This week's hype

This morning, Quanta Magazine informs us that physicists are creating a wormhole using a quantum computer, promoting the article on Twitter with BREAKING: physicists have built a wormhole and sent successfully information from end to end and physicists used Google's quantum computer to send a signal through a wormhole, a shortcut in spacetime first theorized by Einstein and Rosen in 1935.

This work receives the full promotional package from the press: no arXiv preprint (unless I'm missing something?), embargoed information for journalists, with reveal at a press conference, a cover story in Nature, along with a deluge of press releases (see here, here, here, with Harvard, MIT and Google to come). It's the kind of PR effort for a physics result that I've only seen before for things like the Higgs and LIGO gravitational wave discoveries (OK, and the non-discovery of primordial gravitational waves). It would be fitting, I suppose, if someone actually built a wormhole in a lab and teleported information through it, as advertised.

An additional part of the package is the cover of Quanta, with a very long article by Natalie Wolchover and an exaggerated seventeen-minute film How Physicists Created a Wormhole in a Quantum Computer, with summary

Almost a century ago, Albert Einstein realized that the equations of general relativity could produce wormholes. But it would take a number of theoretical leaps and a "crazy" team of experimenters to build one on Google's quantum computer.

The two senior physicists behind it all, Joe Lykken and Maria Spiropulu, have histories that go back a long way of successfully promoting nonsense in the press about exotic space-time structures showing up in experiments that have nothing to do with it. see with them. In 1999, The New York Times published Physicists Finally Find a Way to Test Superstring Theory, which featured Joe Lykken. In 2003, they featured Maria Spiropulu explaining how she was going to find extra dimensions (or "something so 'crazy'") at the Tevatron, or failing that, at the LHC.

I just saw that the New York Times also has a great story about this: physicists create "the tiniest, tiniest wormhole you can imagine". At least this article contains some sensible skeptical quotes, including:

"The most important thing I want New York Times readers to understand is this," Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in an email. "If this experiment brought a wormhole into actual physical existence, then a strong argument might be that you too are bringing a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you draw one with pen and paper. ."

One weird thing about the Quanta article is that it contains a few quotes from me, which aren't about the wormhole stuff at all. This is the attempt to use AdS/CFT to solve QCD or obtain a viable theory of quantum gravity. In June, Wolchover contacted me with some questions about AdS/CFT. It seems that she was planning a long article on AdS/CFT, an article that, several months later, was merged with the absurdity of the wormhole. I had forgotten that I was thinking of turning what I sent him at the time into a blog post, but I never had time to do so, so just earlier in the day I posted it here.

Based on what's really going on here, it's exactly the same as what was widely discussed a month ago in this post and its comments section. The claim that "physicists are creating a wormhole" is pure bullshit, with the huge campaign to mislead the public about it, a disgrace, very unnecessary for the credibility of the research in physics in particular and science in general.