The Problem With Science Communication

on December 1st 2022 the journal Nature published a cover story about a holographic Wormhole it was purportedly created inside a quantum computer to provee the intersection of quantum mechanics and gravity the story kicked off a frenzy of tweets and news headlines nobody has seen a warm to nobody has produced One well we'll take the world's best quantum computer and see if we can map that into building the Wormhole the Wormhole becomes traversible it opens you really can't go through bullsh this video was sponsored by Shopify the problem was of course that no Wormhole had been created it feeds of itself right when when one story starts then other medor outlets grab hold of it and so it spreads very very quickly what actually happened is that super a quantum computer is built and within this quantum computer you can do some calculations calculations that uh can be done with my iPhone because all the most powerful quantum computers today at most do calculations that can easily be done on my iPhone you basically have something that represents the mathematics of a wormhole but the way the story was sold of course is that in doing this whatever calculation they did they had created the Wormhole they say so in the same sense in which I could say look my children has built a rocket that goes to the moon so wow what kind of child you have um yeah here it is and I show you a little sketch on a piece of paper when there is a drawing of a rocket going to the moon and say look so what the quantum computer has done is exactly that there a little sketch what could be perhaps black a wormhole in some hypothetical Theory which is probably wrong is this interesting yes it is interesting because the fact that with quantum computers you can do these things mean that quantum computers little bit begin working so people get excited about that and then they go out and tell to the world oh we've created a wormhole in a in a quantum computer overemphasizing Wormhole which probably don't exist the theory being used of that which probably is wrong and the utility of quantum computers which is not yet there so that's an example of bad communication very bad communication I was embarrassed I was angry ...