Buried a few paragraphs in, it says "The energy wasn’t free; it had to be unlocked using knowledge purchased with energy in a far-off location." In other words, the opposite of the headline.
That doesn't mean it isn't nifty. It is, however, just what you said: "people doing calculations that hadn't been done before". People shove the equations around until they get a result that strikes their fancy, and then (ideally) goes off to perform an experiment that confirms it.
New discoveries are made every day, just by converting the equations into a form you haven't seen before. Most are boring. Some are interesting, and those make journal articles. Some are then exaggerated to make them seem more interesting than they really are, because what everybody wants is a once-in-a-century revolution to occur every week.