Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity(quantamagazine.org) |
Entanglement Builds Space-Time. Now "Magic" Gives It Gravity(quantamagazine.org) |
In this analogy, a planet is like a smaller ball. If it rolls close enough to the bowling ball, its path will be altered by the dimple in the mattress — space-time tells matter how to move."
This analogy is wrong in a way that even people who've studied physics often don't realize.
On an everyday scale like the Earth orbiting the Sun, almost none of that gravitational interaction is from the bending of space. Far beyond 99% (actually, about 99.999999%) of it is from the bending of time.
Now just add massive scale and distances.
It may help your intuition to consider the extreme case of a black hole. The event horizon is where time is so warped that no possible future trajectories lead outside of the black hole, and you need a magical time machine to escape. (Of course, the best way to gain intuition is to work through the mathematics, either symbolically or with diagrams, rather than reading English-language descriptions.)
There is a sense in which an orbit is a straight line. Obviously, an orbit is not a straight line through space (unless you count the perfect and unobtainable orbit of a beam of light around a black hole, some distance from the event horizon), but we often think of them as spirals through spacetime: there's an argument that really we should think of them as straight lines through spacetime, much like how a great circle is a straight line along the earth's surface.
time and gravity are the same thing, the history of understanding physics is basically of the same nature, understanding that two things are actually one thing, which is more like philosophy but with physical confirmation
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]
> 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.
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.
But magic is related to non-Cliffordness, not mixing.
Also, the term "magic" is pretty well used in quantum computing, it really doesn't need to be popularized. The concept is quite important already and would be talked about regardless of its name.
One of the most boring and yet egregious examples imo is "Random Variable". So named because
- they aren't random and
- they aren't variables.[1]
A "random variable" is actually a measurable deterministic function from the set of possible outcomes of some experiment to the real numbers. But you can see why the name "random variable" is confusing to people.
[1] https://cyril9227.github.io/random-variables/ and elsewhere.
I don't think that this was the formalization that was used when the term was coined, given how late set and measure theory were formalized.
Anyone else get Game of Life vibes?
We can do better than "magic".
...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.
I’m so sorry. Couldn’t help myself.
Does using words that are more of a mouthful make scientist more credible?
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.
Please no.
Which. Yeah, has been a pretty bad thing for people in understanding those. :(
You're a little late here, "magic" is already a fairly well known term in quantum computing literature. There's "magic states" and protocols for "magic state distillation" and "magic state injection", there's "shallow magic depth circuits", etc.
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?
Without tests it’s just pretty math that can be coaxed into agreeing with reality but that proves nothing.
Physicists try to indirectly test all the time via cosmological observations but that is extremely hard and limited to what you can infer and how well you can eliminate other explanations or sources of error.
If it is competing against another model that does both that and offers new testable hypothesis (which experiments match), the other model is the clear winner. But lacking that, if no other model explains all existing data, is new testability really necessary when it is the only model that currently explains all existing tests?
That said, aren't most of theoretical models only contenders for such, as in they haven't been expanded to actually explain all testing results, only that, as far as they have been expanded, there are no contradictions yet? So they need physicists to expand them, but if the model is wrong, the effort might largely be wasted, and we have some models that there is disdain for not because they contradict existing experiments, but because they have eaten too many careers without showing value in return?
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.
Physicists get a failing grade for naming things.
It's not just a bad idea because of that BS, but even within the field it's just asking for trouble. We may all wish we were perfect Vulcans who have perfect mental separation between all concepts and emotions, but we aren't. It's going to have a small, but extremely persistent and long-term effect on the field if you seriously name a major part of it "magic". The emotional connotations simply can not help but smear into the putatively mathematical term. It's a high price to pay for what isn't really all that funny of a joke even the first time.
And of course the BS will crank up even higher. People get hurt by that, but I don't know how much to lay at the foot of people who are all but taunting them by naming something "magic", because most of the hurt was going to come anyhow and what particular guise it is wearing is of minimal importance. Still, why even sign up to be in the line of fire of responsibility for that sort of thing?
Analogies aid understanding, even if on an abstract level.
It's bad enough all the corporations trying to steal perfectly active words for their brand names or products.
They’re promoting their preferred frame to ontological status when you can’t use a dual model to assert more than equivalence between frames.
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.
Is this actually stated somewhere by the institutions that take taxpayer money for this research, or just your opinion?
That is, the concern is that instead of studying the real world, theoretical physicists are spending more and more time studying mathematical constructs and their properties.
> In quantum information theory, magic is a property that quantifies the computational resources needed to describe quantum states beyond stabilizer states.
> In 2024–2025, quantum magic was detected in top quark pairs produced at the Large Hadron Collider; it is the first observation of this property in fundamental particle collisions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(quantum_information)
And "second stabilizer Rényi entropy" is even better, it's exactly the kind of technical term I'd prefer, that describes what it means.
> One measure of quantum magic is the stabilizer Rényi entropy of order α such that..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9nyi_entropy#Stabilizer_...
I always hated the ball and sheet example simply because it was describing gravity with gravity. It felt fundamentally wrong.
The point is that mass bends space-time. The amount of bending is dependent on the size of the mass and on the distance from the mass. Even though the Sun is incomparably heavier than the Earth, it is also MUCH farther away from you. So, space-time around the Earth is curved much more towards the center of the Earth than it is towards the center of the Sun. In the mattress analogy, consider a large mattress, with a bowling ball and a car sitting on it. The car will obviously bend the mattress much more, but if you're close to the bowling ball, you'll still fall towards the bowling ball first before both you and it fall towards the car.
So, say you're in an airplane moving directly forward, with the Sun just overhead (and the Earth obviously just below you). The Earth curves spacetime towards it a lot in this area, while the Sun curves it towards itself just a little bit. The overall curvature is such that time still moves more for the bottom of the plane (closer to the Earth) than the top of the plane (closer to the Sun). So, the bottom side moves a little slower than the top side, but the structural integrity of the plane pulls the top side towards the bottom, causing a slight motion towards the Earth - gravity [note that the GP's explanation got the signs a little wrong - time flows slower, not faster, closer to a big mass]. Conversely, if the Earth disappears from the picture and only the Sun remains, now the top part of the plane will move slightly slower, pulling the bottom part towards it, and thus towards the Sun.
Other than that, thank you for a very clear explanation.
Also as far as I know, Penrose’s main argument is that consciousness can not be computational. If you can’t argue against an idea with reason and resort to name calling, you’re not being rational you’re just being dogmatic and censoring ideas.
Also, remember that Isaac Newton was deep into alchemy and religious prophecy. Just because you have one good idea and you're smart enough to follow it to its logical conclusion doesn't mean every idea you have is good.
> Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been.
There's also other areas where a current of picking simple names instead of greek/latin terms was popular for a while at least - Shannon named the smallest unit of information a "bit" after all.
Perhaps Magic is even so ridiculous that it’s immune to co-option by charlatans. After all, they choose sciency words to lend an air of credibility. OTOH the perceived ridiculousness could also change rather quickly. It’s just the nature of language use…
Imagine spacetime as a field of local clocks. Far from the Sun, clocks tick faster. Near the Sun, clocks tick slower. A freely moving object tries to follow the straightest possible path through spacetime. But because the “time axis” changes from place to place, what counts as “straight ahead into the future” tilts slightly inward near the Sun. So the Earth’s path through spacetime curves toward the Sun.
Earth’s spatial speed around the Sun is about 30 km/s. But through spacetime, its “timeward” motion is basically c, 300,000 km/s. So even a tiny tilt in the time direction creates a significant spatial acceleration. That is why the time-warping term dominates for slow massive bodies.
Near Earth’s surface, clocks lower down tick very slightly slower than clocks higher up. The change in tick rate is on the order of 10^(-16) per meter. While extremely small, that's enough to generate the familiar 9.8 m/s^2 spatial acceleration we experience. Such a small gradient in clock rates generates macrosopically noticeable spatial accelerations because the "translation" factor is c^2, a tremendously large number.
Now, if I wanted to cover all my bases here, I'd need to point out that gravity does also bend space -- that is just not a relevant factor for "ordinary" gravity acting on relatively slow moving matter (like the Earth itself, or the Earth's atmosphere). For instance, for light itself, spatial bending is just as important (in fact, the gravitational deflection of light by a weak static gravitational field is controlled by a near 50/50 split between spatial and temporal effects). Near a massive black hole, it's not that simple and can't meaningfully be understood in terms of "time" and "space" effects being independently separated.
Surely you must appreciate the irony when your primary argument is an appeal to authority, while on the other hand you dismiss everyone who is unconvinced as "dogmatic".
As for Penrose's specific ideas, i'm not familiar enough with them or the field to make an informed judgement. Hence i would defer to other experts in that field, who as far as i understand are unconvinced. However, the fact he previously won a nobel does not lead me to give him any more credence than i would anyone else. If anything its a negative signal.
That said, if i was going to bite:
> Penrose’s main argument is that consciousness can not be computational. If you can’t argue against an idea with reason
The onus is on Penrose to show consciousness is non-computational. Preferably with some sort of experiment (or are we in the realm of pure philosophy here? Arguing how many angels are dancing on the pin). Science is about creating hypotheses and testing them. Admiteddly im not super well-read on this topic, but i don't think this theory has yielded testable predictions not explainable by other theories that have been verified.
> Originally coined in the 17th century by René Descartes[4] as a derogatory term and regarded as fictitious or useless, the concept gained wide acceptance following the work of Leonhard Euler in the 18th century, and Augustin-Louis Cauchy and Carl Friedrich Gauss in the early 19th century.
I think the jury is still out wrt utility of AdS spaces. They could be useless toys, or they could be in the Descartes phase rn.
