Quanta Magazine
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2022–2024
17:05 · 2.4M views · Nov 30, 2022
Quanta Magazine explains the 2022 experiment that claimed to create a holographic wormhole on Google's quantum computer. The description now notes that a later independent analysis questioned whether any wormhole was created.
Initially praised as a nicely done explainer, it is now more often cited as an example of overhyped quantum coverage.
4 comments from Hacker News
The accompanying video was quite nicely done: this video I have to say that I have a general suspicion of quantum computing research as it seems that the scientists could be making up success criteria as they go along and we'd have zero idea either way. That said, I respect these institutions enough to accept that people much more brilliant than myself are solving problems I can't begin to understand, and so I take these sorts of pronouncements at face value until proved otherwise.
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, accompanied
I think it matters who we want to write papers to. Right now we write papers and abstracts to reviewers. That's because that's how we're measured and that's where we compete. But I'd say that we generally believe that papers are written to other researchers, which I agree that that should be the goal. But as this competition is increasing we're starting to write more to media as this can usually pass review and gathers lots of citations (these people tend to be from big schools too which have large media arms and are willing to pay for articles in news venues). This is why I'm deeply frustrated with academia right now. Papers are supposed to be how I communicate to my fellow researchers working on the same or similar topic. They're not for communicating to someone in a different field and not for communicating to the public layman (nor should they be!). It is the job of science communicators to act as the bridge between laymen and researcher, which a lot do a poor job as they're beholden to the YouTube algorithm, not accuracy. Hell, Quanta published a shit piece recently about quantum wormholes and machine learning and what did they do when it was called out? Just write another article and add a note on their youtube video. Nature is pulling similar shit. I get wanting to make science popular and exciting, but truth/accuracy has a lower bound in complexity whereas fantasy doesn't. [LINK] [LINK] this video
> 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] - this video