Peter Woit

If you read some of the links in the first paragraph you'll get a feel for the intent of the article. Aaronson probably expects his audience to follow traditional physics sources. See for example:

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=6260

Yesterday in QFT class the professor [0] explained the name by saying that the guy who came up with it was a "very good salesman". The reality is that probabilities can in a great deal of cases be expressed as the volume of something in some phase space, for a trivial example, consider the area under the curve between two x-values on the normal distribution's probability density function -- it's the 2-volume of a section of the Gaussiohedron.

So after branding quantum information science as the study of the "unitarihedron", Aaronson dragged out one of his more miraculous results, which is that PP is closed under union and intersection as a direct result of PP = PostBQP, where PostBQP is a complexity class derived from BQP using an idea called postselection. That proof was actually in his dissertation (if I recall correctly), written in 2006, and it was an extremely impressive proof which did not use a word like "unitarihedron" to describe its methods.

So, while it was a joke, if you read the article in the context of the physics community's reaction to the amplituhedron story, the included proof really just helps to drive the point home.

The methods now called "amplituhedron" have been under continuous development for the…

Tao doesn't know exactly what Mochizuki is talking about because it is not in any of the (many) areas that Tao is an expert in. Even Fields medalists have their limits.

The people that do work in his area don't know exactly what he's talking about because he's been going in a very deep and difficult direction. No one has been following, because they've been waiting to see if he finds anything in there. There was a good description at "Not Even Wrong":

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What Mochizuki is claiming is that he has a new set of techniques, which he calls “inter-universal geometry”, generalizing the foundations of algebraic geometry in terms of schemes first envisioned by Grothendieck. In essence, he has created a new world of mathematical objects, and now claims that he understands them well enough to work with them consistently and show that their properties imply the abc conjecture.

What experts tell me is that, very much unlike the case of Szpiro’s proof, here it may take a very long time to see if this is really a proof. They can’t just rely on their familiarity with the usual scheme-theoretic world, but need to invest some serious time and effort into becoming familiar with Mochizuki’s new world. Only then can they hope to see how his proof is supposed to work, and be able to check carefully that a proof is really there, not just a mirage. It’s important to realize that this is being taken seriously because such experts have a high opinion of Mochizuki and his past work. If…

Unfortunately I have not found this to be true (though it is in this case). There are quite a number of articles that are misleading or flat out false.

The best example is the quantum wormhole article and video[0,1], because it is egregious and doesn't take much nuance or expertise see the issues. I'm glad they made a note and wrote a follow-up[2], but all this illustrates what is wrong with the picture. For one, the article and video were published the same day as it was published in Nature[3]. Sure, they are getting wind of the preprints, but in this case there was none! They're often acting as a PR firm for many of the big universities and companies, unfortunately so is Nature.

The article was published Nov 30th, but the note didn't come till March 29th![4] You might think, oh it took that much time to figure out that there were problems, but no, only a few days after the publication (Dec 2nd) even Ars Technica was posting about the misinformation. They even waited over a month after Kobrin, Schuster, and Yao placed their comment on ArXiv[6]. Scott Aaronson had already written about it[7]. There was so much dissent in that time frame that it is hard to explain it as an accident. A week or two and it wouldn't be an issue.

But I think Peter Woit explains it best[8] (published, yes, Nov 30th).

This work is getting the full-press promotional package: no preprint on the arXiv, embargoed info to journalists, with reveal at a press conference, a cover story in Nature,…

I remember having a total "WTF?!?" moment when I heard Turok, of all people, had been chosen as Perimeter's new director. At the time, Perimeter's reputation was not unlike that of SpaceX or Tesla - a daring, unconventional outfit trying to shake things up with a new approach, and unusually enough endowed with the resources to actually do it. "Things" being very much quantum gravity.

Then, out of the blue, Turok parachutes in, a hum-drum theoretical cosmologist who built his career on straightforward computer simulations of classical field-theoretic toy models, quite unrelated to quantum gravity. What?!?

If he can say he didn't want the institute "to be center for alternative physicists", it is because the people who put him in place decided they didn't want that. But that was very much the origin story of the place.

I still wonder what really happened. Maybe Lazaridis (an engineer, not a physicist) finally realized how far we are from any kind of experimental test of quantum gravity and decided that he wanted some kind of tangible return on his investment.

Howard Burton, the founding director who was replaced by Turok, wrote a book [1] about the early years which may shed some light on events [2]. Maybe some day I'll read it.

[1] https://www.amazon.ca/First-Principles-Business-Serious-Science/dp/1554701759/157-8685500-0664562

[2] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=1805/

Okey, let me quote another post by Peter Woit from 2016:

"One thing that strikes me about these things is that the situation with the physics prize has changed dramatically since the first three years, when they went mostly to string theorists. Having a heavily promoted much larger cash prize than the Nobel, given largely to theorists for ideas many of which haven’t worked out, raised obvious questions about the wisdom of the whole thing. The last two years have seen a 180 degree turn, with the prizes going to experimentalists for successful experimental results. Even better, there has been an unusual emphasis on making an award to entire experimental collaborations, not just a small number of “great men” identified as collaboration leaders or spokespersons. I don’t know of any other major prizes that do this. The lack of an experimental Nobel for the Higgs discovery is one reflection of that problem, it’s great that the Breakthrough Prize people are doing something about it."[0]

Basically, we have two criticized recent physics awards (2019 special and 2017) and several in the very beginning.
That still doesn't qualify as 'mostly'.

[0] http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8088

A more sober take on this story can be found here: https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13181

summary:

The claim that “Physicists Create a Wormhole” is just complete bullshit, with the huge campaign to mislead the public about this a disgrace, highly unhelpful for the credibility of physics research in particular and science in general.

…

As far as I can tell, all they did was perform elaborate SYK calculations on a classical computer, together with simulations of noise on the Google quantum computer, trying to find a possible calculation on the quantum computer that would have signal, not just noise. Once such an N=7 SYK calculation was identified, they used a 9 qubit quantum computer and the noisy result matched the simulation result from the classical computer, exactly as expected. Seeing the completely expected match between results from a 9 bit noisy quantum computer and the results of the simulation of this on a classical computer caused Maria Spiropulu to say that “I was shaken” and “It was nuts. It was nuts”, while Joe Lykken felt that the moment was on a par with discovery of the Higgs particle.