The Death of Quanta Magazine

Not the actual death of the magazine, just someone getting upset about lack of depth in an article. Specifically:<p><i>&gt; &quot;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.&quot;</i><p>Quanta publishes great, detailed articles - but it&#x27;s ultimately a general readership magazine, not an academic journal. I seriously doubt that many of it&#x27;s readers have sufficiently deep knowledge of QC to properly understand the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model. Whatever that is.<p>Edit: Just to be clear, I&#x27;m <i>not</i> disputing that the Quanta article is factually deficient - although I don&#x27;t have the relevant specialist knowledge to understand why. I <i>am</i> disputing that this marks the &quot;death&quot; of the magazine.

I agree it&#x27;s rather sad to see such an over-the-top presentation in Quanta. Staying more grounded would definitely serve their longer term credibility.<p>Perhaps surprisingly, NYTimes did better this time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;11&#x2F;30&#x2F;science&#x2F;physics-wormhole-quantum-computer.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2022&#x2F;11&#x2F;30&#x2F;science&#x2F;physics-wormhole-...</a><p>They quote Scott Aaronson:<p>“The most important thing I’d want New York Times readers to understand is this,” Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in an email. “If this experiment has brought a wormhole into actual physical existence, then a strong case could be made that you, too, bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”

As a mathematician I can say that all math articles I have read so far in Quanta Magazine have been excellent and they deserve praise! This one article might have missed the mark, but the topic is inherently difficult to write about to a lay audience.

To further the damage said article was picked up by mass-market newspapers and circulated widely<p>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 importance and relevance against the entire body of prior knowledge and 2) that journalists disseminating scientific &#x2F; technical information can act as a check and balance to remedy any deficiencies in 1) instead of amplifying and aggravating them<p>It feels like we have entered a downward spiral of ever more shrill claims competing for attention in world crushed by low-quality information overload.

It&#x27;s definitely one of the worst articles they&#x27;ve published, on the grounds of expecting them to demystify science with their journalism rather than mystify it -- which is what every other publication on the planet does.<p>I read it in its entirety to see if there was any justification for its write up. As with all tabloid journalism, the caveats are at the end where you find out the &quot;bridge principle&quot; from QC-to-Wormhole requires assumptions that are non-physical.<p>Everyone is well aware that non-physical assumptions to the equations of physics can produce arbitrary magical effects (eg., perpetual motion, etc.).<p>The whole structure of the article was something I&#x27;d expect from &quot;tabloid science&quot; and I expect Quanta will get a lot of push back from it; and hopefully not do it again.

I&#x27;m sad to say I used to really like Quanta magazine pieces but I&#x27;ve become adept at knowing immediately from a Hacker News discussion title (the direct links, not this one) that it&#x27;s about a Quanta piece, and it&#x27;s going to be a letdown when you drill in.<p>I&#x27;m not sure if they&#x27;ve become more clickbaity or less discriminating, or if it&#x27;s just me moving on. I&#x27;m guessing from the article - however ranty - it&#x27;s not my imagination.

Looks like Quanta Magazine changed the title of the article after publication. I guess they did get some push back on the original article.<p>Original title (dec 1.): &quot;Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer&quot; [1]<p>Current title (dec 2.): &quot;Physicists Create a Holographic Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer&quot; [2]<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20221201021130&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&#x2F;physicists-create-a-wormhole-using-a-quantum-computer-20221130&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20221201021130&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quant...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20221202022713&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quantamagazine.org&#x2F;physicists-create-a-wormhole-using-a-quantum-computer-20221130&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20221202022713&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quant...</a>

Two things can be true at the same time: one, quanta magazine is the best publication out there when it comes to popularizing recent advances in fundamental physics and mathematics; and two, this article was bad.<p>If we are allowed to base our opinion of a publication on one article, should I declare that Mateus Araújo&#x27;s blog is dead to me?

Unfortunately the commodification of physics discoveries, packaged in order to wow laypeople who would be bored by any accurate explanation, is just getting worse and worse every year, to the point that I&#x27;ve noticed a vast increase in the number of clueless crackpot laypeople that try to interact with me (I now block them on sight).<p>Personally, I think it comes from a deep lack within a lot of humans now: they are scared of the future and bored of the present. They want to go to Mars or live out their sci-fi dreams, because they do not have any meaning right now. I won&#x27;t speculate on the reasons for this, because I&#x27;m sure there are many, but the end result is that they are desperate for crazy sounding physics discoveries, because it placates their desire for extreme technological progression. Technology and science have become almost like a God, something people don&#x27;t understand but that they have faith that it will elevate humanity to a point beyond its current, seemingly stale, state. Of course, where there is a desire for that, media companies will try to fulfil it.

All popular articles about quantum physics are in a way bullshit, false and misrepresentation.<p>Because the only way to accurately talk about quantum physics is to show the math and only talk about that. The famous &quot;shut up and calculate&quot;.<p>You can&#x27;t have it both ways, you either accept gross misrepresentations in the popular science press, or you just don&#x27;t have popular science press.

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&#x2F;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 cards, but even this is worth really digging in to. You may find that in fact there are only a few assumptions about reality that need to be made, and that removing any one of them is harder than you might think.<p>And AdS&#x2F;CFT is genuinely fascinating. It’s a type of theoretical construct that’s quite unique in the history of physics. So it’s very hard to talk about it in English sometimes! That’s partly what happened in this Quanta article. AdS&#x2F;CFT asserts an equality between two very different systems (here, the quantum system is identified with the wormhole) in an extremely complex and nonlinear way. Does this mean that the quantum system <i>is</i> a wormhole? It’s a harder question than it appears on the surface.

&gt;The problem is, if they write such bullshit about topics that I do understand, how can I trust their reporting on topics that I do not?<p>Funny how this is true for basically all of science and yet so many popsci authors get away with it, because the vast majority of the audience will not be experts in the field. If you want the true story you&#x27;ll always have to read the original paper (though sometimes even Nature lets bs slip through) and absolutely ignore the common media articles about it. Complaining that articles for the masses are not adequate recitations of real research is like complaining that water is wet. It&#x27;s kind of the whole deal. This stuff is supposed to sound intriguing and generate clicks, not push the research itself ahead or inform real experts.

I saw that wormhole article and something in it triggered the bs detector. Those discoveries are often made by a big team in a big lab, the article only named one researcher.<p>IMHO Quanta is far from the most respectable source of science news, since their articles tend to be very sensationalist, but in this case Quanta is not to blame, as the article it was published in Nature, but publications in big magazines are becoming more and more political, and less about real science.

AdS == Anti de Sitter space == A universe with nothing in it.<p>These physicists assume a universe with nothing in it, then populate it with physicists and quantum computers and wormholes.<p>This is like claiming to have the most beatiful differential equations that explain perfectly the weather on earth. You say &quot;ok, let&#x27;s test these beautiful equations.&quot; But it turns out that the equations so beautiful to look at have no perfect solutions. So you need to make absurdly symmetrical assumptions to arrive at a usable solution, like assuming no atmosphere. Then, with no atmosphere your equations explains the earth&#x27;s atmosphere perfectly well. With beautiful mathematical gimmicks, of course. With an assumption of a universe with nothing in it your equations explain everything in that universe with nothing in it.<p>Physics is neo-scholasticism powered by the marketing skills of the practitioners. This episode about wormholes proves the corruption of academic physics.

No offense, but choosing &quot;The Death of Quanta Magazin&quot; as the title for a rant about clickbaiting is quite ironic.

Agreed. I&#x27;ve read too many long-form Quanta articles that when I open one without realizing it, quickly close it. I don&#x27;t know who values long articles without substance or earnest attempts at relating to the underlying science. There&#x27;s also large unrelated pictures interspersed with the too-wide-margin-padded text. Not my cup of tea either.

I still follow Quanta Magazine, but I kind of moved from it to SciTechDaily, which while still imperfect, generally has a direct link to the scientific article for which, if they have done their work correctly, is easier to follow after the blog article about it.<p>The positive side effect is that I am reading scientific articles more often since I&#x27;m doing this.

Magazine makes a misstep and then someone goes into a rant on how it &quot;Magazine died&quot;<p>Seems like it went much more clickbait than the original article. Nobody reading QM would take that headline literally.<p>Talk about an overreaction.

&gt; <i>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.</i><p>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.<p>As a lay parson, when it comes to quantum mechanics I have to use my own set of heuristics to identify quackery: this Quanta&#x27;s video checks almost all my indicators of low quality quantum woo - I don&#x27;t like to say this about someone&#x27;s else work but just the aesthetics reminds me to pseudo-scientific documentaries.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uOJCS1W1uzg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=uOJCS1W1uzg</a>

This is why I’ve slowly migrated from general readership magazines to reading only academic papers. No-doubt their readership has increased, but I am no-longer these publications target market.

I don&#x27;t like Quanta because of the exaggerated sensationalized clickbait titles. It makes it seem like it&#x27;s aimed at people who want to tell themselves that are smart or into science.

I cannot comment on the content of the article, but the title and the author have changed, unfortunately I cannot find an update in the article. Comments seem to be off.

Their podcast &quot;the joy of why&quot; is still top notch.

I am beginning to think that advertising is the most toxic element of our environment. Click bait is a way to present something that makes it impossible not to ignore. &quot;Biden and Trump Get Into Food Fight at Restaurant&quot;. Behind the click bait is so often lies, deception or garbage, that our brains now conclude that <i>anything</i> behind click bait is trash.<p>If advertising is your business model, then you can make more money with click-baitization. Here&#x27;s looking at you WAPO and NYT.<p>If, with good reason, we cannot trust the supposed sources of good information, even HN, then our ability to build common understandings and actions is destroyed. Why, it is almost like our political system would be destroyed.<p>If you want to destroy an ant colony, the simplest method is just to prevent interfere with the mechanisms they use to collaborate. Single ants, even mobs of ants cannot survive. Of course we are not ants and we can survive even when our systems of collaboration are destroyed.<p>(fixed phrasing in edit)

&gt; The problem is, if they write such bullshit about topics that I do understand, how can I trust their reporting on topics that I do not?<p>See also the Gell-Mann amnesia effect: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.johndcook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;18&#x2F;gell-mann-amnesia&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.johndcook.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2021&#x2F;01&#x2F;18&#x2F;gell-mann-amnesia&#x2F;</a>

It&#x27;s a variant of the classical story <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smbc-comics.com&#x2F;?db=comics&amp;id=1623" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smbc-comics.com&#x2F;?db=comics&amp;id=1623</a><p>Though, it seems in this case some scientists who pushed the narrative were dishonest too.

&gt; It falls so far below any journalistic standard that the magazine is dead to me.<p>I&#x27;ll be honest. I found it very hard to read beyond this line. I powered through though.<p>Here&#x27;s the tldr: It&#x27;s a rant about details in one specific article.