Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity

(quantamagazine.org)

50 points | by rbanffy 3 hours ago

11 comments

  • Terr_ 3 hours ago
    > a measure of quantumness known as “magic.”

    This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line...

    > They had worked out a way of running software on a classical computer that would mimic a quantum task.

    When it comes to using a regular computer to mimic (read: fake) the execution of an exotic program/API for nonexistnet future hardware, I highly recommend the humorously titled talk: "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces... Made Easy!" [0][1]

    [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzTjPx4NIiM

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpInOI4o2LY

    • echelon 39 minutes ago
      Is any of this experimentally testable in the real world?

      Would gravity or spacetime under these definitions behave differently and yield something we can observe?

      Or is this fancy math modeling that looks nice on paper, but that we won't be able to test until we become a Kardashev type III civilization?

    • soco 2 hours ago
      > This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line...

      Your worries are a bit late, there's already a huge amount of new age conspiracy bull about quantum healing with wave function collapse, microtubule alignment and biophotons - quality all-you-can-eat word salad buffet.

      • rockskon 1 hour ago
        Don't underestimate the capacity for the problem to get significantly worse.
      • CuriouslyC 1 hour ago
        Blame Roger Penrose for the microtubule bullshit. Ironically, he's the opposite of new age, dude won a Nobel prize.
  • lioeters 2 hours ago
    Charm, quark, colors, time crystals, holographs.. And now, magic. Don't worry Einstein, no spooky action at a distance here, it's just magical.

    > The more non-Clifford gates you need to produce a quantum state, the more magical that state is. The group found that the particles were highly magical. ..They showed that magic gave space its springiness. Magic, in other words, is connected to space’s ability to bend.

    At some point these physicists crossed over into a very specialized form of poetry, a game of language.

    • themgt 1 hour ago
      You can just call it second stabilizer Rényi entropy or non-stabilizerness if you find "magic" strange and prose is more your flavor than poetry.
    • dabiged 2 hours ago
      Don't forget snap, crackle and pop, and quantum teleportation.

      Physicists get a failing grade for naming things.

      • yubblegum 1 hour ago
        You mean post quantum, theoretical physics. Up to 19th and early 20th, physicists somehow knew how to name things. It is possible that the nature of the beast itself has changed and it attracts a different kind of mindsets ...
        • amelius 31 minutes ago
          Maybe it is easier to get funding with catchy and/or mysterious names?
    • etiam 2 hours ago
      I can sort of appreciate these shenanigans as short-lived common room humor, but I find it obnoxious to put it in the official terminology.

      It's bad enough all the corporations trying to steal perfectly active words for their brand names or products.

    • mr_mitm 2 hours ago
      Ghosts are also a thing in quantum field theory
      • setopt 1 hour ago
        And slavery, unfortunately. (Slave variables, slave bosons, etc.)
    • lloeki 1 hour ago
      Is it measured in Thaum? (which, as everyone surely knows by now is the amount of magic needed to create one small white pigeon or three normal-sized billiard balls)
    • tuyiown 1 hour ago
      we had "god particle" too …
      • setopt 1 hour ago
        To be fair, that one came from an editor not a physicist; the physicist wanted to call their book «the goddamn particle», and it got censored/editorialized to «the god particle».
        • jfengel 34 minutes ago
          I've heard that story and it doesn't ring true to me. It's not that aggravating to find. Try measuring a neutrino mass, which is still an open problem and looks as if it will remain so for a very long time.
        • phs318u 52 minutes ago
          Is that really where the name came from? I remember being struck by how dumb that was and thought “a journalist must have come up with that”.
  • greenbit 46 minutes ago
    Greek 'anameixi' loosely means a mixture or a blending. The special states could be called 'anameixic', the property could be called 'anameixicity'.

    Why am I trying to find a name for this? Otoh, why are so many physicists trying so hard to popularize their projects for the last 40 or 50 years? Oh .. I think I just answered my own question.

  • apothegm 1 hour ago
    That is an incredibly unfortunate term to use for the phenomenon.
  • hirako2000 2 hours ago
    In absolute, those are irrevocably pliable scientific facts.
  • jacknews 29 minutes ago
    IMHO, as an analogy, matter is not 'a bowling-ball on a mattress', but more like a scrunched-up section of table-cloth. Tiny knots or whirlpools of space-time/quantum fields, different particles are different topologies of knot, albeit the nature of space-time is unclear and it may well be a projection.
    • terminalbraid 23 minutes ago
      An ant traveling at constant speed on a "scrunched up section of a table cloth" will still take the same amount of time following the same path to get from A to B. Any material analogy requires some kind of stretching or compression.
      • jacknews 10 minutes ago
        I agree, the table-cloth is rubber.
  • Aboutplants 1 hour ago
    Mathematicians shouldn’t be allowed to name anything, it’s beyond ridiculous
  • greenbit 54 minutes ago
    Calling something 'magic' is like an admission that you have no clue about what is going on. Seems to me, they do have some clue, namely that instead of codes with perfect isolation, there might be some advantage to studying ones that allow some blending. The resulting spaces may (or may not) lead to a better description of reality, but doing science means to peel back that mystery. So to go and promote this under the term 'magic' is disingenuous.
    • jfengel 32 minutes ago
      It sounds as if it's in the same vein that gave us "strange" and "charm" and "color" (in the strong force sense). There was a whimsical time in particle naming. I'd say it ended when they rejected "truth" and "beauty" in favor of "top" and "bottom".

      We can do better than "magic".

  • sigmoid10 2 hours ago
    >In holographic theories, physicists may have traced the pliability of space-time to its quantum roots

    ...ah yes holography again. Not to say that all these insights from it are completely worthless, but unless we actually find a holographic dual of our universe instead of AdS spaces (which are the opposite of our universe if anything), this whole field is starting to feel more like a jobs program for mathematicians out of new ideas.

    • vbezhenar 1 hour ago
      That's how science always worked. The stupid people throw money at smart people and sometimes they pay back with good things. Any attempts to optimize that is futile, so the best we can do is to continue throwing money.
    • zmgsabst 53 minutes ago
      Also, if all you have is a dual model, then it’s equally accurate to say entanglement arises from spacetime. Eg, this article describes entanglement giving rise to wormholes, but the model equally says wormholes give rise to entanglement.

      They’re promoting their preferred frame to ontological status when you can’t use a dual model to assert more than equivalence between frames.

    • dwroberts 1 hour ago
      > this whole field is starting to feel more like a jobs program for mathematicians out of new ideas.

      So sick of seeing phrases like this.

      Science is not business. It is not about producing results that you personally think are important. It is understanding the nature of the universe for the sake of it.

      • echelon 50 minutes ago
        The problem is that entire branches are non-testable and wind up attracting lots of minds and resources.

        There's a lot of ire for string theory, and many scientists express anger about it and claim entire generations of progress were lost.

  • phs318u 48 minutes ago
    So, when it comes to the quantum physics of dark matter, would this property be dark magic?

    I’m so sorry. Couldn’t help myself.

  • tetrisgm 2 hours ago
    I gotta say every aspect of this headline reads like bullshit. Unfortunately
    • jfengel 30 minutes ago
      Quanta usually has fairly good articles, but the headlines are often very bad.
    • yxhuvud 1 hour ago
      Not just the headline. Is it possible to take any scientist talking about something they term as magic seriously?
      • scotty79 1 hour ago
        > Is it possible to take any scientist talking about something they term as magic seriously?

        Obviously. Because the fact that they use this word for something modernly scientific means that its meaning is as far from the commonfolk meaning of the word as possible. Magic doesn't mean anything sensible yet. So it's basically free real estate for something physical, especially something very foundational.