6 ms·

The Death of Quanta Magazine

117 points by kukx 4y ago

andyjohnson0 4y ago
Not the actual death of the magazine, just someone getting upset about lack of depth in an article. Specifically: > "No, scientists haven’t created a wormhole using a quantum computer. They haven’t even simulated one. They simulated some aspects of wormhole dynamics under the crucial assumption that the holographic correspondence of the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model holds." Quanta publishes great, detailed articles - but it's ultimately a general readership magazine, not an academic journal. I seriously doubt that many of it's readers have sufficiently deep knowledge of QC to properly understand the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model. Whatever that is. Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not disputing that the Quanta article is factually deficient - although I don't have the relevant specialist knowledge to understand why. I am disputing that this marks the "death" of the magazine.
- pred_ 4y ago
  Quanta themselves also put out a few posts on their Mastodon account about how they've changed the wording, and about how they assign credibility: https://mstdn.social/@QuantaMagazine/109439420826151490 https://mstdn.social/@QuantaMagazine/109439420826151490
- hucker 4y ago
  This is not some "glossing over some details for a lay audience" situation. It is not a lack of depth. It makes ridiculous claims, fundamentally misrepresenting what this research is, to make it sound cooler and more interesting. This is one of the worst pieces of science journalism I've ever seen.
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- bowsamic 4y ago
  Then leave the original paper as something only appealing to experts. Totally lying about it in order to make it more broadly appealing is pretty bad.
  - andyjohnson0 4y ago
    The paper is still there on the Nature website. I assume experts would go to that. Notwithstanding the difficiencies in the Quanta article, it does at least try to examine something that lay readers would otherwise probably not be aware of.
    - rand0mx1 4y ago
      behind a paywall, neither available on arxiv nor scihub
- Veen 4y ago
  > I seriously doubt that many of it's readers have sufficiently deep knowledge of QC to properly understand the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model But that's the problem. Most people don't understand the underlying science, so they rely on science journalism to distill and explicate complex topics without simplifying and distorting to the point they lose any relationship with the truth. In this case, the writer has failed in their task; they've written a load of nonsense that actively undermines a reader's ability to comprehend the topic—in short, it's bullshit.
  - andyjohnson0 4y ago
    I'm not disputing that the Quanta article is factually deficient - although I don't have the relevant specialist knowledge to understand why. I am disputing that this marks the "death" of the magazine.
    - dekken_ 4y ago
      Purely speaking for myself, but I could tell it was metaphorical. Given the "magazine" is still operating, and that I read some of the article.
      - nobodyandproud 4y ago
        A plain reading of the first four or five paragraphs doesn’t tell me that this is a calculation.
        dekken_ 4y ago
        I meant that the magazine is not literally dead, but in the sense of "dead to me".
    - barry-cotter 4y ago
      - astrange 4y ago
- chriswarbo 4y ago
  > I seriously doubt that many of it's readers have sufficiently deep knowledge of QC to properly understand the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model. Whatever that is. The particular details aren't important; the problem is "model of X" is not the same as "X". In this case the model happens to be using a quantum computer, and X happens to be (some specific variety of) wormhole. A couple of analogies: Writing `new Particle { mass = 0; charge = 0; spin = 2; }` on a computer does not mean gravitons have been discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton The UK cannot avoid an economic recession by pouring water into MONIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC
- crispyambulance 4y ago
  I agree. Every magazine and newspaper leaves a stinker occasionally. It's not the end of the world. The "it's dead to me because of this one bad article" standard will leave one with no magazines and no newspapers that are worthy. More important, however, is that the OP's blog post (as I sense it), is actually mimicking hyperbolic attitude of the article it's complaining about. I suspect that Quanta is not "dead" to the author. Is this his way of b-slapping the editors?
  - hilbert42 4y ago
    "Every magazine and newspaper leaves a stinker occasionally. It's not the end of the world." May be not but just the same it's an overly-prevalent trend nowadays. For instance, New Scientist is notorious for hyping up stories that amount to little more than our current/general understanding of them—and or the Mag's cover stories or articles' headings are often outright misleading. New Scientist didn't do this decades ago (well, certainly not to the same extent). Then there's the perennial problem of the sweeping statement without references or further explanation: new phenomena, complex processes etc. are just stated as if it was taken for granted that everyone already understands them in the way we understand, say, what a gram is. This is damn annoying as understanding the article hinges on actually understanding these skipped-over points. It's not only New Scientist but others too including Quanta that engage in the practice but New Sc. is a past master at it. It seems to me the main reason for this is that the many journalists who engage in the practice don't actually understand the matter themselves and this is why they skip over such explanations (and or they're rewriting stories from press releases without first fully researching them, etc.). Moreover, either editors are asleep at the wheel for allowing the practice and or they're under commercial pressures to print such crap—profit being more important than science news.
- oh_my_goodness 4y ago
  Please don't misrepresent the OP. The writer does not say he is "upset about lack of depth". His claim is that the Quantum article contains wildly false information. Specifically, he claims a simulation was presented as an experiment.
- ergonaught 4y ago
  “It falls so far below any journalistic standard that the magazine is dead to me.” Author explains the “death” in the fifth sentence of the opening paragraph.
- poulpy123 4y ago
  Nobody (not even me) cares about the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model except a handful of scientists.
- FranklinMaillot 4y ago
  Blogpost uses clickbait and overblown reaction to complain about clickbait and overblown reporting.
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- constantcrying 4y ago
  Especially science magazines for the general public have a duty to be as factually correct as possible. This is not only a duty towards the general public, as they should not be deceived and deserve truthful reporting on these subjects. But it is also a duty towards the scientists, as they deserve that their results are presented fairly and accurately towards non-experts. I have been generally impressed with quanta, as they usually try very hard (far more than most of their genre) to actually report accurately. Scientific reporting is hard, the knowledge gaps between reporter, scientists and audience are usually very large and explaining an extremely difficult concept to non-expert audience is very challenging. But this is no excuse to publish outright nonsense and to be honest publishing outright nonsense was not what I was expecting from quanta.
- eynsham 4y ago
  > just someone getting upset about lack of depth There’s a difference between a lack of depth and a fabrication. > relevant specialist knowledge It’s pretty simple to understand the gist of the problem: modelling something and actually creating it are different things. > “death” of the magazine The above notwithstanding, yes, one execrable article cannot kill a publication.
  - sampo 4y ago
    > It’s pretty simple to understand the gist of the problem: modelling something I also think that there is a difference between modelling something, and sparsifying the model calculations so far that what you have left is 164 steps of 2-bit logic gate operations to a 9-bit register. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05424-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05424-3
ilitirit 4y ago
> It falls so far below any journalistic standard that the magazine is dead to me. I'll be honest. I found it very hard to read beyond this line. I powered through though. Here's the tldr: It's a rant about details in one specific article.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  The context is that this is causing a big amount of chaos in the physics community, with a lot of high profile (and/or popular) physicists calling it out. It isn't just one guy's rant. Even my research group is talking about it
  - ilitirit 4y ago
    Sure, and I don't have any issue with that. But this blog post literally says "The death of Quanta Magazine", and in the same breath talks about "journalistic standards".
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mellosouls 4y ago
I'm sad to say I used to really like Quanta magazine pieces but I've become adept at knowing immediately from a Hacker News discussion title (the direct links, not this one) that it's about a Quanta piece, and it's going to be a letdown when you drill in. I'm not sure if they've become more clickbaity or less discriminating, or if it's just me moving on. I'm guessing from the article - however ranty - it's not my imagination.
nyc111 4y ago
AdS == Anti de Sitter space == A universe with nothing in it. These physicists assume a universe with nothing in it, then populate it with physicists and quantum computers and wormholes. This is like claiming to have the most beatiful differential equations that explain perfectly the weather on earth. You say "ok, let's test these beautiful equations." But it turns out that the equations so beautiful to look at have no perfect solutions. So you need to make absurdly symmetrical assumptions to arrive at a usable solution, like assuming no atmosphere. Then, with no atmosphere your equations explains the earth's atmosphere perfectly well. With beautiful mathematical gimmicks, of course. With an assumption of a universe with nothing in it your equations explain everything in that universe with nothing in it. Physics is neo-scholasticism powered by the marketing skills of the practitioners. This episode about wormholes proves the corruption of academic physics.
- zachf 4y ago
  Newtonian space == a universe with nothing in it, which is then populated with fictitious continuous rigid bodies. Yet we use it to build bridges. Physics is about models. Some are useful. AdS/CFT is useful. I know this because I spent the time to study it in grad school, rather than dismiss it out of hand.
bowsamic 4y ago
Unfortunately the commodification of physics discoveries, packaged in order to wow laypeople who would be bored by any accurate explanation, is just getting worse and worse every year, to the point that I've noticed a vast increase in the number of clueless crackpot laypeople that try to interact with me (I now block them on sight). Personally, I think it comes from a deep lack within a lot of humans now: they are scared of the future and bored of the present. They want to go to Mars or live out their sci-fi dreams, because they do not have any meaning right now. I won't speculate on the reasons for this, because I'm sure there are many, but the end result is that they are desperate for crazy sounding physics discoveries, because it placates their desire for extreme technological progression. Technology and science have become almost like a God, something people don't understand but that they have faith that it will elevate humanity to a point beyond its current, seemingly stale, state. Of course, where there is a desire for that, media companies will try to fulfil it.
xrayarx 4y ago
I cannot comment on the content of the article, but the title and the author have changed, unfortunately I cannot find an update in the article. Comments seem to be off.
- andrewflnr 4y ago
  Author is still Wolchover (as of my click a few seconds ago). Not sure what you're seeing.
mjburgess 4y ago
It's definitely one of the worst articles they've published, on the grounds of expecting them to demystify science with their journalism rather than mystify it -- which is what every other publication on the planet does. I read it in its entirety to see if there was any justification for its write up. As with all tabloid journalism, the caveats are at the end where you find out the "bridge principle" from QC-to-Wormhole requires assumptions that are non-physical. Everyone is well aware that non-physical assumptions to the equations of physics can produce arbitrary magical effects (eg., perpetual motion, etc.). The whole structure of the article was something I'd expect from "tabloid science" and I expect Quanta will get a lot of push back from it; and hopefully not do it again.
sigmoid10 4y ago
>The problem is, if they write such bullshit about topics that I do understand, how can I trust their reporting on topics that I do not? Funny how this is true for basically all of science and yet so many popsci authors get away with it, because the vast majority of the audience will not be experts in the field. If you want the true story you'll always have to read the original paper (though sometimes even Nature lets bs slip through) and absolutely ignore the common media articles about it. Complaining that articles for the masses are not adequate recitations of real research is like complaining that water is wet. It's kind of the whole deal. This stuff is supposed to sound intriguing and generate clicks, not push the research itself ahead or inform real experts.
- rob74 4y ago
  Yeah, but "creating a wormhole" is laying it on a bit thick, even someone who is only remotely familiar with physics will find this statement highly suspicious - I mean, even in Star Trek, they didn't manage to create a wormhole, they only used one (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bajoran_wormhole https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bajoran_wormhole).
  - sigmoid10 4y ago
    In line with research of the past years this has moved from being absurd to being somewhat debatable. With the ER=EPR conjecture (which this paper heavily references) for example, you could theoretically argue that it's easy to create wormholes - in fact it happens everywhere all the time. The problem is that those are not Star Trek type wormholes that let you move macroscopic matter across galaxies, but everyone outside the field immediately thinks of them thanks to decades of scifi popculture. The wormholes that Susskind et al. are talking about are much more modest.
- VLM 4y ago
  Magazines are for showing off ones political or philosophical affiliations, not to be informative.
yogsototh 4y ago
I still follow Quanta Magazine, but I kind of moved from it to SciTechDaily, which while still imperfect, generally has a direct link to the scientific article for which, if they have done their work correctly, is easier to follow after the blog article about it. The positive side effect is that I am reading scientific articles more often since I'm doing this.
aortega 4y ago
I saw that wormhole article and something in it triggered the bs detector. Those discoveries are often made by a big team in a big lab, the article only named one researcher. IMHO Quanta is far from the most respectable source of science news, since their articles tend to be very sensationalist, but in this case Quanta is not to blame, as the article it was published in Nature, but publications in big magazines are becoming more and more political, and less about real science.
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prof-dr-ir 4y ago
Two things can be true at the same time: one, quanta magazine is the best publication out there when it comes to popularizing recent advances in fundamental physics and mathematics; and two, this article was bad. If we are allowed to base our opinion of a publication on one article, should I declare that Mateus Araújo's blog is dead to me?
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- dudeinjapan 4y ago
  Schrödinger's magazine?
  - sigmoid10 4y ago
    Only if these two things were mutually exclusive. But in reality, the underlying assumption is a false dichotomy.
- aortega 4y ago
  The article is brilliant until observed.
- pyb 4y ago
  Journalism is about trust. In a sense, scientific magazines are only as good as their worst articles. My opinion just shifted from "if it's in Quanta, it's probably correct" to "I need to fact-check everything they say".
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  This article is particularly bad, but I can't remember the last time I saw a Quanta article that didn't grossly misrepresent the research.
raverbashing 4y ago
Magazine makes a misstep and then someone goes into a rant on how it "Magazine died" Seems like it went much more clickbait than the original article. Nobody reading QM would take that headline literally. Talk about an overreaction.
college_physics 4y ago
To further the damage said article was picked up by mass-market newspapers and circulated widely The net result of all this ad-driven virality madness is the degradation of trust in obscure but important societal contracts: 1) that academics at the cutting edge of human knowledge can self-regulate through peer-review not only the integrity of a piece of work (not an obvious issue in this case) but can also place its importance and relevance against the entire body of prior knowledge and 2) that journalists disseminating scientific / technical information can act as a check and balance to remedy any deficiencies in 1) instead of amplifying and aggravating them It feels like we have entered a downward spiral of ever more shrill claims competing for attention in world crushed by low-quality information overload.
- prof-dr-ir 4y ago
  I am pretty sure the newspapers all picked up on the press releases rather than on the quanta article. For example, the article in the NY Times [0] appeared on the same day (and is also much better IMO). And, for what it's worth, I do not share your pessimistic outlook. I think a lot of excellent science and science reporting is taking place every day. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/science/physics-wormhole-quantum-computer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/science/physics-wormhole-...
sandgiant 4y ago
Looks like Quanta Magazine changed the title of the article after publication. I guess they did get some push back on the original article. Original title (dec 1.): "Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer" [1] Current title (dec 2.): "Physicists Create a Holographic Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer" [2] [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221201021130/https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-using-a-quantum-computer-20221130/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221201021130/https://www.quant... [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221202022713/https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-using-a-quantum-computer-20221130/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221202022713/https://www.quant...
- kgwgk 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/QuantaMagazine/status/1598353637515853827 https://twitter.com/QuantaMagazine/status/159835363751585382...
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dandanua 4y ago
It's a variant of the classical story https://www.smbc-comics.com/?db=comics&id=1623 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?db=comics&id=1623 Though, it seems in this case some scientists who pushed the narrative were dishonest too.
lysecret 4y ago
Their podcast "the joy of why" is still top notch.
jstx1 4y ago
I don't like Quanta because of the exaggerated sensationalized clickbait titles. It makes it seem like it's aimed at people who want to tell themselves that are smart or into science.
pera 4y ago
> For me the worst part of the video was at 11:53, where they showed a graph with a bright point labelled “negative energy peak” on it. The problem is that this is not a plot of data, it’s just a drawing, with no connection to the experiment. Lay people will think they are seeing actual data, so this is straightforward disinformation. This is exactly how I interpreted that part of the video [1], and it makes me feel sad because Quanta is the only kinda pop-science magazine I enjoy reading. As a lay parson, when it comes to quantum mechanics I have to use my own set of heuristics to identify quackery: this Quanta's video checks almost all my indicators of low quality quantum woo - I don't like to say this about someone's else work but just the aesthetics reminds me to pseudo-scientific documentaries. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOJCS1W1uzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOJCS1W1uzg
zachf 4y ago
If anyone is looking to learn some actual physics instead of media crit, it would be worthwhile to sit down with the wikipedia pages for the AdS/CFT correspondence and the black hole information paradox. There’s a lot of things you can learn about the nature of quantum gravity. Some of it is built on assumptions about nature, of course, which leads a lot of people to assume that the enterprise is built on a house of cards, but even this is worth really digging in to. You may find that in fact there are only a few assumptions about reality that need to be made, and that removing any one of them is harder than you might think. And AdS/CFT is genuinely fascinating. It’s a type of theoretical construct that’s quite unique in the history of physics. So it’s very hard to talk about it in English sometimes! That’s partly what happened in this Quanta article. AdS/CFT asserts an equality between two very different systems (here, the quantum system is identified with the wormhole) in an extremely complex and nonlinear way. Does this mean that the quantum system is a wormhole? It’s a harder question than it appears on the surface.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  Is it that hard to talk about? A tangle in the interior of a cylinder loses information when viewed on the boundary because you lose a dimension (ie, the shadow cast by string around a light bulb as you see it on the lamp shade). You then have to allocate probabilities to pseudoknot resolutions (ie, guesses about crossings). So you end up with something that looks like continuous geometry on the inside and quantized statistics about interactions on the boundary. Entanglement looks like taking two filaments in a plasma globe and moving one in a circle around the other. Their ribbons are now tangled. (As a 2+1-D analog.)
  - zachf 4y ago
    Respectfully, your metaphor doesn’t bear any similarity to the way AdS/CFT works. In AdS/CFT there are dual quantum systems with no information loss. A bit more precisely, the correspondence relates the partition functions of quantum gravity in AdS with the partition functions of conformal fields. This implies the existence of a map between the two, which in this case happens to be extremely complex and nonlocal. Another way of saying it is that the two descriptions are different representations of the same object. There is no projection or information lost in switching between descriptions.
iNic 4y ago
As a mathematician I can say that all math articles I have read so far in Quanta Magazine have been excellent and they deserve praise! This one article might have missed the mark, but the topic is inherently difficult to write about to a lay audience.
- green_on_black 4y ago
  As an (ex-)physicist who did minor QC research, I'm very annoyed at the sensationalism. I do typically enjoy Quanta, their sensationalism is usually less severe, and the intuition they givd is decently aligned when I (sometimes) dive deeper.
nickdothutton 4y ago
This is why I’ve slowly migrated from general readership magazines to reading only academic papers. No-doubt their readership has increased, but I am no-longer these publications target market.
323 4y ago
All popular articles about quantum physics are in a way bullshit, false and misrepresentation. Because the only way to accurately talk about quantum physics is to show the math and only talk about that. The famous "shut up and calculate". You can't have it both ways, you either accept gross misrepresentations in the popular science press, or you just don't have popular science press.
- Xcelerate 4y ago
  Yeah, this is how I feel when I read the actual research papers behind these sensational articles. “Quantum teleportation achieved!” Hmm, looks like a unitary operator was applied to a tensor product state. “Virtual particles pop in and out of existence!” Hmm, looks like a mathematical technique to perturbatively approximate a very large unitary operator. “Time crystals!!!” Cool, the unitary operator has some symmetries. “The cat is dead and alive!” So the state the unitary operator acts upon can be represented as a mathematically convenient linear combination of two other states. Great?
okintheory 4y ago
I agree it's rather sad to see such an over-the-top presentation in Quanta. Staying more grounded would definitely serve their longer term credibility. Perhaps surprisingly, NYTimes did better this time: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/science/physics-wormhole-quantum-computer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/science/physics-wormhole-... They quote Scott Aaronson: “The most important thing I’d want New York Times readers to understand is this,” Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in an email. “If 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.”
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talkingtab 4y ago
I am beginning to think that advertising is the most toxic element of our environment. Click bait is a way to present something that makes it impossible not to ignore. "Biden and Trump Get Into Food Fight at Restaurant". Behind the click bait is so often lies, deception or garbage, that our brains now conclude that anything behind click bait is trash. If advertising is your business model, then you can make more money with click-baitization. Here's looking at you WAPO and NYT. If, with good reason, we cannot trust the supposed sources of good information, even HN, then our ability to build common understandings and actions is destroyed. Why, it is almost like our political system would be destroyed. If you want to destroy an ant colony, the simplest method is just to prevent interfere with the mechanisms they use to collaborate. Single ants, even mobs of ants cannot survive. Of course we are not ants and we can survive even when our systems of collaboration are destroyed. (fixed phrasing in edit)
NotYourLawyer 4y ago
> The problem is, if they write such bullshit about topics that I do understand, how can I trust their reporting on topics that I do not? See also the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/
rwoerz 4y ago
No offense, but choosing "The Death of Quanta Magazin" as the title for a rant about clickbaiting is quite ironic.
karmakaze 4y ago
Agreed. I've read too many long-form Quanta articles that when I open one without realizing it, quickly close it. I don't know who values long articles without substance or earnest attempts at relating to the underlying science. There's also large unrelated pictures interspersed with the too-wide-margin-padded text. Not my cup of tea either.

117 points by kukx 4y ago

Not the actual death of the magazine, just someone getting upset about lack of depth in an article. Specifically: > "No, scientists haven’t created a wormhole using a quantum computer. They haven’t even simulated one. They simulated some aspects of wormhole dynamics under the crucial assumption that the holographic correspondence of the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model holds." Quanta publishes great, detailed articles - but it's ultimately a general readership magazine, not an academic journal. I seriously doubt that many of it's readers have sufficiently deep knowledge of QC to properly understand the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model. Whatever that is. Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not disputing that the Quanta article is factually deficient - although I don't have the relevant specialist knowledge to understand why. I am disputing that this marks the "death" of the magazine.

pred_ 4y ago
Quanta themselves also put out a few posts on their Mastodon account about how they've changed the wording, and about how they assign credibility: https://mstdn.social/@QuantaMagazine/109439420826151490 https://mstdn.social/@QuantaMagazine/109439420826151490
hucker 4y ago
This is not some "glossing over some details for a lay audience" situation. It is not a lack of depth. It makes ridiculous claims, fundamentally misrepresenting what this research is, to make it sound cooler and more interesting. This is one of the worst pieces of science journalism I've ever seen.
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bowsamic 4y ago
Then leave the original paper as something only appealing to experts. Totally lying about it in order to make it more broadly appealing is pretty bad.
- andyjohnson0 4y ago
  The paper is still there on the Nature website. I assume experts would go to that. Notwithstanding the difficiencies in the Quanta article, it does at least try to examine something that lay readers would otherwise probably not be aware of.
  - rand0mx1 4y ago
    behind a paywall, neither available on arxiv nor scihub
Veen 4y ago
> I seriously doubt that many of it's readers have sufficiently deep knowledge of QC to properly understand the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model But that's the problem. Most people don't understand the underlying science, so they rely on science journalism to distill and explicate complex topics without simplifying and distorting to the point they lose any relationship with the truth. In this case, the writer has failed in their task; they've written a load of nonsense that actively undermines a reader's ability to comprehend the topic—in short, it's bullshit.
- andyjohnson0 4y ago
  I'm not disputing that the Quanta article is factually deficient - although I don't have the relevant specialist knowledge to understand why. I am disputing that this marks the "death" of the magazine.
  - dekken_ 4y ago
    Purely speaking for myself, but I could tell it was metaphorical. Given the "magazine" is still operating, and that I read some of the article.
    - nobodyandproud 4y ago
      A plain reading of the first four or five paragraphs doesn’t tell me that this is a calculation.
      - dekken_ 4y ago
        I meant that the magazine is not literally dead, but in the sense of "dead to me".
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    - astrange 4y ago
chriswarbo 4y ago
> I seriously doubt that many of it's readers have sufficiently deep knowledge of QC to properly understand the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model. Whatever that is. The particular details aren't important; the problem is "model of X" is not the same as "X". In this case the model happens to be using a quantum computer, and X happens to be (some specific variety of) wormhole. A couple of analogies: Writing `new Particle { mass = 0; charge = 0; spin = 2; }` on a computer does not mean gravitons have been discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton The UK cannot avoid an economic recession by pouring water into MONIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC
crispyambulance 4y ago
I agree. Every magazine and newspaper leaves a stinker occasionally. It's not the end of the world. The "it's dead to me because of this one bad article" standard will leave one with no magazines and no newspapers that are worthy. More important, however, is that the OP's blog post (as I sense it), is actually mimicking hyperbolic attitude of the article it's complaining about. I suspect that Quanta is not "dead" to the author. Is this his way of b-slapping the editors?
- hilbert42 4y ago
  "Every magazine and newspaper leaves a stinker occasionally. It's not the end of the world." May be not but just the same it's an overly-prevalent trend nowadays. For instance, New Scientist is notorious for hyping up stories that amount to little more than our current/general understanding of them—and or the Mag's cover stories or articles' headings are often outright misleading. New Scientist didn't do this decades ago (well, certainly not to the same extent). Then there's the perennial problem of the sweeping statement without references or further explanation: new phenomena, complex processes etc. are just stated as if it was taken for granted that everyone already understands them in the way we understand, say, what a gram is. This is damn annoying as understanding the article hinges on actually understanding these skipped-over points. It's not only New Scientist but others too including Quanta that engage in the practice but New Sc. is a past master at it. It seems to me the main reason for this is that the many journalists who engage in the practice don't actually understand the matter themselves and this is why they skip over such explanations (and or they're rewriting stories from press releases without first fully researching them, etc.). Moreover, either editors are asleep at the wheel for allowing the practice and or they're under commercial pressures to print such crap—profit being more important than science news.
oh_my_goodness 4y ago
Please don't misrepresent the OP. The writer does not say he is "upset about lack of depth". His claim is that the Quantum article contains wildly false information. Specifically, he claims a simulation was presented as an experiment.
ergonaught 4y ago
“It falls so far below any journalistic standard that the magazine is dead to me.” Author explains the “death” in the fifth sentence of the opening paragraph.
poulpy123 4y ago
Nobody (not even me) cares about the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model except a handful of scientists.
FranklinMaillot 4y ago
Blogpost uses clickbait and overblown reaction to complain about clickbait and overblown reporting.
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constantcrying 4y ago
Especially science magazines for the general public have a duty to be as factually correct as possible. This is not only a duty towards the general public, as they should not be deceived and deserve truthful reporting on these subjects. But it is also a duty towards the scientists, as they deserve that their results are presented fairly and accurately towards non-experts. I have been generally impressed with quanta, as they usually try very hard (far more than most of their genre) to actually report accurately. Scientific reporting is hard, the knowledge gaps between reporter, scientists and audience are usually very large and explaining an extremely difficult concept to non-expert audience is very challenging. But this is no excuse to publish outright nonsense and to be honest publishing outright nonsense was not what I was expecting from quanta.
eynsham 4y ago
> just someone getting upset about lack of depth There’s a difference between a lack of depth and a fabrication. > relevant specialist knowledge It’s pretty simple to understand the gist of the problem: modelling something and actually creating it are different things. > “death” of the magazine The above notwithstanding, yes, one execrable article cannot kill a publication.
- sampo 4y ago
  > It’s pretty simple to understand the gist of the problem: modelling something I also think that there is a difference between modelling something, and sparsifying the model calculations so far that what you have left is 164 steps of 2-bit logic gate operations to a 9-bit register. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05424-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05424-3

ilitirit 4y ago

> It falls so far below any journalistic standard that the magazine is dead to me. I'll be honest. I found it very hard to read beyond this line. I powered through though. Here's the tldr: It's a rant about details in one specific article.

bowsamic 4y ago
The context is that this is causing a big amount of chaos in the physics community, with a lot of high profile (and/or popular) physicists calling it out. It isn't just one guy's rant. Even my research group is talking about it
- ilitirit 4y ago
  Sure, and I don't have any issue with that. But this blog post literally says "The death of Quanta Magazine", and in the same breath talks about "journalistic standards".
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mellosouls 4y ago

I'm sad to say I used to really like Quanta magazine pieces but I've become adept at knowing immediately from a Hacker News discussion title (the direct links, not this one) that it's about a Quanta piece, and it's going to be a letdown when you drill in. I'm not sure if they've become more clickbaity or less discriminating, or if it's just me moving on. I'm guessing from the article - however ranty - it's not my imagination.

nyc111 4y ago

AdS == Anti de Sitter space == A universe with nothing in it. These physicists assume a universe with nothing in it, then populate it with physicists and quantum computers and wormholes. This is like claiming to have the most beatiful differential equations that explain perfectly the weather on earth. You say "ok, let's test these beautiful equations." But it turns out that the equations so beautiful to look at have no perfect solutions. So you need to make absurdly symmetrical assumptions to arrive at a usable solution, like assuming no atmosphere. Then, with no atmosphere your equations explains the earth's atmosphere perfectly well. With beautiful mathematical gimmicks, of course. With an assumption of a universe with nothing in it your equations explain everything in that universe with nothing in it. Physics is neo-scholasticism powered by the marketing skills of the practitioners. This episode about wormholes proves the corruption of academic physics.

zachf 4y ago
Newtonian space == a universe with nothing in it, which is then populated with fictitious continuous rigid bodies. Yet we use it to build bridges. Physics is about models. Some are useful. AdS/CFT is useful. I know this because I spent the time to study it in grad school, rather than dismiss it out of hand.

bowsamic 4y ago

Unfortunately the commodification of physics discoveries, packaged in order to wow laypeople who would be bored by any accurate explanation, is just getting worse and worse every year, to the point that I've noticed a vast increase in the number of clueless crackpot laypeople that try to interact with me (I now block them on sight). Personally, I think it comes from a deep lack within a lot of humans now: they are scared of the future and bored of the present. They want to go to Mars or live out their sci-fi dreams, because they do not have any meaning right now. I won't speculate on the reasons for this, because I'm sure there are many, but the end result is that they are desperate for crazy sounding physics discoveries, because it placates their desire for extreme technological progression. Technology and science have become almost like a God, something people don't understand but that they have faith that it will elevate humanity to a point beyond its current, seemingly stale, state. Of course, where there is a desire for that, media companies will try to fulfil it.

xrayarx 4y ago

I cannot comment on the content of the article, but the title and the author have changed, unfortunately I cannot find an update in the article. Comments seem to be off.

andrewflnr 4y ago
Author is still Wolchover (as of my click a few seconds ago). Not sure what you're seeing.

mjburgess 4y ago

It's definitely one of the worst articles they've published, on the grounds of expecting them to demystify science with their journalism rather than mystify it -- which is what every other publication on the planet does. I read it in its entirety to see if there was any justification for its write up. As with all tabloid journalism, the caveats are at the end where you find out the "bridge principle" from QC-to-Wormhole requires assumptions that are non-physical. Everyone is well aware that non-physical assumptions to the equations of physics can produce arbitrary magical effects (eg., perpetual motion, etc.). The whole structure of the article was something I'd expect from "tabloid science" and I expect Quanta will get a lot of push back from it; and hopefully not do it again.

sigmoid10 4y ago

>The problem is, if they write such bullshit about topics that I do understand, how can I trust their reporting on topics that I do not? Funny how this is true for basically all of science and yet so many popsci authors get away with it, because the vast majority of the audience will not be experts in the field. If you want the true story you'll always have to read the original paper (though sometimes even Nature lets bs slip through) and absolutely ignore the common media articles about it. Complaining that articles for the masses are not adequate recitations of real research is like complaining that water is wet. It's kind of the whole deal. This stuff is supposed to sound intriguing and generate clicks, not push the research itself ahead or inform real experts.

rob74 4y ago
Yeah, but "creating a wormhole" is laying it on a bit thick, even someone who is only remotely familiar with physics will find this statement highly suspicious - I mean, even in Star Trek, they didn't manage to create a wormhole, they only used one (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bajoran_wormhole https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bajoran_wormhole).
- sigmoid10 4y ago
  In line with research of the past years this has moved from being absurd to being somewhat debatable. With the ER=EPR conjecture (which this paper heavily references) for example, you could theoretically argue that it's easy to create wormholes - in fact it happens everywhere all the time. The problem is that those are not Star Trek type wormholes that let you move macroscopic matter across galaxies, but everyone outside the field immediately thinks of them thanks to decades of scifi popculture. The wormholes that Susskind et al. are talking about are much more modest.
VLM 4y ago
Magazines are for showing off ones political or philosophical affiliations, not to be informative.

yogsototh 4y ago

I still follow Quanta Magazine, but I kind of moved from it to SciTechDaily, which while still imperfect, generally has a direct link to the scientific article for which, if they have done their work correctly, is easier to follow after the blog article about it. The positive side effect is that I am reading scientific articles more often since I'm doing this.

aortega 4y ago

I saw that wormhole article and something in it triggered the bs detector. Those discoveries are often made by a big team in a big lab, the article only named one researcher. IMHO Quanta is far from the most respectable source of science news, since their articles tend to be very sensationalist, but in this case Quanta is not to blame, as the article it was published in Nature, but publications in big magazines are becoming more and more political, and less about real science.

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prof-dr-ir 4y ago

Two things can be true at the same time: one, quanta magazine is the best publication out there when it comes to popularizing recent advances in fundamental physics and mathematics; and two, this article was bad. If we are allowed to base our opinion of a publication on one article, should I declare that Mateus Araújo's blog is dead to me?

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dudeinjapan 4y ago
Schrödinger's magazine?
- sigmoid10 4y ago
  Only if these two things were mutually exclusive. But in reality, the underlying assumption is a false dichotomy.
aortega 4y ago
The article is brilliant until observed.
pyb 4y ago
Journalism is about trust. In a sense, scientific magazines are only as good as their worst articles. My opinion just shifted from "if it's in Quanta, it's probably correct" to "I need to fact-check everything they say".
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
This article is particularly bad, but I can't remember the last time I saw a Quanta article that didn't grossly misrepresent the research.

raverbashing 4y ago

Magazine makes a misstep and then someone goes into a rant on how it "Magazine died" Seems like it went much more clickbait than the original article. Nobody reading QM would take that headline literally. Talk about an overreaction.

college_physics 4y ago

To further the damage said article was picked up by mass-market newspapers and circulated widely The net result of all this ad-driven virality madness is the degradation of trust in obscure but important societal contracts: 1) that academics at the cutting edge of human knowledge can self-regulate through peer-review not only the integrity of a piece of work (not an obvious issue in this case) but can also place its importance and relevance against the entire body of prior knowledge and 2) that journalists disseminating scientific / technical information can act as a check and balance to remedy any deficiencies in 1) instead of amplifying and aggravating them It feels like we have entered a downward spiral of ever more shrill claims competing for attention in world crushed by low-quality information overload.

prof-dr-ir 4y ago
I am pretty sure the newspapers all picked up on the press releases rather than on the quanta article. For example, the article in the NY Times [0] appeared on the same day (and is also much better IMO). And, for what it's worth, I do not share your pessimistic outlook. I think a lot of excellent science and science reporting is taking place every day. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/science/physics-wormhole-quantum-computer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/science/physics-wormhole-...

sandgiant 4y ago

Looks like Quanta Magazine changed the title of the article after publication. I guess they did get some push back on the original article. Original title (dec 1.): "Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer" [1] Current title (dec 2.): "Physicists Create a Holographic Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer" [2] [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221201021130/https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-using-a-quantum-computer-20221130/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221201021130/https://www.quant... [2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221202022713/https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-using-a-quantum-computer-20221130/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221202022713/https://www.quant...

kgwgk 4y ago
https://twitter.com/QuantaMagazine/status/1598353637515853827 https://twitter.com/QuantaMagazine/status/159835363751585382...

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dandanua 4y ago

It's a variant of the classical story https://www.smbc-comics.com/?db=comics&id=1623 https://www.smbc-comics.com/?db=comics&id=1623 Though, it seems in this case some scientists who pushed the narrative were dishonest too.

lysecret 4y ago

Their podcast "the joy of why" is still top notch.

jstx1 4y ago

I don't like Quanta because of the exaggerated sensationalized clickbait titles. It makes it seem like it's aimed at people who want to tell themselves that are smart or into science.

pera 4y ago

> For me the worst part of the video was at 11:53, where they showed a graph with a bright point labelled “negative energy peak” on it. The problem is that this is not a plot of data, it’s just a drawing, with no connection to the experiment. Lay people will think they are seeing actual data, so this is straightforward disinformation. This is exactly how I interpreted that part of the video [1], and it makes me feel sad because Quanta is the only kinda pop-science magazine I enjoy reading. As a lay parson, when it comes to quantum mechanics I have to use my own set of heuristics to identify quackery: this Quanta's video checks almost all my indicators of low quality quantum woo - I don't like to say this about someone's else work but just the aesthetics reminds me to pseudo-scientific documentaries. [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOJCS1W1uzg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOJCS1W1uzg

zachf 4y ago

If anyone is looking to learn some actual physics instead of media crit, it would be worthwhile to sit down with the wikipedia pages for the AdS/CFT correspondence and the black hole information paradox. There’s a lot of things you can learn about the nature of quantum gravity. Some of it is built on assumptions about nature, of course, which leads a lot of people to assume that the enterprise is built on a house of cards, but even this is worth really digging in to. You may find that in fact there are only a few assumptions about reality that need to be made, and that removing any one of them is harder than you might think. And AdS/CFT is genuinely fascinating. It’s a type of theoretical construct that’s quite unique in the history of physics. So it’s very hard to talk about it in English sometimes! That’s partly what happened in this Quanta article. AdS/CFT asserts an equality between two very different systems (here, the quantum system is identified with the wormhole) in an extremely complex and nonlinear way. Does this mean that the quantum system is a wormhole? It’s a harder question than it appears on the surface.

zmgsabst 4y ago
Is it that hard to talk about? A tangle in the interior of a cylinder loses information when viewed on the boundary because you lose a dimension (ie, the shadow cast by string around a light bulb as you see it on the lamp shade). You then have to allocate probabilities to pseudoknot resolutions (ie, guesses about crossings). So you end up with something that looks like continuous geometry on the inside and quantized statistics about interactions on the boundary. Entanglement looks like taking two filaments in a plasma globe and moving one in a circle around the other. Their ribbons are now tangled. (As a 2+1-D analog.)
- zachf 4y ago
  Respectfully, your metaphor doesn’t bear any similarity to the way AdS/CFT works. In AdS/CFT there are dual quantum systems with no information loss. A bit more precisely, the correspondence relates the partition functions of quantum gravity in AdS with the partition functions of conformal fields. This implies the existence of a map between the two, which in this case happens to be extremely complex and nonlocal. Another way of saying it is that the two descriptions are different representations of the same object. There is no projection or information lost in switching between descriptions.

iNic 4y ago

As a mathematician I can say that all math articles I have read so far in Quanta Magazine have been excellent and they deserve praise! This one article might have missed the mark, but the topic is inherently difficult to write about to a lay audience.

green_on_black 4y ago
As an (ex-)physicist who did minor QC research, I'm very annoyed at the sensationalism. I do typically enjoy Quanta, their sensationalism is usually less severe, and the intuition they givd is decently aligned when I (sometimes) dive deeper.

nickdothutton 4y ago

This is why I’ve slowly migrated from general readership magazines to reading only academic papers. No-doubt their readership has increased, but I am no-longer these publications target market.

323 4y ago

All popular articles about quantum physics are in a way bullshit, false and misrepresentation. Because the only way to accurately talk about quantum physics is to show the math and only talk about that. The famous "shut up and calculate". You can't have it both ways, you either accept gross misrepresentations in the popular science press, or you just don't have popular science press.

Xcelerate 4y ago
Yeah, this is how I feel when I read the actual research papers behind these sensational articles. “Quantum teleportation achieved!” Hmm, looks like a unitary operator was applied to a tensor product state. “Virtual particles pop in and out of existence!” Hmm, looks like a mathematical technique to perturbatively approximate a very large unitary operator. “Time crystals!!!” Cool, the unitary operator has some symmetries. “The cat is dead and alive!” So the state the unitary operator acts upon can be represented as a mathematically convenient linear combination of two other states. Great?

okintheory 4y ago

I agree it's rather sad to see such an over-the-top presentation in Quanta. Staying more grounded would definitely serve their longer term credibility. Perhaps surprisingly, NYTimes did better this time: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/science/physics-wormhole-quantum-computer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/30/science/physics-wormhole-... They quote Scott Aaronson: “The most important thing I’d want New York Times readers to understand is this,” Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in an email. “If 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.”

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talkingtab 4y ago

I am beginning to think that advertising is the most toxic element of our environment. Click bait is a way to present something that makes it impossible not to ignore. "Biden and Trump Get Into Food Fight at Restaurant". Behind the click bait is so often lies, deception or garbage, that our brains now conclude that anything behind click bait is trash. If advertising is your business model, then you can make more money with click-baitization. Here's looking at you WAPO and NYT. If, with good reason, we cannot trust the supposed sources of good information, even HN, then our ability to build common understandings and actions is destroyed. Why, it is almost like our political system would be destroyed. If you want to destroy an ant colony, the simplest method is just to prevent interfere with the mechanisms they use to collaborate. Single ants, even mobs of ants cannot survive. Of course we are not ants and we can survive even when our systems of collaboration are destroyed. (fixed phrasing in edit)

NotYourLawyer 4y ago

> The problem is, if they write such bullshit about topics that I do understand, how can I trust their reporting on topics that I do not? See also the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2021/01/18/gell-mann-amnesia/

rwoerz 4y ago

No offense, but choosing "The Death of Quanta Magazin" as the title for a rant about clickbaiting is quite ironic.

karmakaze 4y ago

Agreed. I've read too many long-form Quanta articles that when I open one without realizing it, quickly close it. I don't know who values long articles without substance or earnest attempts at relating to the underlying science. There's also large unrelated pictures interspersed with the too-wide-margin-padded text. Not my cup of tea either.