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Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity

#41

Post by wvbdmp »

yubblegum wrote: post #15
dabiged wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget snap, crackle and pop, and quantum teleportation. Physicists get a failing grade for naming things.

You mean post quantum, theoretical physics. Up to 19th and early 20th, physicists somehow knew how to name things. It is possible that the nature of the beast itself has changed and it attracts a different kind of mindsets ...

Maybe Greek and Latin vocabulary is just overextended at some point? I don’t really see the issue with Snap, Crackle and Pop. The potential confusion around Magic seems much greater, although when you consider the vastly more common opposite effect, where specific scientific terms become popular and quickly gain wholly different colloquial meanings, perhaps it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Perhaps Magic is even so ridiculous that it’s immune to co-option by charlatans. After all, they choose sciency words to lend an air of credibility. OTOH the perceived ridiculousness could also change rather quickly. It’s just the nature of language use…

Re: Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity

#42

Post by mfaulk »

dabiged wrote: post #7
lioeters wrote: post #6

Charm, quark, colors, time crystals, holographs.. And now, magic. Don't worry Einstein, no spooky action at a distance here, it's just magical. > The more non-Clifford gates you need to produce a quantum state, the more magical that state is. The group found that the particles were highly magical. ..They showed that magic gave space its springiness . Magic, in other words, is connected to space’s ability to bend. At…

Don't forget snap, crackle and pop, and quantum teleportation. Physicists get a failing grade for naming things.

Meanwhile, on HN: "Don't use yarn, use bun it's written in zig!"

Re: Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity

#43

Post by stogot »

echelon wrote: post #32
Terr_ wrote: post #2

> a measure of quantumness known as “magic.” This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line... > They had worked out a way of running software on a classical computer that would mimic a quantum task. When it comes to using a regular computer to mimic (read: fake) the execution of an exotic program/API for nonexistnet future hardware, I highly recommend the humorously titled talk: "Temporally…

Is any of this experimentally testable in the real world? Would gravity or spacetime under these definitions behave differently and yield something we can observe? Or is this fancy math modeling that looks nice on paper, but that we won't be able to test until we become a Kardashev type III civilization?

These wild ideas eventually arrive in textbooks as if they were tested, proven with none of the nuance or contradictory evidence

Re: Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity

#44

Post by api »

echelon wrote: post #32
Terr_ wrote: post #2

> a measure of quantumness known as “magic.” This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line... > They had worked out a way of running software on a classical computer that would mimic a quantum task. When it comes to using a regular computer to mimic (read: fake) the execution of an exotic program/API for nonexistnet future hardware, I highly recommend the humorously titled talk: "Temporally…

Is any of this experimentally testable in the real world? Would gravity or spacetime under these definitions behave differently and yield something we can observe? Or is this fancy math modeling that looks nice on paper, but that we won't be able to test until we become a Kardashev type III civilization?

As far as I know it’s the latter and that’s a big problem for physics. A lot of stuff like string theory, loop quantum gravity, etc. require energies that would take a particle accelerator the diameter of the solar system or something nuts like that.

Without tests it’s just pretty math that can be coaxed into agreeing with reality but that proves nothing.

Physicists try to indirectly test all the time via cosmological observations but that is extremely hard and limited to what you can infer and how well you can eliminate other explanations or sources of error.

Re: Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity

#45

Post by lioeters »

b3lvedere wrote: post #39
themgt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just call it second stabilizer Rényi entropy or non-stabilizerness if you find "magic" strange and prose is more your flavor than poetry.

Strange quarks[1] are not magic. :) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_quark

Actually "non-stabilizerness" does describe it better than "magic".

> In quantum information theory, magic is a property that quantifies the computational resources needed to describe quantum states beyond stabilizer states.

> In 2024–2025, quantum magic was detected in top quark pairs produced at the Large Hadron Collider; it is the first observation of this property in fundamental particle collisions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(quantum_information)

And "second stabilizer Rényi entropy" is even better, it's exactly the kind of technical term I'd prefer, that describes what it means.

> One measure of quantum magic is the stabilizer Rényi entropy of order α such that..

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9nyi_entropy#Stabilizer_...

Re: Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity

#46

Post by Tade0 »

lioeters wrote: post #6

Charm, quark, colors, time crystals, holographs.. And now, magic. Don't worry Einstein, no spooky action at a distance here, it's just magical. > The more non-Clifford gates you need to produce a quantum state, the more magical that state is. The group found that the particles were highly magical. ..They showed that magic gave space its springiness . Magic, in other words, is connected to space’s ability to bend. At…

Time crystals, AFAIK, are actually descriptive: they're crystals in the sense that they produce regularities through occupying the lowest energy state - they just do that in time, not just space.

Re: Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity

#48

Post by MeteorMarc »

echelon wrote: post #32
Terr_ wrote: post #2

> a measure of quantumness known as “magic.” This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line... > They had worked out a way of running software on a classical computer that would mimic a quantum task. When it comes to using a regular computer to mimic (read: fake) the execution of an exotic program/API for nonexistnet future hardware, I highly recommend the humorously titled talk: "Temporally…

Is any of this experimentally testable in the real world? Would gravity or spacetime under these definitions behave differently and yield something we can observe? Or is this fancy math modeling that looks nice on paper, but that we won't be able to test until we become a Kardashev type III civilization?

See the end of the article, after further research quantum gravity could be simulated on a quantum computer. The links between research on quantum computing and quantum gravity are fascinating anyway!

Re: Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity

#49

Post by jerf »

dabiged wrote: post #7
lioeters wrote: post #6

Charm, quark, colors, time crystals, holographs.. And now, magic. Don't worry Einstein, no spooky action at a distance here, it's just magical. > The more non-Clifford gates you need to produce a quantum state, the more magical that state is. The group found that the particles were highly magical. ..They showed that magic gave space its springiness . Magic, in other words, is connected to space’s ability to bend. At…

Don't forget snap, crackle and pop, and quantum teleportation. Physicists get a failing grade for naming things.

Most of the crazy names come from before "quantum" was co-opted by a lot of BS. I don't blame those physicists for naming things that way because the coopting was inevitable. However, we are now decades into that process, and it is inconceivable that the authors choosing the name "magic" are unaware of it. Which means they are doing it with knowledge beforehand, and they should know this is a bad idea.

It's not just a bad idea because of that BS, but even within the field it's just asking for trouble. We may all wish we were perfect Vulcans who have perfect mental separation between all concepts and emotions, but we aren't. It's going to have a small, but extremely persistent and long-term effect on the field if you seriously name a major part of it "magic". The emotional connotations simply can not help but smear into the putatively mathematical term. It's a high price to pay for what isn't really all that funny of a joke even the first time.

And of course the BS will crank up even higher. People get hurt by that, but I don't know how much to lay at the foot of people who are all but taunting them by naming something "magic", because most of the hurt was going to come anyhow and what particular guise it is wearing is of minimal importance. Still, why even sign up to be in the line of fire of responsibility for that sort of thing?

Re: Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity

#50

Post by lioeters »

lloeki wrote: post #21
lioeters wrote: post #6

Charm, quark, colors, time crystals, holographs.. And now, magic. Don't worry Einstein, no spooky action at a distance here, it's just magical. > The more non-Clifford gates you need to produce a quantum state, the more magical that state is. The group found that the particles were highly magical. ..They showed that magic gave space its springiness . Magic, in other words, is connected to space’s ability to bend. At…

Is it measured in Thaum? (which, as everyone surely knows by now is the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls)

> The thaum is the basic unit of magic. The thaum is made up of so called resons, which are themselves made up of at least five flavours including up, down, sideways, sex appeal and peppermint.
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