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]
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?
soco 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rockskon 1 hours ago [-]
Don't underestimate the capacity for the problem to get significantly worse.
CuriouslyC 1 hours ago [-]
Blame Roger Penrose for the microtubule bullshit. Ironically, he's the opposite of new age, dude won a Nobel prize.
lioeters 3 hours ago [-]
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.
themgt 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Don't forget snap, crackle and pop, and quantum teleportation.
Physicists get a failing grade for naming things.
yubblegum 2 hours ago [-]
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 ...
amelius 31 minutes ago [-]
Maybe it is easier to get funding with catchy and/or mysterious names?
etiam 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mr_mitm 2 hours ago [-]
Ghosts are also a thing in quantum field theory
setopt 2 hours ago [-]
And slavery, unfortunately. (Slave variables, slave bosons, etc.)
lloeki 1 hours ago [-]
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)
tuyiown 2 hours ago [-]
we had "god particle" too …
setopt 2 hours ago [-]
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».
jfengel 35 minutes ago [-]
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.
phs318u 53 minutes ago [-]
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”.
greenbit 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
apothegm 2 hours ago [-]
That is an incredibly unfortunate term to use for the phenomenon.
1 hours ago [-]
hirako2000 2 hours ago [-]
In absolute, those are irrevocably pliable scientific facts.
jacknews 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
terminalbraid 24 minutes ago [-]
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.
jacknews 11 minutes ago [-]
I agree, the table-cloth is rubber.
Aboutplants 1 hours ago [-]
Mathematicians shouldn’t be allowed to name anything, it’s beyond ridiculous
greenbit 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
jfengel 32 minutes ago [-]
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".
sigmoid10 3 hours ago [-]
>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.
vbezhenar 1 hours ago [-]
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.
zmgsabst 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
dwroberts 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
echelon 51 minutes ago [-]
The problem is that entire branches are non-testable and wind up attracting lots of minds and resources.
There's a lot of ire for string theory, and many scientists express anger about it and claim entire generations of progress were lost.
phs318u 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
tetrisgm 3 hours ago [-]
I gotta say every aspect of this headline reads like bullshit. Unfortunately
jfengel 30 minutes ago [-]
Quanta usually has fairly good articles, but the headlines are often very bad.
yxhuvud 2 hours ago [-]
Not just the headline. Is it possible to take any scientist talking about something they term as magic seriously?
scotty79 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Rendered at 12:27:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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
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?
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.
> 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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_quark
Physicists get a failing grade for naming things.
It's bad enough all the corporations trying to steal perfectly active words for their brand names or products.
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.
We can do better than "magic".
...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.
They’re promoting their preferred frame to ontological status when you can’t use a dual model to assert more than equivalence between frames.
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.
There's a lot of ire for string theory, and many scientists express anger about it and claim entire generations of progress were lost.
I’m so sorry. Couldn’t help myself.
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.