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.
>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.