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The Death of Quanta Magazine

mateusaraujo.info

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Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#41

Post by barry-cotter »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #22
Veen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No post body was provided.

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#42

Post by jstx1 »

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.

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#43

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

prof-dr-ir wrote: post #20

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?

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.

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#44

Post by pera »

> 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

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#45

Post by crispyambulance »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #2

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 i…

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?

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#46

Post by astrange »

barry-cotter wrote: post #41
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quoted post unavailable.

> [1] https://news.yahoo.com/news/liberal-blogger-matt-yglesias-ad...

Amusingly(?) this article you linked is a lie, since he explicitly denies that he meant it that way. (Also, it's on a news site but isn't news?)

This is the traditional extremely angry misreading of a normal Matt Yglesias tweet; it's sometimes known as "cope".

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#47

Post by zachf »

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.

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#48

Post by iNic »

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.

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#49

Post by kgwgk »

sandgiant wrote: post #32

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.quant... [2]: https://web.archive.org/w…

https://twitter.com/QuantaMagazine/status/159835363751585382...
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