{"id":14052,"date":"2024-08-02T18:22:33","date_gmt":"2024-08-02T22:22:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=14052"},"modified":"2024-11-07T09:16:22","modified_gmt":"2024-11-07T14:16:22","slug":"zombie-wormhole-publicity-stunt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=14052","title":{"rendered":"Zombie Wormhole Publicity Stunt"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had thought that the Wormhole Publicity Stunt<\/a> could now be safely ignored, with almost everyone in the physics community agreeing that this was an embarrassing disaster that was dead and buried. Even the people at Quanta had realized that they had been misled into helping promote something that wasn’t at all what it claimed to be. The Quanta promotional video that was a big part of the publicity stunt is still on Youtube<\/a>, but they’ve added this text:<\/p>\n

UPDATE: In February 2023, an independent team of physicists presented evidence that the research described in this video did not create any wormholes, holographic or otherwise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today though, the World Science Festival put out a Zombie revival of the publicity stunt, under the bizarre title Did Einstein Crack the Biggest Problem in Physics\u2026and Not Know It?<\/a> It starts off with Brian Greene explaining that this may be the “Holy Grail” connecting string theory\/quantum gravity to experiment, with such experiments not needing an expensive collider or space telescope, just a Google quantum computer.<\/p>\n

Brought in for the discussion are the three architects of the publicity stunt, Daniel Jafferis, Joe Lykken, and Maria Spiropulu. At a couple points there is a mention that something might be “controversial”, but there’s zero explanation of what the “controversy” might be. After starting out with some background about wormholes and entanglement, the rest of the program is basically outrageous and misleading hype, without a hint of why anyone might be skeptical about it.<\/p>\n

I’ve now wasted too much of my life trying to debunk bogus claims of this kind, with the wormhole nonsense just the latest and most egregious example. One learns over the years that it’s impossible to stop this kind of thing, there’s no way to kill off the Test of String Theory<\/a>\/Fake Physics<\/a> enterprise. Even if you think something has been completely debunked, its proponents will always find some way to emerge from the grave and keep going. If anyone is aware of a source for the right kind of silver bullet to stop this, let me know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had thought that the Wormhole Publicity Stunt could now be safely ignored, with almost everyone in the physics community agreeing that this was an embarrassing disaster that was dead and buried. Even the people at Quanta had realized that … 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_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[23,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fake-physics","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\/14052","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=14052"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14056,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14052\/revisions\/14056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}