These days, a few interesting but esoteric physics news broke: The scientists used a quantum computer to simulate two black holes and were able to send out a message between them, as if the virtual system was a tiny wormhole.
The research, as outlined in a new paper published in the journal Nature, was picked up by major new outlets – but in a serious failure of science literacy, they jumped to some outrageous conclusions in their headlines.
“Physicists Create’ the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You are able to Imagine,’ ” The new York Times’ proclaimed.
“Scientists develop a baby wormhole while sci-fi moves closer to the fact “, Reuters reported.
Researchers mimic a newborn wormhole without rupturing space and time, “The Guardian reported.
These headlines can not be further from the fact. The researchers weren’t actually able to produce a wormhole of any kind – or more than one which exists in the real world, “baby” or not. Attempting to suggest otherwise is such asRB_IN saying that the video game Portal involves creating an actual wormhole, since it depicts something similar to the theoretical concept onscreen.
Industry experts said headlines such as this are made to mislead the public and serve to warp the truth. Many people simply read the headline and move on.
“No, they did not create a wormhole,” German physicist and science writer Sabine Hossenfelder pointed out, responding to a tweet by Quanta Magazine claiming that physicists had “built a wormhole and successfully sent information from one end to the other.”
“that headline deliberately misinforms the viewer, and I do believe you ought to unsubscribe and unfollow every outlet that encourages this nonsense,” she added.
When it comes to scope, the group was able to simulate possible wormhole dynamics with Google’s 72-qubit Sycamore 2 quantum processor.
The researchers themselves were very careful not to jump to conclusions about what they were able to achieve in their research quotes which were published directly below those bogus statements.
“There is a difference between what is feasible in concept and what is possible in reality,” Joseph Lykken, a physicist at Fermilab, told Reuters. “So do not hold your breath when you consider placing your dog through the wormhole,” she said. But you’ve to start somewhere.”
He said : “It looks like a duck, it walks as a duck, it quacks like a duck. “So, that is exactly what we can say at this point — that we’ve something which looks like a wormhole in terms of properties.”
“We are utilizing The quantum computer to find out just what it would look as well as feel like in case you were in this gravitational situation,” Harvard physics professor Daniel Jafferis told the new York Times.
However, Hossenfelder left their work not impressed.
” This ‘wormhole’ talk is a fancy word for a bit of math, ” she explained. “Using the same mathematics, anything at a constant temperature is a black hole,” it states. Spilling water in the sink? ‘Okay, that’s a black hole, congratulations.’
Some other experts would likely agree.
“The most crucial thing I would like to say to the audience of the new York Times is this,” stated Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert who wasn’t involved in the research. “If the experiment has brought a wormhole into actual physical existence, then a strong case might be made that you, too, bring a wormhole into actual physical presence each time you sketch one with pen and paper,” he said.
