Sorry for being so terse, but having read the "Not Even Wrong" blog just moments before I ran across the topic on HN I wanted to get the link out quickly.
While I advise reading the whole post, here is a notable quote:
"The two senior physicists behind this, Joe Lykken and Maria Spiropulu, have histories that go way back of successfully promoting to the press nonsense about exotic space-time structures appearing in experiments that have nothing to do with them."
I'm loving Scott Aaronson rolling his eyes at this. He actually had a whole section on this in his book for a similar experiment in 2010 on closed timelike curves https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.2219. I feel bad for actual quantum computing experts, we're living through a weird quantum hype moment and they have to combat the quantum hype machine making absurd claims on one side and the quantum skeptics saying that quantum computing is useless on the other.
Yes, as others have pointed out, Quanta's own embedded video title says they "simulated a wormhole", but references to simulation appear nowhere in the entire article. I'd love to know if this is a surprisingly brazen misrepresentation, or if the difference between "create" and "simulate" is perhaps not as clear-cut in this context (after all, this is the realm of the weird).
It appears today the qualifier "holographic" has been added to the article's title, and the subtitle has added the phrase "it’s not clear in what sense the wormhole can be said to exist."
I could be wrong, since I'm relying on memory, and I can not find an indication that the article was edited.
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.
Thank you, I noticed it changed and was looking for the statement of edit. I don't see it anywhere on the article - am I missing it, or are we really expected to check Twitter for changes to published articles?
Also:
>To avoid further confusion with wormhole in the sci-fi sense of a passageway that a person can fly through...
I don't know if there is a name for this flavor of "sorry-not-sorry", but it's upsetting that a professional writer would engage in it. The wormhole did not have to be a full blown "science fiction" gate that people can "fly through" for the article to have been accurate. It could have been a nanometer-sized space that existed for a microsecond, across which a single bit of data was transmitted.
Most comments say it's simulated. I think it's not even that. IIUC there's a theoretical setup to create a wormhole in AdS/CFT. It requires ~infinite qubits. They found a way of making a similarly-shaped output function with 14 qubits and ran it. I think that's all this is.
It's not really a simulation because if they used all ~infinite qubits then IIUC it would have created the actual wormhole. This is more like a wireframe diagram. The fact that they ran it on a real device is irrelevant.
They do address this in the article (albeit in a flowery way):
>Surprisingly, despite the skeletal simplicity of their wormhole, the researchers detected a second signature of wormhole dynamics, a delicate pattern in the way information spread and un-spread among the qubits known as “size-winding.” They hadn’t trained their neural network to preserve this signal as it sparsified the SYK model, so the fact that size-winding shows up anyway is an experimental discovery about holography. “We didn’t demand anything about this size-winding property, but we found that it just popped out,” Jafferis said. This “confirmed the robustness” of the holographic duality, he said. “Make one [property] appear, then you get all the rest, which is a kind of evidence that this gravitational picture is the correct one.”
Seems like their argument is that because they didn't train for the size-winding, but observed it, that some gravitational interaction is probably happening, despite there only being finitely many cubits unlike true SYK.
>Most comments say it's simulated. I think it's not even that... The fact they ran it on a real device is irrelevant.
I don't fully understand the theory around holography but I'm not convinced by the commenters saying that it's "simulated". IIUC, the certain quantum system that is equivalent to gravity is "another view of" the wormhole transport in AdS space and that in some sense it did indeed happen "in reality". Although it's not so clear what reality means anymore if these theories are true for real dS spacetime and everything can be described via a bunch of degrees of freedom on a boundary surface.
As an aside, I wish the article was written in plainer English. I laughed when they wrote that the physicist was "a gifted programmer" because they could use pytorch or whatever. What a puff piece.
After reading about it, that's the impression I got as well. Why did they want to involve wormholes in this? Sending information faster than light is already awe-inspiring.
At least if that's what happened. I can't wait to see this replicated. I am optimistic but skeptical, given the reputation of physicists like Spiropulu and the exaggerated presentation.
Answered in the Q&A section of https://inqnet.caltech.edu/wormhole2022/. The answer is a bit garbled, and all I can infer is "we simulated it classically first and then did it on a quantum computer so that we could call it an experiment".
