"Einstein cast gravity not as a force but as the geometric bending of space and time. In a popular analogy, the fabric of space-time is like the flat expanse of a mattress, and a massive object like a star is like a bowling ball sitting on top. The weight of the bowling ball compresses the mattress, forming a dimple — matter tells space-time how to curve.
In this analogy, a planet is like a smaller ball. If it rolls close enough to the bowling ball, its path will be altered by the dimple in the mattress — space-time tells matter how to move."
This analogy is wrong in a way that even people who've studied physics often don't realize.
On an everyday scale like the Earth orbiting the Sun, almost none of that gravitational interaction is from the bending of space. Far beyond 99% (actually, about 99.999999%) of it is from the bending of time.
All objects move through spacetime at the speed of light, but a stationary object is moving in the time direction. (And time's a negative dimension, so rotation's effect on length works opposite to what you'd expect from Euclidean rotations.) Suppose we drop a test mass from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa. The "forwards through time" direction takes the object deeper into the local gravity well: as far as the test mass is concerned, it's just moving forwards through time, and everything else is accelerating towards it.
This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line...
> They had worked out a way of running software on a classical computer that would mimic a quantum task.
When it comes to using a regular computer to mimic (read: fake) the execution of an exotic program/API for nonexistnet future hardware, I highly recommend the humorously titled talk: "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces... Made Easy!" [0][1]
> This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line...
You're a little late here, "magic" is already a fairly well known term in quantum computing literature. There's "magic states" and protocols for "magic state distillation" and "magic state injection", there's "shallow magic depth circuits", etc.
See the end of the article, after further research quantum gravity could be simulated on a quantum computer. The links between research on quantum computing and quantum gravity are fascinating anyway!
Does the model need to offer new testable hypothesis if it provides a way of explaining existing results that current models can't?
If it is competing against another model that does both that and offers new testable hypothesis (which experiments match), the other model is the clear winner. But lacking that, if no other model explains all existing data, is new testability really necessary when it is the only model that currently explains all existing tests?
That said, aren't most of theoretical models only contenders for such, as in they haven't been expanded to actually explain all testing results, only that, as far as they have been expanded, there are no contradictions yet? So they need physicists to expand them, but if the model is wrong, the effort might largely be wasted, and we have some models that there is disdain for not because they contradict existing experiments, but because they have eaten too many careers without showing value in return?
As far as I know it’s the latter and that’s a big problem for physics. A lot of stuff like string theory, loop quantum gravity, etc. require energies that would take a particle accelerator the diameter of the solar system or something nuts like that.
Without tests it’s just pretty math that can be coaxed into agreeing with reality but that proves nothing.
Physicists try to indirectly test all the time via cosmological observations but that is extremely hard and limited to what you can infer and how well you can eliminate other explanations or sources of error.
I believe there was a science fiction story all the way back in the early '80s describing a scenario where physics gets reclassified as a soft science or an art form because it is no longer feasible to prove anything.
> This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line...
Your worries are a bit late, there's already a huge amount of new age conspiracy bull about quantum healing with wave function collapse, microtubule alignment and biophotons - quality all-you-can-eat word salad buffet.
Maybe, just maybe, an eminent physicist who won the Nobel Prize knows more than us. At the very least his ideas deserve consideration instead of ridicule and dismissal.
Also as far as I know, Penrose’s main argument is that consciousness can not be computational. If you can’t argue against an idea with reason and resort to name calling, you’re not being rational you’re just being dogmatic and censoring ideas.
I didn't say all his theories were garbage, though the theories inspired by them developed by laypeople almost certainly are. I just don't find his argument compelling enough on its face to warrant holding them up as real progress.
Also, remember that Isaac Newton was deep into alchemy and religious prophecy. Just because you have one good idea and you're smart enough to follow it to its logical conclusion doesn't mean every idea you have is good.
Again, if you disagree with Penrose’s idea, just explain your disagreement. It’s so ironic how you’ll call it bullshit and link to some pop culture skeptic idea with no scientific backing to try and undermine an idea in defense of “real science”
> Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been.
Charm, quark, colors, time crystals, holographs.. And now, magic. Don't worry Einstein, no spooky action at a distance here, it's just magical.
> The more non-Clifford gates you need to produce a quantum state, the more magical that state is. The group found that the particles were highly magical. ..They showed that magic gave space its springiness. Magic, in other words, is connected to space’s ability to bend.
At some point these physicists crossed over into a very specialized form of poetry, a game of language.
Actually "non-stabilizerness" does describe it better than "magic".
> In quantum information theory, magic is a property that quantifies the computational resources needed to describe quantum states beyond stabilizer states.
> In 2024–2025, quantum magic was detected in top quark pairs produced at the Large Hadron Collider; it is the first observation of this property in fundamental particle collisions.
Is it measured in Thaum? (which, as everyone surely knows by now is the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls)
> The thaum is the basic unit of magic. The thaum is made up of so called resons, which are themselves made up of at least five flavours including up, down, sideways, sex appeal and peppermint.
You mean post quantum, theoretical physics. Up to 19th and early 20th, physicists somehow knew how to name things. It is possible that the nature of the beast itself has changed and it attracts a different kind of mindsets ...
Color charge and the strange and charm quarks are not post-quantum theoretical physics, are they?
There's also other areas where a current of picking simple names instead of greek/latin terms was popular for a while at least - Shannon named the smallest unit of information a "bit" after all.
Maybe Greek and Latin vocabulary is just overextended at some point? I don’t really see the issue with Snap, Crackle and Pop. The potential confusion around Magic seems much greater, although when you consider the vastly more common opposite effect, where specific scientific terms become popular and quickly gain wholly different colloquial meanings, perhaps it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Perhaps Magic is even so ridiculous that it’s immune to co-option by charlatans. After all, they choose sciency words to lend an air of credibility. OTOH the perceived ridiculousness could also change rather quickly. It’s just the nature of language use…
Most of the crazy names come from before "quantum" was co-opted by a lot of BS. I don't blame those physicists for naming things that way because the coopting was inevitable. However, we are now decades into that process, and it is inconceivable that the authors choosing the name "magic" are unaware of it. Which means they are doing it with knowledge beforehand, and they should know this is a bad idea.
It's not just a bad idea because of that BS, but even within the field it's just asking for trouble. We may all wish we were perfect Vulcans who have perfect mental separation between all concepts and emotions, but we aren't. It's going to have a small, but extremely persistent and long-term effect on the field if you seriously name a major part of it "magic". The emotional connotations simply can not help but smear into the putatively mathematical term. It's a high price to pay for what isn't really all that funny of a joke even the first time.
And of course the BS will crank up even higher. People get hurt by that, but I don't know how much to lay at the foot of people who are all but taunting them by naming something "magic", because most of the hurt was going to come anyhow and what particular guise it is wearing is of minimal importance. Still, why even sign up to be in the line of fire of responsibility for that sort of thing?
Time crystals, AFAIK, are actually descriptive: they're crystals in the sense that they produce regularities through occupying the lowest energy state - they just do that in time, not just space.
To be fair, that one came from an editor not a physicist; the physicist wanted to call their book «the goddamn particle», and it got censored/editorialized to «the god particle».
I've heard that story and it doesn't ring true to me. It's not that aggravating to find. Try measuring a neutrino mass, which is still an open problem and looks as if it will remain so for a very long time.
Greek 'anameixi' loosely means a mixture or a blending. The special states could be called 'anameixic', the property could be called 'anameixicity'.
Why am I trying to find a name for this? Otoh, why are so many physicists trying so hard to popularize their projects for the last 40 or 50 years? Oh .. I think I just answered my own question.
But magic is related to non-Cliffordness, not mixing.
Also, the term "magic" is pretty well used in quantum computing, it really doesn't need to be popularized. The concept is quite important already and would be talked about regardless of its name.
I agree, although there is a long tradition of terrible naming in the sciences.
One of the most boring and yet egregious examples imo is "Random Variable". So named because
- they aren't random and
- they aren't variables.[1]
A "random variable" is actually a measurable deterministic function from the set of possible outcomes of some experiment to the real numbers. But you can see why the name "random variable" is confusing to people.
IMHO, as an analogy, matter is not 'a bowling-ball on a mattress', but more like a scrunched-up section of table-cloth. Tiny knots or whirlpools of space-time/quantum fields, different particles are different topologies of knot, albeit the nature of space-time is unclear and it may well be a projection.
An ant traveling at constant speed on a "scrunched up section of a table cloth" will still take the same amount of time following the same path to get from A to B. Any material analogy requires some kind of stretching or compression.
Calling something 'magic' is like an admission that you have no clue about what is going on. Seems to me, they do have some clue, namely that instead of codes with perfect isolation, there might be some advantage to studying ones that allow some blending. The resulting spaces may (or may not) lead to a better description of reality, but doing science means to peel back that mystery. So to go and promote this under the term 'magic' is disingenuous.
They are not "promoting" the term magic. It is a well-known and commonly used term in quantum computing research. It is also pretty well understood as a concept (mathematically), even if it's not always easy to recognize in nature or easy to know when it needs to be used in algorithms.
It sounds as if it's in the same vein that gave us "strange" and "charm" and "color" (in the strong force sense). There was a whimsical time in particle naming. I'd say it ended when they rejected "truth" and "beauty" in favor of "top" and "bottom".
>In holographic theories, physicists may have traced the pliability of space-time to its quantum roots
...ah yes holography again. Not to say that all these insights from it are completely worthless, but unless we actually find a holographic dual of our universe instead of AdS spaces (which are the opposite of our universe if anything), this whole field is starting to feel more like a jobs program for mathematicians out of new ideas.
That's how science always worked. The stupid people throw money at smart people and sometimes they pay back with good things. Any attempts to optimize that is futile, so the best we can do is to continue throwing money.
> this whole field is starting to feel more like a jobs program for mathematicians out of new ideas.
So sick of seeing phrases like this.
Science is not business. It is not about producing results that you personally think are important. It is understanding the nature of the universe for the sake of it.
Science and math are not the same thing, though. The concern is that physics, a science, has been sliding too much into math research - specifically talking about the foundations of particle physics.
That is, the concern is that instead of studying the real world, theoretical physicists are spending more and more time studying mathematical constructs and their properties.
There's a lot of ire for string theory. It's non-testable and wound up attracting lots of minds, funding, and resources. It hasn't seemingly led to any tangible results. Many scientists express anger about it and claim entire generations of progress were lost.
Also, if all you have is a dual model, then it’s equally accurate to say entanglement arises from spacetime. Eg, this article describes entanglement giving rise to wormholes, but the model equally says wormholes give rise to entanglement.
They’re promoting their preferred frame to ontological status when you can’t use a dual model to assert more than equivalence between frames.
> Is it possible to take any scientist talking about something they term as magic seriously?
Obviously. Because the fact that they use this word for something modernly scientific means that its meaning is as far from the commonfolk meaning of the word as possible. Magic doesn't mean anything sensible yet. So it's basically free real estate for something physical, especially something very foundational.
"Einstein cast gravity not as a force but as the geometric bending of space and time. In a popular analogy, the fabric of space-time is like the flat expanse of a mattress, and a massive object like a star is like a bowling ball sitting on top. The weight of the bowling ball compresses the mattress, forming a dimple — matter tells space-time how to curve.
In this analogy, a planet is like a smaller ball. If it rolls close enough to the bowling ball, its path will be altered by the dimple in the mattress — space-time tells matter how to move."
This analogy is wrong in a way that even people who've studied physics often don't realize.
On an everyday scale like the Earth orbiting the Sun, almost none of that gravitational interaction is from the bending of space. Far beyond 99% (actually, about 99.999999%) of it is from the bending of time.
Could you be more specific? How does bending time cause the Earth to orbit the Sun?
And also, how does one bend time?
All objects move through spacetime at the speed of light, but a stationary object is moving in the time direction. (And time's a negative dimension, so rotation's effect on length works opposite to what you'd expect from Euclidean rotations.) Suppose we drop a test mass from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa. The "forwards through time" direction takes the object deeper into the local gravity well: as far as the test mass is concerned, it's just moving forwards through time, and everything else is accelerating towards it.
Aka the Einstein tensor
> a measure of quantumness known as “magic.”
This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line...
> They had worked out a way of running software on a classical computer that would mimic a quantum task.
When it comes to using a regular computer to mimic (read: fake) the execution of an exotic program/API for nonexistnet future hardware, I highly recommend the humorously titled talk: "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces... Made Easy!" [0][1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzTjPx4NIiM
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpInOI4o2LY
> This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line...
You're a little late here, "magic" is already a fairly well known term in quantum computing literature. There's "magic states" and protocols for "magic state distillation" and "magic state injection", there's "shallow magic depth circuits", etc.
To be fair, it isn't that different from why we have imaginary numbers. Or why the reals are calls reals.
Which. Yeah, has been a pretty bad thing for people in understanding those. :(
I had assumed it was a play on the saying "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" but I didn't see that in the article.
Is any of this experimentally testable in the real world?
Would gravity or spacetime under these definitions behave differently and yield something we can observe?
Or is this fancy math modeling that looks nice on paper, but that we won't be able to test until we become a Kardashev type III civilization?
See the end of the article, after further research quantum gravity could be simulated on a quantum computer. The links between research on quantum computing and quantum gravity are fascinating anyway!
Simulating it on a computer, even a "quantum computer", is not the same as testing it against actual reality.
Does the model need to offer new testable hypothesis if it provides a way of explaining existing results that current models can't?
If it is competing against another model that does both that and offers new testable hypothesis (which experiments match), the other model is the clear winner. But lacking that, if no other model explains all existing data, is new testability really necessary when it is the only model that currently explains all existing tests?
That said, aren't most of theoretical models only contenders for such, as in they haven't been expanded to actually explain all testing results, only that, as far as they have been expanded, there are no contradictions yet? So they need physicists to expand them, but if the model is wrong, the effort might largely be wasted, and we have some models that there is disdain for not because they contradict existing experiments, but because they have eaten too many careers without showing value in return?
As far as I know it’s the latter and that’s a big problem for physics. A lot of stuff like string theory, loop quantum gravity, etc. require energies that would take a particle accelerator the diameter of the solar system or something nuts like that.
Without tests it’s just pretty math that can be coaxed into agreeing with reality but that proves nothing.
Physicists try to indirectly test all the time via cosmological observations but that is extremely hard and limited to what you can infer and how well you can eliminate other explanations or sources of error.
I believe there was a science fiction story all the way back in the early '80s describing a scenario where physics gets reclassified as a soft science or an art form because it is no longer feasible to prove anything.
These wild ideas eventually arrive in textbooks as if they were tested, proven with none of the nuance or contradictory evidence
Do they though? Are physics textbooks putting forward some version of string theory from the 1990s as proven fact?
> This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line...
Your worries are a bit late, there's already a huge amount of new age conspiracy bull about quantum healing with wave function collapse, microtubule alignment and biophotons - quality all-you-can-eat word salad buffet.
Don't underestimate the capacity for the problem to get significantly worse.
Blame Roger Penrose for the microtubule bullshit. Ironically, he's the opposite of new age, dude won a Nobel prize.
Maybe, just maybe, an eminent physicist who won the Nobel Prize knows more than us. At the very least his ideas deserve consideration instead of ridicule and dismissal.
Also as far as I know, Penrose’s main argument is that consciousness can not be computational. If you can’t argue against an idea with reason and resort to name calling, you’re not being rational you’re just being dogmatic and censoring ideas.
I didn't say all his theories were garbage, though the theories inspired by them developed by laypeople almost certainly are. I just don't find his argument compelling enough on its face to warrant holding them up as real progress.
Also, remember that Isaac Newton was deep into alchemy and religious prophecy. Just because you have one good idea and you're smart enough to follow it to its logical conclusion doesn't mean every idea you have is good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
Again, if you disagree with Penrose’s idea, just explain your disagreement. It’s so ironic how you’ll call it bullshit and link to some pop culture skeptic idea with no scientific backing to try and undermine an idea in defense of “real science”
> Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been.
https://paulgraham.com/say.html
Charm, quark, colors, time crystals, holographs.. And now, magic. Don't worry Einstein, no spooky action at a distance here, it's just magical.
> The more non-Clifford gates you need to produce a quantum state, the more magical that state is. The group found that the particles were highly magical. ..They showed that magic gave space its springiness. Magic, in other words, is connected to space’s ability to bend.
At some point these physicists crossed over into a very specialized form of poetry, a game of language.
You can just call it second stabilizer Rényi entropy or non-stabilizerness if you find "magic" strange and prose is more your flavor than poetry.
Strange quarks[1] are not magic. :)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_quark
Actually "non-stabilizerness" does describe it better than "magic".
> In quantum information theory, magic is a property that quantifies the computational resources needed to describe quantum states beyond stabilizer states.
> In 2024–2025, quantum magic was detected in top quark pairs produced at the Large Hadron Collider; it is the first observation of this property in fundamental particle collisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(quantum_information)
And "second stabilizer Rényi entropy" is even better, it's exactly the kind of technical term I'd prefer, that describes what it means.
> One measure of quantum magic is the stabilizer Rényi entropy of order α such that..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9nyi_entropy#Stabilizer_...
Is it measured in Thaum? (which, as everyone surely knows by now is the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls)
> The thaum is the basic unit of magic. The thaum is made up of so called resons, which are themselves made up of at least five flavours including up, down, sideways, sex appeal and peppermint.
400 billion dollars and a portal to hell later scientists discover evidence of the elusive spearmint.
Don't forget snap, crackle and pop, and quantum teleportation.
Physicists get a failing grade for naming things.
Meanwhile, on HN: "Don't use yarn, use bun it's written in zig!"
You mean post quantum, theoretical physics. Up to 19th and early 20th, physicists somehow knew how to name things. It is possible that the nature of the beast itself has changed and it attracts a different kind of mindsets ...
Color charge and the strange and charm quarks are not post-quantum theoretical physics, are they?
There's also other areas where a current of picking simple names instead of greek/latin terms was popular for a while at least - Shannon named the smallest unit of information a "bit" after all.
Maybe Greek and Latin vocabulary is just overextended at some point? I don’t really see the issue with Snap, Crackle and Pop. The potential confusion around Magic seems much greater, although when you consider the vastly more common opposite effect, where specific scientific terms become popular and quickly gain wholly different colloquial meanings, perhaps it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Perhaps Magic is even so ridiculous that it’s immune to co-option by charlatans. After all, they choose sciency words to lend an air of credibility. OTOH the perceived ridiculousness could also change rather quickly. It’s just the nature of language use…
Maybe it is easier to get funding with catchy and/or mysterious names?
Most of the crazy names come from before "quantum" was co-opted by a lot of BS. I don't blame those physicists for naming things that way because the coopting was inevitable. However, we are now decades into that process, and it is inconceivable that the authors choosing the name "magic" are unaware of it. Which means they are doing it with knowledge beforehand, and they should know this is a bad idea.
It's not just a bad idea because of that BS, but even within the field it's just asking for trouble. We may all wish we were perfect Vulcans who have perfect mental separation between all concepts and emotions, but we aren't. It's going to have a small, but extremely persistent and long-term effect on the field if you seriously name a major part of it "magic". The emotional connotations simply can not help but smear into the putatively mathematical term. It's a high price to pay for what isn't really all that funny of a joke even the first time.
And of course the BS will crank up even higher. People get hurt by that, but I don't know how much to lay at the foot of people who are all but taunting them by naming something "magic", because most of the hurt was going to come anyhow and what particular guise it is wearing is of minimal importance. Still, why even sign up to be in the line of fire of responsibility for that sort of thing?
Time crystals, AFAIK, are actually descriptive: they're crystals in the sense that they produce regularities through occupying the lowest energy state - they just do that in time, not just space.
I can sort of appreciate these shenanigans as short-lived common room humor, but I find it obnoxious to put it in the official terminology.
It's bad enough all the corporations trying to steal perfectly active words for their brand names or products.
Ghosts are also a thing in quantum field theory
And slavery, unfortunately. (Slave variables, slave bosons, etc.)
we had "god particle" too …
To be fair, that one came from an editor not a physicist; the physicist wanted to call their book «the goddamn particle», and it got censored/editorialized to «the god particle».
I've heard that story and it doesn't ring true to me. It's not that aggravating to find. Try measuring a neutrino mass, which is still an open problem and looks as if it will remain so for a very long time.
Is that really where the name came from? I remember being struck by how dumb that was and thought “a journalist must have come up with that”.
Quanta article are getting longer and longer. AI effect?
Greek 'anameixi' loosely means a mixture or a blending. The special states could be called 'anameixic', the property could be called 'anameixicity'.
Why am I trying to find a name for this? Otoh, why are so many physicists trying so hard to popularize their projects for the last 40 or 50 years? Oh .. I think I just answered my own question.
Are you suggesting "anameixi" to replace "magic"?
But magic is related to non-Cliffordness, not mixing.
Also, the term "magic" is pretty well used in quantum computing, it really doesn't need to be popularized. The concept is quite important already and would be talked about regardless of its name.
That is an incredibly unfortunate term to use for the phenomenon.
I agree, although there is a long tradition of terrible naming in the sciences.
One of the most boring and yet egregious examples imo is "Random Variable". So named because
- they aren't random and
- they aren't variables.[1]
A "random variable" is actually a measurable deterministic function from the set of possible outcomes of some experiment to the real numbers. But you can see why the name "random variable" is confusing to people.
[1] https://cyril9227.github.io/random-variables/ and elsewhere.
> A "random variable" is actually a measurable deterministic function from the set of possible outcomes of some experiment to the real numbers.
I don't think that this was the formalization that was used when the term was coined, given how late set and measure theory were formalized.
In absolute, those are irrevocably pliable scientific facts.
Mathematicians shouldn’t be allowed to name anything, it’s beyond ridiculous
That's exactly why mathematicians should name things.
IMHO, as an analogy, matter is not 'a bowling-ball on a mattress', but more like a scrunched-up section of table-cloth. Tiny knots or whirlpools of space-time/quantum fields, different particles are different topologies of knot, albeit the nature of space-time is unclear and it may well be a projection.
An ant traveling at constant speed on a "scrunched up section of a table cloth" will still take the same amount of time following the same path to get from A to B. Any material analogy requires some kind of stretching or compression.
I agree, the table-cloth is rubber.
So, when it comes to the quantum physics of dark matter, would this property be dark magic?
I’m so sorry. Couldn’t help myself.
Calling something 'magic' is like an admission that you have no clue about what is going on. Seems to me, they do have some clue, namely that instead of codes with perfect isolation, there might be some advantage to studying ones that allow some blending. The resulting spaces may (or may not) lead to a better description of reality, but doing science means to peel back that mystery. So to go and promote this under the term 'magic' is disingenuous.
They are not "promoting" the term magic. It is a well-known and commonly used term in quantum computing research. It is also pretty well understood as a concept (mathematically), even if it's not always easy to recognize in nature or easy to know when it needs to be used in algorithms.
It sounds as if it's in the same vein that gave us "strange" and "charm" and "color" (in the strong force sense). There was a whimsical time in particle naming. I'd say it ended when they rejected "truth" and "beauty" in favor of "top" and "bottom".
We can do better than "magic".
>In holographic theories, physicists may have traced the pliability of space-time to its quantum roots
...ah yes holography again. Not to say that all these insights from it are completely worthless, but unless we actually find a holographic dual of our universe instead of AdS spaces (which are the opposite of our universe if anything), this whole field is starting to feel more like a jobs program for mathematicians out of new ideas.
That's how science always worked. The stupid people throw money at smart people and sometimes they pay back with good things. Any attempts to optimize that is futile, so the best we can do is to continue throwing money.
> this whole field is starting to feel more like a jobs program for mathematicians out of new ideas.
So sick of seeing phrases like this.
Science is not business. It is not about producing results that you personally think are important. It is understanding the nature of the universe for the sake of it.
Please enlighten us how purely theoretical mathematical constructs, that are impossible to test, help us understand anything about our universe.
Imaginary numbers are purely theoretical, but they turn out very helpful in almost every engineering discipline
Science and math are not the same thing, though. The concern is that physics, a science, has been sliding too much into math research - specifically talking about the foundations of particle physics.
That is, the concern is that instead of studying the real world, theoretical physicists are spending more and more time studying mathematical constructs and their properties.
There's a lot of ire for string theory. It's non-testable and wound up attracting lots of minds, funding, and resources. It hasn't seemingly led to any tangible results. Many scientists express anger about it and claim entire generations of progress were lost.
Also, if all you have is a dual model, then it’s equally accurate to say entanglement arises from spacetime. Eg, this article describes entanglement giving rise to wormholes, but the model equally says wormholes give rise to entanglement.
They’re promoting their preferred frame to ontological status when you can’t use a dual model to assert more than equivalence between frames.
>"magic"
Please no.
I gotta say every aspect of this headline reads like bullshit. Unfortunately
Quanta usually has fairly good articles, but the headlines are often very bad.
Not just the headline. Is it possible to take any scientist talking about something they term as magic seriously?
> Is it possible to take any scientist talking about something they term as magic seriously?
Obviously. Because the fact that they use this word for something modernly scientific means that its meaning is as far from the commonfolk meaning of the word as possible. Magic doesn't mean anything sensible yet. So it's basically free real estate for something physical, especially something very foundational.