Publicity Stunt Fallout

Fields that lack reproducability, replace this (i.e. truth) by community consensus which is enforced, in parts, by threats.

There its more about reputation of a source than the actual facts, because few have the ability to evaluate the latter. Actually, if they spent even a little bit of time and thought they might actually be able to, it's just that almost nobody does. When the interest in "science" is to read publications for the general public, but never touch any of the by now quite numerous deeper equally easily available resources e.g. in the form of courses. For example, sooo many people interested in quantum physics articles - how many bother, even after years, to just go e.g. to edx (https://www.edx.org/learn/quantum-physics-mechanics -- or, archived, https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-mechanics-for-everyone specifically) and just take a course?

The people that complain about scientific findings being held in to high esteem usually have no clue about the topic they're talking about and are petulant that their uninformed opinion based on their feelings isn't taken seriously.

The people who insist that anything "peer reviewed" * must be / needs to be gospel are outside science, almost by definition. A few have credentials but are not functioning professionals; some see themselves as lay champions of science; others see themselves as wise lay critics of science. None of them have almost anything relevant to say about how science is doing, because they literally don't know what's under the hood.

*OMG

Be prepared for disappointment; be prepared for vicious attacks. Expect that the power structures of the establishment will make things uncomfortable to you. But continue on, humbly collecting your data and showing your thinking.

I've watched several key paradigms fall after 20-30 years of dogged work.

COVID 1 managed to die out before becoming a pandemic. That's one reason people treated SARS-COV-2 as harmless until it already was a pandemic.

Epidemiologists and public health planners learned a lot from both. But when SARS-COV-3 comes around, they will still not have learned how to deal with the large numbers of people who will say it's not a problem even after it has caused the death of millions.

Flexing your unlimited comment edit privileges I see ;)

    Once I thought I had a title,
    So clever and so true,
    But Dang changed it 'fore anyone could sue.
    
    My title was so simple,
    Just a statement of the facts,
    Yet Dang liked the title from the clickbait hacks.
    
    Now I sit and wonder,
    What's the point of coming up with a name?
    When Dang will change it, regardless of fame.
    
    Still I try and post,
    In hopes that my title might stay,
    Though Dang is always lurking, ready to change it in some sneaky way.
    
    So I'll keep on posting,
    With a resigned and weary mind,
    Because I know Dang will win, as my title is left behind.

As far as quantum computing goes, IBM and Google were promising us exponential growth in quantum chip size, but what we have actually seen so far is exponentially faster decoherence that comes with size.

I think the original team made like 100 samples using different metals and different oxygen proportion. Discovering the first one requires some brute force that needs a small team, and is too much for a single person. Anyway, it doesn't look too far away from something a single person can discover.

[1] That's 36 year ago. I'm feeling old...

1) The tools available to an individual are always progressing.

By "tools" I mean all of direct physical tools and materials, computational, theories and understandings, services, etc.

2) Big funded labs have business owners, stockholders, academic department heads, and grant comittees that have specific goals and ideas and topics they are willing to pay for.

Many of the most important discoveries were never on anyone's list of things they will pay for (until after it happened some other way first).

They only happened either by accident in real labs despite all conscious intention to be working on something else, or by people who didn't need anyone's permission and were just satisfying their own curiosity, and couldn't be told to work on something more sensible by any boss or other funding source.

3) It is true that some large scale things probably won't be advanced in a garage.

Then again, a lot of times large scale things are up-ended specifically from a garage exactly because the garage researcher does not have the option to address problems with (expensive/large/dangerous) brute force.

They need to somehow make pressure of a zillion psi, but they can't build a zillion psi machine, so instead they figure out how to align sound waves to create a zillion psi just where the waves meet or something, and that goes on to obsolete a huge industry and now everyone's making MrFusion's in their spare bedrooms and selling them on Etsy.

The smallness of the operation is the very cause of the discovery and would not have happened in a normal funded lab.

all, always, none, never

The thing that makes that quote so incredible is that it's from Albert Michelson in 1903. The same Michelson of the Michelson-Morley experiment [1] that was completed in 1887. The experiment he performed 16 years prior set the stage for the period of exponential and revolutionary progress that was about to be discovered by some unknown guy writing scientific papers while working as a low level inspector at a patent office [2] because no university was willing to take him on board.

Humanity, at any snapshot in time, believes they are on the bleeding edge of human progress, and that's because they are! Yet invariably we look back marveling at how little they knew. There's zero reason to think this trend has ended, or that we're even near the end of time where knowledge can be simply 'thought up', especially given the vast free resources available to all. The problem is that 'thinking it up' is extremely difficult.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

David Shaw is the poster child of rich people who succeeded at breaking through the elitism into the scientific establishment, but he went through the whole PhD process before "settling" for becoming a finance billionaire.

We had a partial repeat of this with the whole faster than light neutrinos, with lots of partially informed commentary, but for the most part these researchers were lucky their situation was obviously instrumental error soon enough, had it continued to be a discrepancy much longer, I have no doubt the conversation would have devolved.

We also have the Venus phosphene research work which gets a lot of pushback because it doesn’t fit so it much be a mistake, and it’s taken a lot of hard methodical work just to get the consensus to “this requires more research”.

Then we have the complete debacle around the emdrive … which is simply summed up as, no it didn’t work, but it should not have taken years to prove that. When someone has a theory that doesn’t fit, based on some (albeit weak) experimental evidence, you don’t refute it by simply saying “your wrong because existing physics is correct”… you do it by proving your own theory about why the experiment shows the results, or by performing alternative experiments that eliminate more variables… what we got instead was a tiny community of true believers, an tiny community of open minded scientists trying to do good experimental scientific research and didn’t care if the end result was the device doesn’t work, because it was good scientific work to develop better metrology techniques to measure the effects that were claimed… and then all the other scientists falling for the circular reasoning fallacy. “It can’t work because physics says so”… as if that somehow negates the possibility that we might have found some new physics, by doing an experiment, finding conflicting results, and diligently performing experiments to understand what’s going on… which is deeply ironic to me as one of the favourite headlines in the particle physics world is a variation on “hints at new physics” … the physics community wants new physics… just not this new physics. (Once again, I do know it didn’t work, and never worked, I’m angry about how the physics community reacted to this)

Essentially it seems like how shocking/surprising the new results are, the more push back they get, so publicity stunts or high visibility publication or press releases is correlated with the level of push back from the wider scientific community. Effectively the acceptance of the scientific community is like a non-Newtonian fluid.

> See for example the New York Times and Quanta and Ars Technica and Nature

And the Quanta[1] (which is usually great) was probably the worst of the lot. The Nature paper had a title that probably caused the whole mess. The NYT (ironically since it is the most mainstream of the lot) did a pretty good job.

Let me quote the Quanta article:

> Physicists have purportedly created the first-ever wormhole, a kind of tunnel theorized in 1935 by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen that leads from one place to another by passing into an extra dimension of space.

> The wormhole emerged like a hologram out of quantum bits of information, or “qubits,” stored in tiny superconducting circuits. By manipulating the qubits, the physicists then sent information through the wormhole, they reported today in the journal Nature.

If specialist science communication sources like Quanta are getting this so badly wrong then I don't think it is at all reasonable to blame mainstream media which acts an an aggregator from specialist sources.

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-...

It's even less than that. The duality between SYK_4 (SYK with four-fermion interactions) and AdS_2 (2D AdS spacetime) is only (conjectured to be) true at infinite N (where N is the number of fermions) and at the conformal limit (ie. the limit where temperature goes to zero). What they did is a N=7 simulation of a (sparse SYK) Hamiltonian "learned" (a much better word would have been "fitted") from a N=10 dense SYK at various (finite) temperatures. Neither 7 nor 10 is large enough to test this limit.

Now the actual quantum simulation they performed is that they constructed a thermal field double (and this allows them to make the connection with a "wormhole" because the two side of the TFD are basically the left and right quadrant of the Penrose diagram) and evolved it with the "learned" sparse SYK plus some shockwave operator $e^{i\mu V}$. The actual construction of the quantum gates is due to that Jafferis-Gao wormhole teleportaion paper. The supplementary material has some useful information (I find the actual Nature paper to be quite thin on technical details). It is indeed an interesting quantum simulation, in the sense that it demonstrated that the Google quantum computer behaves the way one expects a QC to behave.

Now does this experiment actually tell us anything about quantum gravity? No, and in this sense it is a publicity stunt. My reading of the Nature paper is that the actual paper is about 20% science (mostly due to Google's hardware) and about 80% salesmanship, which is really what you need in order to survive in academia.

> our dS space

To clarify this, our universe is asymptotically a dS spacetime in the distant future where matter and radiation density become zero and the universe becomes dominated by vacuum energy (and this is necessarily a conjecture based on current theory and cosmological observations, because nobody can live this long to see that day). It's not literally a dS spacetime right now.