{"id":13181,"date":"2022-11-30T15:18:48","date_gmt":"2022-11-30T20:18:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13181"},"modified":"2022-12-09T16:58:13","modified_gmt":"2022-12-09T21:58:13","slug":"this-weeks-hype-67","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=13181","title":{"rendered":"This Week’s Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning Quanta Magazine informs us that Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer<\/a>, promoting the article on Twitter with BREAKING: Physicists have built a wormhole and successfully sent information from one end to the other<\/a> and Physicists have used Google’s quantum computer to send a signal through a wormhole, a shortcut in space-time first theorized by Einstein and Rosen in 1935<\/a>. <\/p>\n

This work is getting the full-press promotional package: no preprint on the arXiv (unless I’m missing something?), embargoed info to journalists, with reveal at a press conference<\/a>, a cover story in Nature<\/a>, accompanied by a barrage of press releases (see here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, with Harvard, MIT and Google to come). This is the kind of PR effort for a physics result I’ve only seen before for things like the Higgs and LIGO gravitational wave discoveries (OK, and the primordial gravitational wave non-discovery). It would be appropriate I suppose if someone actually had built a wormhole in a lab and teleported information through it, as advertised.<\/p>\n

An additional part of the package is the Quanta coverage, with a very long article by Natalie Wolchover and an over-the-top seventeen minute film How Physicists Created a Wormhole in a Quantum Computer<\/a>, with abstract<\/p>\n

Almost a century ago, Albert Einstein realized that the equations of general relativity could produce wormholes. But it would take a number of theoretical leaps and a \u201ccrazy\u201d team of experimentalists to build one on Google’s quantum computer. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The two senior physicists behind this, Joe Lykken and Maria Spiropulu, have histories that go way back of successfully promoting to the press nonsense about exotic space-time structures appearing in experiments that have nothing to do with them. Back in 1999, the New York Times published Physicists Finally Find a Way to Test Superstring theory<\/a>, which featured Joe Lykken. In 2003, they featured Maria Spiropulu explaining how she was going to find extra dimensions<\/a> (or “something just as ‘crazy””) at the Tevatron, or failing that, the LHC.<\/p>\n

I just saw that the New York Times also has a big story about this: Physicists Create ‘the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine’<\/a>. At least this article has some sensible skeptical quotes, including:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe most important thing I\u2019d want New York Times readers to understand is this,\u201d Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in an email. \u201cIf this experiment has brought a wormhole into actual physical existence, then a strong case could be made that you, too, bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An odd thing about the Quanta article is that it contains a couple quotes from me, that aren’t at all about the wormhole business. They’re about the attempt to use AdS\/CFT to either solve QCD or get a viable theory of quantum gravity. Back in June Wolchover contacted me with some questions about AdS\/CFT. It seems that she was planning a long piece on AdS\/CFT, one which somehow many months later got amalgamated with the wormhole nonsense. I had forgotten that I was thinking of turning what I sent her back then into a blog posting but never got around to it, so just earlier today posted it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the substance of what is really going on here, it’s exactly the same as what was discussed extensively a month ago in this posting<\/a> and in its comment section. The claim that “Physicists Create a Wormhole” is just complete bullshit, with the huge campaign to mislead the public about this a disgrace, highly unhelpful for the credibility of physics research in particular and science in general.<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: Here’s the promotional piece from Google<\/a>, and Will Kinney’s reaction<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/strong> Physics World has Quantum teleportation opens a \u2018wormhole in spacetime\u2019<\/a> with a quote from Witten saying positive things about this experiment (“a ‘milestone’ in developing control over microscopic quantum systems”), nothing about the wormholes.<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: I tried reading the paper in some more detail. Almost all the calculations in the paper were done on paper or on a classical computer. As far as I can tell, all they did was perform elaborate SYK calculations on a classical computer, together with simulations of noise on the Google quantum computer, trying to find a possible calculation on the quantum computer that would have signal, not just noise. Once such an N=7 SYK calculation was identified, they used a 9 qubit quantum computer and the noisy result matched the simulation result from the classical computer, exactly as expected. Seeing the completely expected match between results from a 9 bit noisy quantum computer and the results of the simulation of this on a classical computer caused Maria Spiropulu to say that “I was shaken” and “It was nuts. It was nuts”, while Joe Lykken felt that the moment was on a par with discovery of the Higgs particle.<\/p>\n

I hadn’t noticed that the Nature issue comes with an article by Brown and Susskind, A holographic wormhole traversed in a quantum computer<\/a>. Amidst the hype, they do at least point out:<\/p>\n

because nine qubits can be easily simulated on a classical computer, the results of this experiment cannot teach us anything that could not be learnt from a classical computation, and will not teach us anything new about quantum gravity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

New Scientist is the sober one here, with their headline the relatively reasonable A quantum computer has simulated a wormhole for the first time<\/a><\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: MSN is going for the larger context: physicists didn’t just create a wormhole in a lab, also This tiny 2D wormhole could finally solve the biggest problem in physics<\/a><\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: Andreas Karch on Twitter<\/a> I think has an accurate characterization of this “mostly a publicity stunt”:<\/p>\n

Experimentally it’s of course cool they can do SYK – as a demonstration they have control over their device. They can couple 9 qbits in a pre-specified way. But I guess we knew they could do this before. Going after SYK in particular, in my mind, is mostly a publicity stunt.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update<\/strong>: Quanta has changed the title of their article from “Physicists Create a Wormhole” to “Physicists Create a Holographic Wormhole”.<\/p>\n

The MIT press release is out, and it’s comical in the other direction, explaining the huge breakthrough as MIT researchers use quantum computing to observe entanglement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Chad Orzel is getting flashbacks to 2006<\/a>, which I can well understand. Many of the worst offenders in this hype campaign were hard at work doing the same thing back then (and earlier), and I was, as now, ineffectually trying to do something about it (the first edition of “This Week’s Hype” dates back to that year).<\/p>\n

Update<\/strong>: Quanta has also deleted the original “BREAKING: Physicists have built a wormhole and successfully sent information from one end to the other” tweet. Davide Castelvecchi at Nature as a more sober story<\/a>, ending with <\/p>\n

The theory tested at the Google lab \u201conly has a very tangential relationship to any possible theories of quantum gravity in our Universe\u201d, says Peter Shor, a mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update<\/strong>: More coverage of this here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>. Quanta and Wolchover are, quite appropriately, blaming the “some of the best-respected physicists in the world” who sold them this nonsense, see here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning Quanta Magazine informs us that Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer, promoting the article on Twitter with BREAKING: Physicists have built a wormhole and successfully sent information from one end to the other and Physicists have … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-hype","category-wormhole-publicity-stunts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13181"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13208,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13181\/revisions\/13208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}