[HN Gopher] Publicity Stunt Fallout
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Publicity Stunt Fallout
Author : jjgreen
Score : 108 points
Date : 2022-12-07 19:13 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scottaaronson.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (scottaaronson.blog)
| pmayrgundter wrote:
| Uhh, this is cool:
|
| "If you had two entangled quantum computers, one on Earth and the
| other in the Andromeda galaxy, and if they were both simulating
| [the wormhole], and if Alice on Earth and Bob in Andromeda both
| uploaded their own brains into their respective quantum
| simulations, then it seems possible that the simulated Alice and
| Bob could have the experience of jumping into a wormhole and
| meeting each other in the middle. ... if true, I suppose some
| would treat it as grounds for regarding a quantum simulation of
| SYK as "more real" or "more wormholey" than a classical
| simulation."
| dang wrote:
| The submitted URL was
| https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13229, but it's
| mostly quoting from Aaronson's post, so I've changed the URL to
| the latter. Interesting readers might want to read both, though
| (including the comemnts).
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| It seems unfair to dismiss this as a publicity stunt or fraud, or
| to say this is no closer to a real wormhole than a drawing. It's
| fundamentally impossible to really describe what is happening
| here to the general public without tons of quantum mechanics
| background. Any summary of research like this is inherently a
| subjective description of why scientists feel it's important,
| rather than a coherent description of what actually occurred.
|
| However, the quantum process they are describing really did
| physically occur on the quantum processor, which I feel is really
| different than a simulated quantum experiment on a regular cpu.
| It is truly a real observation of a real quantum experiment,
| which demonstrates that the system they setup really exhibits
| properties of wormhole physics that had previously only been
| predicted theoretically.
|
| Is it possible that experimental physicists are just insulted by
| the way this is presented, because it's presented as an
| experimental milestone, but, because of the use of a quantum
| processor, they didn't really have to build anything... it's just
| math and code?
| pdonis wrote:
| _> the quantum process they are describing really did
| physically occur on the quantum processor_
|
| Yes. But...
|
| _> It is truly a real observation of a real quantum
| experiment, which demonstrates that the system they setup
| really exhibits properties of wormhole physics that had
| previously only been predicted theoretically._
|
| No, it demonstrates that the system they set up has properties
| that _some people have hypothesized_ are related to wormhole
| physics. Those hypotheses are still pure speculation. This
| experiment does not provide any evidence for them.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _The Wormhole Publicity Stunt_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33851295 - Dec 2022 (2
| comments)
|
| _Physicists Simulate a Simplified Wormhole on Google's Quantum
| Computer_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841537 - Dec
| 2022 (1 comment)
|
| _Physicists Create 'The Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can
| Imagine'_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809648 - Nov
| 2022 (2 comments)
|
| _Physicists Create 'The Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can
| Imagine'_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809498 - Nov
| 2022 (1 comment)
|
| _Scientists build 'baby' wormhole as sci-fi moves closer to
| fact_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809268 - Nov 2022
| (4 comments)
|
| _Making a Traversable Wormhole with a Quantum Computer_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807764 - Nov 2022 (20
| comments)
|
| _This Week 's Hype_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807169 - Nov 2022 (24
| comments)
|
| _Making a Traversable Wormhole with a Quantum Computer_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33803257 - Nov 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802711 - Nov 2022 (1
| comment)
|
| _Physicists have purportedly created a wormhole using a quantum
| computer_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802613 - Nov
| 2022 (29 comments)
|
| Note that word purportedly -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809173.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| We deal with similar fallout here every time climate change comes
| up for discussion and someone trots out the claim that scientists
| in the 70s were worried about global cooling. A few interesting
| papers got wildly over-covered and, well, here we are 50 years
| later.
|
| Ultimately I think this is not a solvable problem because people
| want to believe. If a story seems to confirm or support a belief
| that is exciting or emotionally charged, it can stick in the
| heads of some people and really affect them.
|
| Information we take in is not just stored for later retrieval, it
| is interlinked with what we already think. If you have lots of
| other physics in your head, a weird physics story has a chance to
| get linked with that and kept in its proper context.
|
| If you don't have much physics, a weird physics story might get
| linked elsewhere: to religious views, political ideology, science
| fiction stories, etc.
| dkural wrote:
| String Theory, "It from (Qu)bit", etc. have been putting out a
| large amount of B.S. for many years now, and the hype itself
| became so common that, to compete with other B.S. the hype has
| now become over-the-top blatant nonsense.
|
| Many fields of science these days suffer from dishonest and
| attention seeking researchers and professors, overhyping their
| results on media, fudging experiments etc.
|
| We need to make science actively painful (cut all funding,
| regularly jail them, condemn them to obscurity, make sure no one
| wants to date them etc.) so it only attracts people in it for the
| right reasons :)
| karencarits wrote:
| > Many fields of science these days suffer from dishonest and
| attention seeking researchers and professors, overhyping their
| results on media, fudging experiments etc.
|
| And the administration loves them for it! And they will happily
| book expensive influencers and self-made media personalities to
| arrange workshops and courses in how to present your research
| in the simplest and most emotional ways - to maximize
| engagement and outreach. It's almost funny to see the disbelief
| in researchers' eyes when the extroverted influencer brings
| them the microphone and asks: ignore for a moment the specifics
| of your research, what are the three qualities that makes YOU
| unique and special?
| constantcrying wrote:
| One commenter on that article points out that there is a
| symbiotic relation between scientists, the press and the
| public. All of them desire spectacular results and there is
| little incentive to ever play down a paper.
|
| The result is that scientists "polish" their results when
| communicating to the press, who again make sure that it "sounds
| good". In the end the public usually gets the truth only in so
| far as "could" means "there is a low but nonzero chance of this
| ever working, but only if there are massive engineering efforts
| and many more breakthroughs and economic and resource
| incentives line up right".
|
| Putting scientists into the media game, instead of isolating
| them was a grave mistake. It even creates competition for
| gtants, based on how "flashy" the results are.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| Long gone is the age of self-funded aristocrat scientists who
| experimented to satisfy their curiosity.
|
| Curious if there's any renowned independent scientists
| producing research at home and sharing directly online
| (bypassing universities and journals)
| biggoodwolf wrote:
| Whoa, but then how would governments shape research?
| birdman3131 wrote:
| We have those. We tend to ignore them or call them kooks.
|
| For good reason in (Large percentage) of cases. But I do feel
| that there are a few that are getting marginalized. Often
| because they are semi related to stuff that is politically
| unpopular.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Several of them are absolutely marginalized and not kooks
| at all. The reputation, unfortunately, sticks with them.
|
| David Shaw is the poster child of rich people who succeeded
| at breaking through the elitism into the scientific
| establishment, but he went through the whole PhD process
| before "settling" for becoming a finance billionaire.
| zmachinaz wrote:
| Might go back to this model over time. Guess it is no secret
| that academia is in strong decline. Lot of excellent people
| just don't bother anymore to enter that circus. They might do
| their own independent research after they succeeded
| financially.
| boringg wrote:
| Too expensive to get access to what is needed for
| independent research.
| zmachinaz wrote:
| Do you think research equipment was cheap during the time
| of "aristocrat scientists" ? The point being here "after
| they succeeded financially".
| birdman3131 wrote:
| It is possible to do surprising amounts on a shoestring
| budget. Ive seen cheap (Sub $1k) electron microscopes go
| up for sale. As well as a ton of other lab equipment.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Isn't all the science that is possible to do "at home"
| already done?
| gus_massa wrote:
| Most of it, but there are some corners. For example, high
| temperature superconductivity was discovered in 1986 [1].
| The process is not so complicated, and can be done at home.
| Well, at least in a very good personal lab, for example see
| this video by Applied Science.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLFaa6RPJIU
|
| I think the original team made like 100 samples using
| different metals and different oxygen proportion.
| Discovering the first one requires some brute force that
| needs a small team, and is too much for a single person.
| Anyway, it doesn't look too far away from something a
| single person can discover.
|
| [1] That's 36 year ago. I'm feeling old...
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I don't think so, for at least 3 reasons.
|
| 1) The tools available to an individual are always
| progressing.
|
| By "tools" I mean all of direct physical tools and
| materials, computational, theories and understandings,
| services, etc.
|
| 2) Big funded labs have business owners, stockholders,
| academic department heads, and grant comittees that have
| specific goals and ideas and topics they are willing to pay
| for.
|
| Many of the most important discoveries were never on
| anyone's list of things they will pay for (until after it
| happened some other way first).
|
| They only happened either by accident in real labs despite
| all conscious intention to be working on something else, or
| by people who didn't need anyone's permission and were just
| satisfying their own curiosity, and couldn't be told to
| work on something more sensible by any boss or other
| funding source.
|
| 3) It is true that some large scale things _probably_ won
| 't be advanced in a garage.
|
| Then again, a lot of times large scale things are up-ended
| specifically from a garage exactly because the garage
| researcher does not have the option to address problems
| with (expensive/large/dangerous) brute force.
|
| They need to somehow make pressure of a zillion psi, but
| they can't build a zillion psi machine, so instead they
| figure out how to align sound waves to create a zillion psi
| just where the waves meet or something, and that goes on to
| obsolete a huge industry and now everyone's making
| MrFusion's in their spare bedrooms and selling them on
| Etsy.
|
| The smallness of the operation is the very cause of the
| discovery and would not have happened in a normal funded
| lab.
| disentanglement wrote:
| > cut all funding, regularly jail them, condemn them to
| obscurity
|
| I can't even begin to describe how overjoyed I am to finally
| have found a fellow campaigner for implementing the glorious
| techniques of Maoist China in dealing with free thought.
| mistermann wrote:
| There is a big difference between free thought and making
| false claims, scientific or otherwise.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It's got about as much scientific validity as
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGFp09nS5sM
| carabiner wrote:
| Paul.
| peteradio wrote:
| Yea leave Sliders out of this Paul.
| [deleted]
| zmachinaz wrote:
| At its start, the quanta magazine was a good read. But, it
| degraded very quickly after they started to use it mainly to put
| scientists from under-represented groups into the spot light.
| Nowadays not worth any attention.
| paganel wrote:
| This bit form Sabine Hossenfelder's comment is something that
| I've personally also started to think about lately:
|
| > It's easy enough to address the problem: Give every scientist a
| basic education on the sociology and philosophy of science, and
| social and cognitive biases.
|
| Granted, I'm not a scientist, but even from the very far outside
| (i.e. the position from where I'm writing this comment) one can
| see that that knowledge about the "sociology and philosophy of
| science" seems to be lacking in today's scientific community.
| danbmil99 wrote:
| So sad -- this mindset seems to me like "Q-Anon for smart
| people". As if Q was a meme (mind virus) that originally only
| infected people with a low IQ, but then mutated to become a high-
| IQ variant...
| tom-thistime wrote:
| We sure missed the point here on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33828602
| clnq wrote:
| I'd be joyed if there was any meaningful fallout. Magical
| thinking in science only benefits click-deprived blogs (which
| some people call mainstream news outlets, despite "news" implying
| journalistic integrity). But where is this fallout? All I see is
| tempered pushback from the scientific community. It seems to me
| like the publicity stunt worked for the most part.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Discussion here about the claim of the wormhole
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802613
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807764
| trynewideas wrote:
| If you lack context, see Peter Woit's previous blog post:
| https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13209
|
| And Ars: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/no-physicists-
| didnt-...
| echelon wrote:
| These researchers are trying _really hard_ to start a Quantum
| Winter.
|
| It's already looking pretty grim, but lying about results is a
| sure way to accelerate the decrease in funding for their
| departments and bring about professional repercussions.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| "Quantum" is losing its magic. The researchers in the field
| really over-promised, and so far they have delivered almost
| nothing to show for it on general-purpose computing problems.
| 15 was factored some time ago, and the record number that has
| been factored with Shor's algorithm as of 2022 is 21.
|
| Personally, I think D-wave and the other attempted Ising
| machines took the right approach: use quantum computing to
| solve problems that are essentially reducing to energy
| minimization of a system.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Exponential curves look really boring, until they aren't.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Can you show us this exponential curve?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Every growth function looks exponential until it's not.
| Most things in science and technology aren't exponential,
| though. Computers have been, and if we think they are the
| model for everything, I give you the airplane and the car
| as counterexamples.
|
| As far as quantum computing goes, IBM and Google were
| promising us exponential growth in quantum chip size, but
| what we have actually seen so far is exponentially faster
| decoherence that comes with size.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This is what happens when calling bullshit is shushed as
| incivility. It's not a new problem by any means, but just as a
| diet of fast food is correlated with diabetes and dementia, a
| culture of hype correlates with mediocrity and mendacity.
| debacle wrote:
| Calling bullshit on HN is almost always met with a deading.
| bawolff wrote:
| I don't think that's true.
|
| Just yelling "bullshit" certainly is, and hn has a bit of a
| positivity bias, nonetheless, comments that say something is
| BS and explain why are usually reasonably well recieved.
| kergonath wrote:
| > hn has a bit of a positivity bias
|
| Interestingly, it also has a bit of negativity bias. This
| means that any story, however anodine or ground-breaking,
| will have:
|
| - a group of people doing some motivated reasoning showing
| how obviously terrible the thing is and how clever they
| are;
|
| - a group of people arguing that the thing is the best
| since warm water and is going to solve everything (if only
| reality would behave).
|
| This makes a lot of discussions simultaneously very
| interesting and utterly depressing.
| mistermann wrote:
| In my experience "are usually reasonably well received" is
| heavily influenced by the topic of discussion.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I call bullshit on this comment. Lots of times when a study
| of some sort is posted the comments are filled with people
| calling bullshit on the study either due to sampling bias or
| too small of a sample or flawed experimental protocols.
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