I had thought that the Wormhole Publicity Stunt could now be safely ignored, with almost everyone in the physics community agreeing that this was an embarrassing disaster that was dead and buried. Even the people at Quanta had realized that they had been misled into helping promote something that wasn’t at all what it claimed to be. The Quanta promotional video that was a big part of the publicity stunt is still on Youtube, but they’ve added this text:
UPDATE: In February 2023, an independent team of physicists presented evidence that the research described in this video did not create any wormholes, holographic or otherwise.
Today though, the World Science Festival put out a Zombie revival of the publicity stunt, under the bizarre title Did Einstein Crack the Biggest Problem in Physics…and Not Know It? It starts off with Brian Greene explaining that this may be the “Holy Grail” connecting string theory/quantum gravity to experiment, with such experiments not needing an expensive collider or space telescope, just a Google quantum computer.
Brought in for the discussion are the three architects of the publicity stunt, Daniel Jafferis, Joe Lykken, and Maria Spiropulu. At a couple points there is a mention that something might be “controversial”, but there’s zero explanation of what the “controversy” might be. After starting out with some background about wormholes and entanglement, the rest of the program is basically outrageous and misleading hype, without a hint of why anyone might be skeptical about it.
I’ve now wasted too much of my life trying to debunk bogus claims of this kind, with the wormhole nonsense just the latest and most egregious example. One learns over the years that it’s impossible to stop this kind of thing, there’s no way to kill off the Test of String Theory/Fake Physics enterprise. Even if you think something has been completely debunked, its proponents will always find some way to emerge from the grave and keep going. If anyone is aware of a source for the right kind of silver bullet to stop this, let me know.
On the web, the means to destroy zombie invasions may not be appropriate for the discussion that needs to be had here :).
Jokes aside, perhaps we should target the sources of funding for this research which is going round in circles, possibly hampering the funding of other potentially more promising research.
Fwiw, I think the hype has much decreased in the past decade, and I think that’s to no small part b/c of your blog, so thanks for all the fish etc & don’t give up
As someone once told me, academia is like a big tanker ship, inertia is huge. Even if you stop the engines it’ll keep going for a few miles and I think that’s what we’re seeing here.
Oh! The attempted obituary here turned out very timely:
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/07/the-wormhole-fiasco.html
Maybe start spreading the word that these people are just… weird.
I just watched the video with Brian Greene…
And honestly, it is a mix of half-baked “common-man” examples of quantum mechanics systems using spin, which would embarrass a part-time contract lecturer were he to listen to his students talking this way in the coffee place near college after a few beers.
Also with overtones of a Monty Python sketch.
And these are the guys that got where I could never make it?
I don’t know whether to feel depressed… or proud…
Regards
It’s your fault. Your criticism prompted string theorists to try doing something testable.
Jean-Pierre Laflamme,
It looks like the DOE grant that funded this is still active. I’m curious to know if these people will try to get another one to fund doing this, would hope that they would run into trouble with that.
Two problems though are:
1. To some extent this was funded by Google, and good publicity but bad science is probably fine with them, so they may keep funding it.
2. IAS faculty in this case seem to have convinced the IAS director that this was earth-shattering work on a par with the 1919 verification of GR predictions. I don’t know that they’re going to stop doing this kind of thing and they have a lot of influence.
The title is another example of countless and unjustified Einstein hagiography (Did Einstein Crack the Biggest Problem in Physics…and Not Know It?).
People just walk into Betteridge’s law, it’s astounding. Or else the person who was tasked with coming up with a headline knew what they were doing, and more or less trolled the people doing the stunt.