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The Death of Quanta Magazine

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Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#71

Post by pred_ »

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…

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

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#72

Post by nobodyandproud »

dekken_ wrote: post #40
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.

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.

A plain reading of the first four or five paragraphs doesn’t tell me that this is a calculation.

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#73

Post by zachf »

zmgsabst wrote: post #69
zachf wrote: post #47

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…

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…

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.

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#74

Post by dekken_ »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #72
dekken_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A plain reading of the first four or five paragraphs doesn’t tell me that this is a calculation.

I meant that the magazine is not literally dead, but in the sense of "dead to me".

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#75

Post by eynsham »

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…

> 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.

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#76

Post by sampo »

eynsham wrote: post #75
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…

> 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.

> 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

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#77

Post by prof-dr-ir »

college_physics wrote: post #27

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…

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-...

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#78

Post by zmgsabst »

zachf wrote: post #73
zmgsabst wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. Ano…

Yes — that non-locality on the surface is because the braiding structure is non-local when projected.

You are correct and I misspoke:

You don’t lose the information, it becomes non-local on the surface — and so if you’re building a model of the interior from a local sampling of the surface, you get a statistical model built on pseudoknots (again, like a shadow from a lamp).

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#79

Post by zachf »

zmgsabst wrote: post #78
zachf wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ano…

Yes — that non-locality on the surface is because the braiding structure is non-local when projected. You are correct and I misspoke: You don’t lose the information, it becomes non-local on the surface — and so if you’re building a model of the interior from a local sampling of the surface, you get a statistical model built on pseudoknots (again, like a shadow from a lamp).

I think it proves my point that AdS/CFT is hard to talk about :) I’ve still got mixed feelings about the lamp/shadow analogy but thanks for the clarification.

Re: The Death of Quanta Magazine

#80

Post by karmakaze »

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.
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