How Physicists Created a Holographic Wormhole in a Quantum Computer

What Hacker News said

Recommends russellbeattie · 2022-11 · on “Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer”

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.

Critical pera · 2022-12 · on “The Death of Quanta Magazine”

> 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 lik

Critical godelski · 2023-11 · on “Show HN: Bulletpapers – ArXiv AI paper summarizer, won Anthropic Hackathon”

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 work

Critical godelski · 2024-11 · on “Teen mathematicians tie knots through a mind-blowing fractal”

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 articl