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.
The Death of Quanta Magazine
21–30 of 81 posts
Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine
#22Not 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 i…
> 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 th…
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.
Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine
#23I 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.
Author is still Wolchover (as of my click a few seconds ago). Not sure what you're seeing.
Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine
#24Two 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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Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine
#25Two 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?
Schrödinger's magazine?
Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine
#26Not 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 i…
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.
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.
Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine
#27To 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.
Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine
#28Two 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?
The article is brilliant until observed.
Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine
#29> 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.
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Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine
#30AdS == 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…
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.