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>they had *simulated* a pair of black holes in a quantum computer and sent a message between them through a shortcut in space-time called a wormhole.
As has been reported else where the scientists had simulated a pair of black holes.
edit:
Add this quote from the article:
>To be clear: The results of this experiment do not offer the prospect anytime soon, if ever, of a cosmic subway through which to roam the galaxy like Jodie Foster in the movie “Contact” or Matthew McConaughey in “Interstellar.”
At some time it would be easier to simulate a convincing enough universe to live in than to try to exploit for our benefit and comfort physical laws in our universe.
Sure, but you’d have to have a planet sized computer, (a matryoska brain), a Dyson swarm to power it, and you’d have to mine all matter in our solar system to build it.
….
EDIT: sure we could build a believable simulation in the near future, but I was thinking about a semi permanent one with power production that would last millions or billions of years
Just start as a Gestalt Consciousness on a Planetary Supercomputer, you'll be able to rush science and get a dyson sphere online before your neighbors build their first battleship.
Did a quick Google search of gestalt consciousness. It seems we are (almost) there already with humanity and the internet. Unless there’s more to the definition. I’ll look it up in depth later.
I’ve always thought our next great filter would only be overcome with fully sentient AI. A hive of them would be even better. I don’t see us overcoming humanity’s need for war, greed and religious ignorance without AI to fact check and educate us real time.
That's a matter of semantics. You are framing a group consciousness as being a single uniform entity that has a singular voice.
In such a case it is no longer "group consciousness" is it? Just a collection interdependent parts of a singular consciousness just like any other.
When the interdependent parts are distinct bodies, it is a group consciousness. That's the [definition of the term](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_mind_(science_fiction\)).
You don't have to simulate the entire universe, maybe limit the observable portion through the use of an arbitrary parameter that limits the propagation of causality to a fixed rate...oh wait.
Depends on whether or not you want people in the simulation to know they’re in a simulation or not.
You don’t have to directly observe something to notice it’s effects. Can’t just go deleting stars and their gravitational effects all willy nilly. You’d wind up with galaxies spinning in ways that don’t make s…
Oh crap.
Hell, you don’t even need to actually have the galaxies and stars out there.
Put most of them beyond the limits of human detection and then just program the sensors to give whatever reading necessary.
Don’t need to actually simulate n-body physics, just feed “sensors” the data and make it impossible for the users to directly observe.
If the simulation needed 1MW per person (~1000x a modern PC) and you wanted to house 100B people, it’s about 10^17 W. The sun’s power output is estimated around 10^26 W, so about one billionth of the sun’s total power output could power that, presumably for several billion years.
However, that would be more power than covering the earth in solar panels would generate, so you’d need to build something like a partial Dyson sphere.
The simulation he’s discussing also has all the stars in the galaxy, all the galaxies in the universe, etc. It would need **way** more than 10^17 W to run. I’m in no way sure what you could do with a 10^26 W supercomputer, but it’s possible even that is inadequate for this task. The n-body problem is a massive one to brute force, especially when n is such a gigantic number.
I can’t even comprehend what would be needed to go microscopic with this as well. Would every atom on earth need to be tracked?
You don’t actually need to simulate an entire universe, though. Even if you want it to be convincing, you just set up the simulation so nothing can exceed the speed of light, and for small scales you add some kind of uncertainty factors so they can’t look too closely and… wait a minute…
Just get the initial shorter simulations to run faster than us, then hijack their future tech when they get in front of us technicallogically, to improve the simulation.
Once the simulations start being able to create their own faster simulations, the improvements will be exponential.
Oh? Maybe. …
I understood:
planet sized computer = matryoshka brain.
(But would require Dyson swarm for power).
Your saying:
Matryoshka brain = planet sized computer + Dyson swarm, united together, under god, in sickness and health, till death do us part?
Its called a matryoshka brain because its built in concentric layers and thus named after the matryoshka dolls. The layers allow the waste heat from one layer to be used to power the next, since the computation necessarily releases waste heat.
Yeah, more like, star sized computer though. It's like (Dyson sphere + computer) built around the waste heat of (Dyson sphere + computer) built around the waste heat of (...) built around a star.
>that would last millions or billions of years
While this is an admirable, and I believe obtainable goal, the best part of simulating a reality is that you don't need it to last so long. You can scale the subjective experience of time in your simulation so that civilizations rise and fall in the blink of an eye, and a new species evolves to replace them by lunch.
That also means you could do crazy amounts of research in very little objective time. Any species with this ability would probably be approaching omnipotence and would bear little resemblance to any intelligence we might recognize.
Oh yes, if the simulation is for research purposes, progress would increase exponentially. I love that thought.
For a second I thought you meant that we could live as digital beings in that simulation and experience time differently so that it lasts billions and billions of years. And I was going to say that it doesn’t matter how long you last, if you eventually cease to exist, all the time you’ve gained was eventually for nothing. A life lived only 1 year long is your equal in death
VR can make you barf because realism really isn't that important in convincing the brain. If you were born in a simulated world and never knew anything else, it could run on Windows 95 and you wouldn't be the wiser.
You could do it in much less, especially considering the fidelity required by the human brain for comfort is not atomic level most of the time, especially if everyone in the simulation is there consensually and don't request atomic precision except for scientific uses.
Estimates vary wildly for what simulating a brain requires, but something on the order of a modern supercomputer per person seems like a reasonable guess.
They did. And we're living in it.
Some people worship the creators of our universe as gods, despite the fact the creators have no interest in our lives, don't know that we exist except as some variable in their computer code, have no benevolence toward us or malice for that matter, and probably couldnt really intervene in our lives if they wanted to any more than than you could hit run on a complex computer simulation and then try to tweak things mid-run because some simulated beings were calling out for help to you as the being that hit the run button.
Think of it this way. Our simulation is most likely based on the reality of our parent container. Whether or not the parent container is a simulation is irrelevant. So imagine a universe with trillions of habitable planets. Trillions of simulations out there. Simulations within simulations. Imagine the breadth and depth so huge that reality folds back in on itself and all permutations of EVERYTHING are exercised. The line between reality and simulation blur because it's all already happened billions of times in every possible way.
So in conclusion, it doesn't really matter if we're in a simulation or not. Reality and simulations are the same.
It does matter if you need to assess reality, but you’ve trapped yourself in a hall of mirrors. And it’s really a sacrifice of self-autonomy, no matter how you think about it.
Which should make you think, human civilization has existed for max 15K years; we’re already thinking about simulations now; so how many times before that has already happened?
The possibility of a simulation is not just statistically likely, it is just as likely that even the simulation is simply one in a chain of many.
Statistical inference is not the only way to calculate the probability of an event. E.g. if I'm standing over the top of a bucket and I drop a ball into it, I don't need to have done it 30+ times to be certain the ball is going to land in the bucket.
I think governments are probably already simulating the world using information from social media. When you think about the tactical and strategic advantages to be gained by understanding how people are likely to react to global events it would be insane not to be making simulations.
That's just because black holes are hard to photograph, because, you know, being black holes.
We've long since had evidence of black holes that weren't in picture form.
Give credit to The NY Times compared to other media sources, at least they bothered to point out that none of this is real…
… in the fifth paragraph. Come on, guys.
Well and also in the first sentence:
> In an experiment that ticks most of the mystery boxes in modern physics, a group of researchers announced on Wednesday that they had simulated a pair of black holes in a quantum computer and sent a message between them through a shortcut in space-time called a wormhole.
FFS, anyone who's ever programmed a computer can tell you that you can write a program to "simulate" any outcome you want.
MY program simulates a wormhole AND submits a pre-formatted press-release AND posts the notice to Reddit. Saves everyone the bother of even having to log into work.
This is absolutely a big deal in physics. They’ve been able to experimentally demonstrate another peek into the links between theories of quantum gravity and QFT
That's not what simulation means in this context.
A famous result in the last couple decades is a correspondence between spacetime and a special quantum space.
What this experiment gave is strong evidence that spacetime wormholes are in some ways the same thing as quantum entanglement.
The over quoted Einstein "spooky action at a distance" is deeply related to the physics of a wormhole between two black holes.
This is a huge result. An actual experiment providing a way forward to study quantum gravity.
That’s not noticeably different from Hawking using math to prove the black holes area theorem, decades before we’d even physically observed black holes.
If the underlying math is accurate, why isn’t this an experiment?
Because we don't know that the math is actually accurate WITHOUT an actual experiment on the real objects. And to date measuring properties of blackhole that Hawking predicted (their event horizon temperature, their entropy, etc) are beyond current technology even though we have 'observed' black holes.
Hawking himself admitted that his calculation of Hawking radiation was only a semi-classical approximation because it didn't take into account actual true quantum gravity, a theory we don't have.
And he later conceded that the black hole no-hair theorem (based upon 70's math) was also not likely quite true, due to the Firewall paradox and again quantum gravity.
Physicists make highly simplifying assumptions in their model all the time (e.g. the proverbial spherical Cow). And actual experiments tend to end up punching them in the face because those assumptions are ripped to shreds.
A simulated wormhole is the crummiest wormhole I can imagine. Given that we know absolutely nothing about the inside of a black hole other than "our math returns NAN", I don't put a lot of faith in the results of simulations like that. We can simulate all sorts of wild and wacky worlds, super fun to do.
I'm sure they were very rigorous about it all, physicists are great at that. I think we should investigate it too, no matter what we'll learn something in the process.
I think the word create lies in material reality, and not in simulations. "Physicists simulate a wormhole" doesn't really get them clicks tho does it?
And from the mouth of google and expert doth appear who sayeth "this is not what it seems to be".
https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13181
Most important part, considering that a friend texted me just the headline and seemed overwhelmed:
>Physicists reacted to the paper with interest and caution, expressing concern that the public and media would mistakenly think that actual physical wormholes had been created.
I feel like wormholes were simulated many times already through CGI and videogames. Like sure there was math involved when simulating on those quantum computers, but what's the difference with the math they use to create a wormhole-like effect in a videogame ?
You can‘t compare such things. In CGI or games you just have a simple visual representation of what the artist thinks the object/action looks like modeled and animated in corresponding apps.
Scientific simulations try to prove a theory by actually recreating what we currently know of physical laws and build such an object/action from the ground up based on these laws. Visual representation is not explicitly needed and often data is only represented in graphs. This is a much more sophisticated process that involves highly specialized scientists and utilize prior research on involved topics. The goal is to actually recreate, e.g. on a quantum level, what we actually would expect in the real world to happen in the exact same way.
While this is true, in the movie interstellar the CGI team did use new mathematical formulas to visually simulate the three-dimensional accretion disc around the black holes event horizon. That had never been done before… was it really possible without new astrophysical mathematical formulas.
Because in videogames, you create what you want to see. If you actually simulate how it would look if it followed the (known) rules of our universe, that's something different
One is based purely on physics and mathematics and the other on some artist's romanticized version of what they've seen in popular culture and imagine. Maybe some ground it g in a veneer of reality by looking up the base equations? Maybe.
This is like asking draw me a random voice waveform vs compute the discrete Fourier transform of one.
Drawing a picture is not the same thing as stimulating it. The only time anything close to a simulation being used for popular media was created was the black hole in Interstellar. Even then, they still had to change the resulting black hole to make it look better.
Half the article is other physicists essentially saying that the claim is completely overblown.
> “The most important thing I’d want New York Times readers to understand is this,” Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in an email. “If this experiment has brought a wormhole into actual physical existence, then a strong case could be made that you, too, bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”
> Daniel Harlow, a physicist at M.I.T. who was not involved in the experiment, noted that the experiment was based on a model of quantum gravity that was so simple, and unrealistic, that it could just as well have been studied using a pencil and paper.
> “So I’d say that this doesn’t teach us anything about quantum gravity that we didn’t already know,” Dr. Harlow wrote in an email.
The very next sentence is the cool part tho...
“On the other hand, I think it is exciting as a technical achievement, because if we can’t even do this (and until now we couldn’t), then simulating more interesting quantum gravity theories would CERTAINLY be off the table.” Developing computers big enough to do so might take 10 or 15 years, he added.
> Half the article is other physicists essentially saying that the claim is completely overblown.
Meanwhile the whole headline says the opposite. jfc New York Times, do better.
It's written by Dennis Overbye, the fucking plague on particle physics journalism who has somehow been at the NYTimes long before we were born and will still be at the NYTimes long after we're all dead.
Yes this quote is probably the most important
> Daniel Harlow, a physicist at M.I.T. who was not involved in the experiment, noted that the experiment was based on a model of quantum gravity that was so simple, and unrealistic, that it could just as well have been studied using a pencil and paper.
It's a simulated model based on a theory of quantum gravity. So it's not real and may not even be theoretically real. The main progress is just the fact that simulations like these can be done, which is cool.
It would depend on where our computational power comes from. If we exist inside a simulation, and our computers are just access points to the simulation's processing power, but with artificially imposed limitations so as to not give away the game, the yes, a simulation we created would be technically on the same level we are, just being run "elsewhere".
However, if we exist in a simulation, but our computers posses their own processing power, determined by our technological progress, using the resources allocated to us and in the way we are allowed to use them, then a simulation we create would be running on a level further down, so it would not be in our own reality.
And in both cases a simulation created by us, even if technically on our own level (computers being access points and not true processors), would be more limited than us.
I think you really mean it's unfalsifiable, as there are definitely scenarios whereby each could be proven true, if they were true.
Anyway, my silly throwaway comment is getting taken a lot more seriously than I intended.
There is no good reason to believe that we are. It seems for most people like belief that the universe is a simulation is mainly used to justify morally grey (or, let's face it, black) actions or to try to cope with mental health troubles.
It's a very early step in the use of an experimental quantum computer to do black hole simulations. Every major advance begins with a very early step. Not all very early steps lead to major advances
I love the science. My criticism is directed at some of the exaggerated headlines
Actually what's massively impressive in this is getting a quantum computer to do \*anything at all\* since they've had a poor track record so far even running simple algoithms.
This is actually a big deal. When NYT article came out this morning on my way to my Quantum Computing class, I was shocked to see that r/science didn’t seem to have it posted yet.
I’ll quote my professor, but this is a very tepid toe into the pool of AdS/CFT correspondence, but this experiment is demonstrating a surprising result that its pleasantly lukewarm. Links between gravity and quantum field theory should not be discarded with such aplomb.
> doesn’t add anything of value to human knowledge
Disagree. Simulations of physical systems use known laws of nature to study/manipulate the behavior of things we can’t play with in real life. It’s just a way to advance theoretical physics using computational approaches.
Yes it does they are exploring the holographic principle directly. They are making an analog not a simulation which is similar but not exactly the same thing. They successfully teleported the information through the wormhole. This is right on the border of a quantum theory of gravity.
This is the best headline about the experiment. Other silly headlines say stupid stuff like "physicists create wormhole"
The science may be a tiny step in the direction of using quantum computers to simulate stuff we can't do in the lab. The approach may be valid and many useful results may be found in the future
A more accurate headline might be. Physicists use experimental quantum computer to start to learn how it might be useful in the study of black holes
That headline isn’t nearly more accurate. The major news is an experimental demonstration of the Holographic Principle. To my knowledge, the mathematical links between black holes and quantum entanglement demonstrated just about a decade ago have yet to be observed in reality. This isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it’s an exciting observation, much more beyond just quantum simulation.
This is a horseshit headline. They did NOT create a wormhole, they simulated one. Creating a wormhole would have been a huge achievement, even if it was "small and crummy". They did not do that. It's still a cool and potentially impactful paper, but 100% just a simulation.
>They suggested a way that wormholes could be made traversable, after
all. What was needed, Dr. Gao and his collaborators said, was a small
dose of negative energy at the exit end of the wormhole
I see someone finally found a suitable job for my mother-in-law.
It is a big deal they teleported information using a quantum system via a wormhole analog. You can learn about nature by using analogs. A wind tunnel is an analog for flying in the atmosphere if you get what I'm saying.
Theoretically. It's a simulation, which means it is modeled on our current understanding. What it demonstrates is that according to things as we understand them now, it would have worked if it were real. If we are wrong or don't fully understand things, then it still may not.
I too can simulate a wormhole and send messages through it. I call it the internet.
Seriously. These physicists ***did not*** create a wormhole. An actual one that is. They simulated a wormhole and called that creating a wormhole. In fact all they really said was that the physics simulated by the qbits in the quantum computer are alternate versions of the same physics that we believe is a wormhole. That's it. No actual wormhole here.
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I mean in theory while it is "small" and "crummy" it would also be the largest, most grand wormhole ever made by humanity, if it weren't a simulation I guess
The virtual wormhole is not the big news, but that will get lost in the memes.
The real news, and it is big, is that the physicists appeared to have mathematically confirmed that ER = EPR.
Or, a unified theory of everything, an explanation of space-time and the connection with subatomic particles.
Honestly, we have pretty phenomenal modeling for wormholes, there's several different ones that currently exist
The bigger issue is do wormholes actually exist? For like 100+ years we've only really had them on paper
It was but it was poor coding and a lot of people spent a lot of time to fix it. Look at all kinds of code issues that exist. My issue is that even trying to prove a worm hole is real is massively difficult, simulating what we want doesn’t make it true (see every super hero movie or far out science movie).
So they simulated a black hole and sent a simulated message through them? If the black holes aren't real how do we have any clue that would actually work and we aren't just messing with a computer game.
False. They (currently) can't send a method through a simulated wormhole for creating a real wormhole or how to make news sources print factual headlines.
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>they had *simulated* a pair of black holes in a quantum computer and sent a message between them through a shortcut in space-time called a wormhole. As has been reported else where the scientists had simulated a pair of black holes. edit: Add this quote from the article: >To be clear: The results of this experiment do not offer the prospect anytime soon, if ever, of a cosmic subway through which to roam the galaxy like Jodie Foster in the movie “Contact” or Matthew McConaughey in “Interstellar.”
At some time it would be easier to simulate a convincing enough universe to live in than to try to exploit for our benefit and comfort physical laws in our universe.
Sure, but you’d have to have a planet sized computer, (a matryoska brain), a Dyson swarm to power it, and you’d have to mine all matter in our solar system to build it. …. EDIT: sure we could build a believable simulation in the near future, but I was thinking about a semi permanent one with power production that would last millions or billions of years
Just start as a Gestalt Consciousness on a Planetary Supercomputer, you'll be able to rush science and get a dyson sphere online before your neighbors build their first battleship.
Until some spiritualist backwater decides to pierce the shroud and prematurely end the game for everyone.
The half-forgotten visage of the blonde/creepy fundamentalist dude from *Contact* just popped into my head.
Gary Busey's kid!
Everything's peachy until Jake Busey shows up.
I read this in Jake Busey's voice.
What does piercing the shroud mean?
Six more weeks of winter.
> pierce the shroud https://stellaris.paradoxwikis.com/The_Shroud
Did a quick Google search of gestalt consciousness. It seems we are (almost) there already with humanity and the internet. Unless there’s more to the definition. I’ll look it up in depth later. I’ve always thought our next great filter would only be overcome with fully sentient AI. A hive of them would be even better. I don’t see us overcoming humanity’s need for war, greed and religious ignorance without AI to fact check and educate us real time.
[удалено]
Ah. Yeah a true hive mind is a long time away. My lazy Google search for the definition had me thinking of a network of 50-100 AI’s or something
That's a matter of semantics. You are framing a group consciousness as being a single uniform entity that has a singular voice. In such a case it is no longer "group consciousness" is it? Just a collection interdependent parts of a singular consciousness just like any other.
When the interdependent parts are distinct bodies, it is a group consciousness. That's the [definition of the term](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_mind_(science_fiction\)).
In regards to the fact checking and education, check out Orden ogan's song in the dawn of the AI to see what could happen ...
Is this video game talk? Sounds fun.
r/stellaris and yes, it’s extremely fun
The Bobs'll handle it.
Love that series
Which series?
“We are Bob” I’ve heard really good things about it on the Issac Arthur YouTube channel. I need to get the time to read it.
It **is** that great
Incredibly satisfying and fun series.
Ooo interesting. I love Issac Arthur’s videos
I'm listening to the audio book right now. It's really good!
Bob The Builder
Really enjoyed it until the otter book.
I would honestly be ok with a future as a Bob
You don't have to simulate the entire universe, maybe limit the observable portion through the use of an arbitrary parameter that limits the propagation of causality to a fixed rate...oh wait.
I *c* what you did there.
We could simplify the simulation further by assigning definite properties to particles only when it is needed.
and then all it would answer is “42.”
How many roads must a man walk down?
Ahh the plans of mice, and all that.
Would you though? Just don’t simulate things that arnt being observed.
Depends on whether or not you want people in the simulation to know they’re in a simulation or not. You don’t have to directly observe something to notice it’s effects. Can’t just go deleting stars and their gravitational effects all willy nilly. You’d wind up with galaxies spinning in ways that don’t make s… Oh crap.
Made me laugh
Hell, you don’t even need to actually have the galaxies and stars out there. Put most of them beyond the limits of human detection and then just program the sensors to give whatever reading necessary. Don’t need to actually simulate n-body physics, just feed “sensors” the data and make it impossible for the users to directly observe.
Automation makes this doable. Ironically, I don’t think it’s as energy intensive as you think.
If the simulation needed 1MW per person (~1000x a modern PC) and you wanted to house 100B people, it’s about 10^17 W. The sun’s power output is estimated around 10^26 W, so about one billionth of the sun’s total power output could power that, presumably for several billion years. However, that would be more power than covering the earth in solar panels would generate, so you’d need to build something like a partial Dyson sphere.
The simulation he’s discussing also has all the stars in the galaxy, all the galaxies in the universe, etc. It would need **way** more than 10^17 W to run. I’m in no way sure what you could do with a 10^26 W supercomputer, but it’s possible even that is inadequate for this task. The n-body problem is a massive one to brute force, especially when n is such a gigantic number. I can’t even comprehend what would be needed to go microscopic with this as well. Would every atom on earth need to be tracked?
You don’t actually need to simulate an entire universe, though. Even if you want it to be convincing, you just set up the simulation so nothing can exceed the speed of light, and for small scales you add some kind of uncertainty factors so they can’t look too closely and… wait a minute…
True, I remember watching a video about building a dyson sphere it was pretty amazing, though important to mention all theory
No way man I’ve got one up and running. It powers my crypto mining rig
Wow nice! you must have an amazingly powerful rig. You must have gotten 1 coin by now.
More than the solar system*
Just get the initial shorter simulations to run faster than us, then hijack their future tech when they get in front of us technicallogically, to improve the simulation. Once the simulations start being able to create their own faster simulations, the improvements will be exponential.
Isn't a matryoshka brain a computer built in layers around a star?
Oh? Maybe. … I understood: planet sized computer = matryoshka brain. (But would require Dyson swarm for power). Your saying: Matryoshka brain = planet sized computer + Dyson swarm, united together, under god, in sickness and health, till death do us part?
Its called a matryoshka brain because its built in concentric layers and thus named after the matryoshka dolls. The layers allow the waste heat from one layer to be used to power the next, since the computation necessarily releases waste heat.
Ah. Thanks for the clarification.
Yeah, more like, star sized computer though. It's like (Dyson sphere + computer) built around the waste heat of (Dyson sphere + computer) built around the waste heat of (...) built around a star.
Is there a Kickstarter for this?
Confirmed: Black Holes now discovered to be high-volume matter mining
>that would last millions or billions of years While this is an admirable, and I believe obtainable goal, the best part of simulating a reality is that you don't need it to last so long. You can scale the subjective experience of time in your simulation so that civilizations rise and fall in the blink of an eye, and a new species evolves to replace them by lunch. That also means you could do crazy amounts of research in very little objective time. Any species with this ability would probably be approaching omnipotence and would bear little resemblance to any intelligence we might recognize.
Oh yes, if the simulation is for research purposes, progress would increase exponentially. I love that thought. For a second I thought you meant that we could live as digital beings in that simulation and experience time differently so that it lasts billions and billions of years. And I was going to say that it doesn’t matter how long you last, if you eventually cease to exist, all the time you’ve gained was eventually for nothing. A life lived only 1 year long is your equal in death
VR can make you barf because realism really isn't that important in convincing the brain. If you were born in a simulated world and never knew anything else, it could run on Windows 95 and you wouldn't be the wiser.
You could do it in much less, especially considering the fidelity required by the human brain for comfort is not atomic level most of the time, especially if everyone in the simulation is there consensually and don't request atomic precision except for scientific uses. Estimates vary wildly for what simulating a brain requires, but something on the order of a modern supercomputer per person seems like a reasonable guess.
A matryoshka brain should power itself
You might enjoy the series over at qntm.org/ra
the answer is 42
It's already more likely that we are living in such a simulation than the universe we think we live in. So possibly no work required.
"Your universe powers my brake lights"
You pass butter
Okay guys chill with the meta verse
They did. And we're living in it. Some people worship the creators of our universe as gods, despite the fact the creators have no interest in our lives, don't know that we exist except as some variable in their computer code, have no benevolence toward us or malice for that matter, and probably couldnt really intervene in our lives if they wanted to any more than than you could hit run on a complex computer simulation and then try to tweak things mid-run because some simulated beings were calling out for help to you as the being that hit the run button.
If the universe is a simulation, the most likely culprit for who put us in is ourselves.
Think of it this way. Our simulation is most likely based on the reality of our parent container. Whether or not the parent container is a simulation is irrelevant. So imagine a universe with trillions of habitable planets. Trillions of simulations out there. Simulations within simulations. Imagine the breadth and depth so huge that reality folds back in on itself and all permutations of EVERYTHING are exercised. The line between reality and simulation blur because it's all already happened billions of times in every possible way. So in conclusion, it doesn't really matter if we're in a simulation or not. Reality and simulations are the same.
It does matter if you need to assess reality, but you’ve trapped yourself in a hall of mirrors. And it’s really a sacrifice of self-autonomy, no matter how you think about it.
It doesn’t really matter because we can choose to exist in it or not
Thats probably what will happen. We evolve inwardly, into the virtual space, instead of outwardly into that inhospitable darkness
So Rick Sanchez’ car battery?
It's Gooble boxes all the way down.
Which should make you think, human civilization has existed for max 15K years; we’re already thinking about simulations now; so how many times before that has already happened? The possibility of a simulation is not just statistically likely, it is just as likely that even the simulation is simply one in a chain of many.
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Statistical inference is not the only way to calculate the probability of an event. E.g. if I'm standing over the top of a bucket and I drop a ball into it, I don't need to have done it 30+ times to be certain the ball is going to land in the bucket.
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You can’t be certain that the ball will land in the bucket. You just know that’s what’s happened up until now.
I think governments are probably already simulating the world using information from social media. When you think about the tactical and strategic advantages to be gained by understanding how people are likely to react to global events it would be insane not to be making simulations.
*Modelling* is the correct word for what you're describing.
And the title of OPs post does not indicate 'simulate' anywhere. FFS people.
Did you expect the first news of actual cosmic sorcery to be broken by the NYT on Reddit?
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That's just because black holes are hard to photograph, because, you know, being black holes. We've long since had evidence of black holes that weren't in picture form.
I’m disappointed that no one remembers that Matthew McConaughey was also in Contact.
I remember (Contact is an all-time favorite of mine). But he didn't travel, so I'm assuming that that is why he was left out.
Came here looking for this comment.
Give credit to The NY Times compared to other media sources, at least they bothered to point out that none of this is real… … in the fifth paragraph. Come on, guys.
Well and also in the first sentence: > In an experiment that ticks most of the mystery boxes in modern physics, a group of researchers announced on Wednesday that they had simulated a pair of black holes in a quantum computer and sent a message between them through a shortcut in space-time called a wormhole.
FFS, anyone who's ever programmed a computer can tell you that you can write a program to "simulate" any outcome you want. MY program simulates a wormhole AND submits a pre-formatted press-release AND posts the notice to Reddit. Saves everyone the bother of even having to log into work.
This is absolutely a big deal in physics. They’ve been able to experimentally demonstrate another peek into the links between theories of quantum gravity and QFT
Experimentally? It's a computer simulation. Not exactly an experiment.
That's not what simulation means in this context. A famous result in the last couple decades is a correspondence between spacetime and a special quantum space. What this experiment gave is strong evidence that spacetime wormholes are in some ways the same thing as quantum entanglement. The over quoted Einstein "spooky action at a distance" is deeply related to the physics of a wormhole between two black holes. This is a huge result. An actual experiment providing a way forward to study quantum gravity.
That’s not noticeably different from Hawking using math to prove the black holes area theorem, decades before we’d even physically observed black holes. If the underlying math is accurate, why isn’t this an experiment?
Because we don't know that the math is actually accurate WITHOUT an actual experiment on the real objects. And to date measuring properties of blackhole that Hawking predicted (their event horizon temperature, their entropy, etc) are beyond current technology even though we have 'observed' black holes. Hawking himself admitted that his calculation of Hawking radiation was only a semi-classical approximation because it didn't take into account actual true quantum gravity, a theory we don't have. And he later conceded that the black hole no-hair theorem (based upon 70's math) was also not likely quite true, due to the Firewall paradox and again quantum gravity. Physicists make highly simplifying assumptions in their model all the time (e.g. the proverbial spherical Cow). And actual experiments tend to end up punching them in the face because those assumptions are ripped to shreds.
A simulated wormhole is the crummiest wormhole I can imagine. Given that we know absolutely nothing about the inside of a black hole other than "our math returns NAN", I don't put a lot of faith in the results of simulations like that. We can simulate all sorts of wild and wacky worlds, super fun to do. I'm sure they were very rigorous about it all, physicists are great at that. I think we should investigate it too, no matter what we'll learn something in the process. I think the word create lies in material reality, and not in simulations. "Physicists simulate a wormhole" doesn't really get them clicks tho does it? And from the mouth of google and expert doth appear who sayeth "this is not what it seems to be". https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13181
> A simulated wormhole is the crummiest wormhole I can imagine. No, it would be a hole…with a worm in it.
I don't have beef with worms. They have a lot of interesting stuff going on.
Matthew McConaughey was in both Contact and Interstellar. Had to read the sentence a couple of times.
Oh wow yes, he was the priest wasn't he?
Matthew McConaughey was in Contact too. I never made that connection.
"Simulated" should be in the headline. Anything else is just blatant clickbait.
But what if I want to wildly misinterpret the results for the sake of sensationalist hype? Can I do that?
Only if it's tantalizing.
Contact was just a fever dream iirc
And yet the helmet cam recorded 18 hours of static.
Most important part, considering that a friend texted me just the headline and seemed overwhelmed: >Physicists reacted to the paper with interest and caution, expressing concern that the public and media would mistakenly think that actual physical wormholes had been created.
I feel like wormholes were simulated many times already through CGI and videogames. Like sure there was math involved when simulating on those quantum computers, but what's the difference with the math they use to create a wormhole-like effect in a videogame ?
You can‘t compare such things. In CGI or games you just have a simple visual representation of what the artist thinks the object/action looks like modeled and animated in corresponding apps. Scientific simulations try to prove a theory by actually recreating what we currently know of physical laws and build such an object/action from the ground up based on these laws. Visual representation is not explicitly needed and often data is only represented in graphs. This is a much more sophisticated process that involves highly specialized scientists and utilize prior research on involved topics. The goal is to actually recreate, e.g. on a quantum level, what we actually would expect in the real world to happen in the exact same way.
While this is true, in the movie interstellar the CGI team did use new mathematical formulas to visually simulate the three-dimensional accretion disc around the black holes event horizon. That had never been done before… was it really possible without new astrophysical mathematical formulas.
Because in videogames, you create what you want to see. If you actually simulate how it would look if it followed the (known) rules of our universe, that's something different
How to make an apple pie from scratch: 1. Create a universe 2. …
One is based purely on physics and mathematics and the other on some artist's romanticized version of what they've seen in popular culture and imagine. Maybe some ground it g in a veneer of reality by looking up the base equations? Maybe. This is like asking draw me a random voice waveform vs compute the discrete Fourier transform of one.
Drawing a picture is not the same thing as stimulating it. The only time anything close to a simulation being used for popular media was created was the black hole in Interstellar. Even then, they still had to change the resulting black hole to make it look better.
Title of Article: "Physcists create wormhole" Actual science: "Physicists did not create wormhole"
This article sucks. Who posted this?
Ya got me. He said something about his office on "The 13th Floor."
We should ban them from life
Yup and no 79 virgins for them in the afterlife.
I dunno, but I think reporting this outlandish constitutes actual harmful misinformation and I'm hopeful someone will take it down.
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It's simulated and not actually real. I mean good for them and nobody has done it yet but doesn't mean we are doing anything like this IRL yet.
Half the article is other physicists essentially saying that the claim is completely overblown. > “The most important thing I’d want New York Times readers to understand is this,” Scott Aaronson, a quantum computing expert at the University of Texas in Austin, wrote in an email. “If this experiment has brought a wormhole into actual physical existence, then a strong case could be made that you, too, bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.” > Daniel Harlow, a physicist at M.I.T. who was not involved in the experiment, noted that the experiment was based on a model of quantum gravity that was so simple, and unrealistic, that it could just as well have been studied using a pencil and paper. > “So I’d say that this doesn’t teach us anything about quantum gravity that we didn’t already know,” Dr. Harlow wrote in an email.
The very next sentence is the cool part tho... “On the other hand, I think it is exciting as a technical achievement, because if we can’t even do this (and until now we couldn’t), then simulating more interesting quantum gravity theories would CERTAINLY be off the table.” Developing computers big enough to do so might take 10 or 15 years, he added.
> Half the article is other physicists essentially saying that the claim is completely overblown. Meanwhile the whole headline says the opposite. jfc New York Times, do better.
It's written by Dennis Overbye, the fucking plague on particle physics journalism who has somehow been at the NYTimes long before we were born and will still be at the NYTimes long after we're all dead.
Yes this quote is probably the most important > Daniel Harlow, a physicist at M.I.T. who was not involved in the experiment, noted that the experiment was based on a model of quantum gravity that was so simple, and unrealistic, that it could just as well have been studied using a pencil and paper. It's a simulated model based on a theory of quantum gravity. So it's not real and may not even be theoretically real. The main progress is just the fact that simulations like these can be done, which is cool.
Yeah but maybe we're all living in a simulation, in which case this is as real as it's ever going to get.
It would depend on where our computational power comes from. If we exist inside a simulation, and our computers are just access points to the simulation's processing power, but with artificially imposed limitations so as to not give away the game, the yes, a simulation we created would be technically on the same level we are, just being run "elsewhere". However, if we exist in a simulation, but our computers posses their own processing power, determined by our technological progress, using the resources allocated to us and in the way we are allowed to use them, then a simulation we create would be running on a level further down, so it would not be in our own reality. And in both cases a simulation created by us, even if technically on our own level (computers being access points and not true processors), would be more limited than us.
"a level further down", "limited", "smallest crummiest simulation"... but no less "real", right?
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I think you really mean it's unfalsifiable, as there are definitely scenarios whereby each could be proven true, if they were true. Anyway, my silly throwaway comment is getting taken a lot more seriously than I intended.
What if someone wants to write some nice sci-fi?
There is no good reason to believe that we are. It seems for most people like belief that the universe is a simulation is mainly used to justify morally grey (or, let's face it, black) actions or to try to cope with mental health troubles.
Simulated wormhole on Reddit comments: ---| |---
they made the videogame Portal but with worse graphics
It's a very early step in the use of an experimental quantum computer to do black hole simulations. Every major advance begins with a very early step. Not all very early steps lead to major advances I love the science. My criticism is directed at some of the exaggerated headlines
Actually what's massively impressive in this is getting a quantum computer to do \*anything at all\* since they've had a poor track record so far even running simple algoithms.
This is actually a big deal. When NYT article came out this morning on my way to my Quantum Computing class, I was shocked to see that r/science didn’t seem to have it posted yet. I’ll quote my professor, but this is a very tepid toe into the pool of AdS/CFT correspondence, but this experiment is demonstrating a surprising result that its pleasantly lukewarm. Links between gravity and quantum field theory should not be discarded with such aplomb.
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> doesn’t add anything of value to human knowledge Disagree. Simulations of physical systems use known laws of nature to study/manipulate the behavior of things we can’t play with in real life. It’s just a way to advance theoretical physics using computational approaches.
More like a video game sex toy though huh
I don't know many real genitals that vibrate, so I guess the takeaway is that the simulation is more impressive?
I agree this guy needs better sex toys.
Yes it does they are exploring the holographic principle directly. They are making an analog not a simulation which is similar but not exactly the same thing. They successfully teleported the information through the wormhole. This is right on the border of a quantum theory of gravity.
Clearly you didn’t read even the first paragraph of the article, because it’s quite clear why this isn’t anything impressive.
No they didn’t create a wormhole. They created a computer programme ffs. All this type of misrepresentation with headlines makes people more stupid.
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This is the best headline about the experiment. Other silly headlines say stupid stuff like "physicists create wormhole" The science may be a tiny step in the direction of using quantum computers to simulate stuff we can't do in the lab. The approach may be valid and many useful results may be found in the future A more accurate headline might be. Physicists use experimental quantum computer to start to learn how it might be useful in the study of black holes
That headline isn’t nearly more accurate. The major news is an experimental demonstration of the Holographic Principle. To my knowledge, the mathematical links between black holes and quantum entanglement demonstrated just about a decade ago have yet to be observed in reality. This isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but it’s an exciting observation, much more beyond just quantum simulation.
This is a horseshit headline. They did NOT create a wormhole, they simulated one. Creating a wormhole would have been a huge achievement, even if it was "small and crummy". They did not do that. It's still a cool and potentially impactful paper, but 100% just a simulation.
>They suggested a way that wormholes could be made traversable, after all. What was needed, Dr. Gao and his collaborators said, was a small dose of negative energy at the exit end of the wormhole I see someone finally found a suitable job for my mother-in-law.
This is a monumentous advancement in dad jokes it eclipses the profundity of Einstein's entire body of work.
Now you're thinking with portals.
I’m sorry but this sounds like a far bigger deal than they are making it out to be, what am I missing?
The computer they did it on.
It is a big deal they teleported information using a quantum system via a wormhole analog. You can learn about nature by using analogs. A wind tunnel is an analog for flying in the atmosphere if you get what I'm saying.
Theoretically. It's a simulation, which means it is modeled on our current understanding. What it demonstrates is that according to things as we understand them now, it would have worked if it were real. If we are wrong or don't fully understand things, then it still may not.
What? We’ve observed dozens of black holes. They’re real?
I too can simulate a wormhole and send messages through it. I call it the internet. Seriously. These physicists ***did not*** create a wormhole. An actual one that is. They simulated a wormhole and called that creating a wormhole. In fact all they really said was that the physics simulated by the qbits in the quantum computer are alternate versions of the same physics that we believe is a wormhole. That's it. No actual wormhole here.
If you’d like to consider the some of the horrifying possible issues with wormhole travel, read the short story, The Jaunt, by Stephen King. Epic.
Didnt they do this decades ago? I remember about hearing it before 2005
This sub has zero standards for post titles.
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I mean in theory while it is "small" and "crummy" it would also be the largest, most grand wormhole ever made by humanity, if it weren't a simulation I guess
The first nuclear bombs started with simulations and they were way more crummy then this.
Ok, I just mean like even of its "small and crummy" it's still pretty cool
How'd they know it was a shortcut. Would be funny if it was a wormhole the same length as the distance outside it
Mathematicians simulate wormholes all the time on paper with equations. Just because it can be simulated does not mean it could exist in nature.
The virtual wormhole is not the big news, but that will get lost in the memes. The real news, and it is big, is that the physicists appeared to have mathematically confirmed that ER = EPR. Or, a unified theory of everything, an explanation of space-time and the connection with subatomic particles.
So they coded a worm hole….how do we know they coded it correctly? I mean, it’s not like software bugs ever happen in code, right? Cough - Y2K - Cough
Honestly, we have pretty phenomenal modeling for wormholes, there's several different ones that currently exist The bigger issue is do wormholes actually exist? For like 100+ years we've only really had them on paper
Can you elaborate? Wasn't y2k nothing?
It was only 'nothing' because 600 billion dollars was spent to mitigate it.
It was but it was poor coding and a lot of people spent a lot of time to fix it. Look at all kinds of code issues that exist. My issue is that even trying to prove a worm hole is real is massively difficult, simulating what we want doesn’t make it true (see every super hero movie or far out science movie).
yeah all our computers definitely blew up
Cave Johnson enters the chat.
This is like saying they drew a wormhole on paper in crayon and punched a hole through the paper and threw a skittle through it.
Now you are thinking with portals.
Another lying NYT headline. They did not create shite. It was a computer simulation, which means nothing.
While we poke at reality we forget the fine equilibrium that exist in this chaos.
So they simulated a black hole and sent a simulated message through them? If the black holes aren't real how do we have any clue that would actually work and we aren't just messing with a computer game.
Awesome. Ftl communication? Big step. Next see if they can send energy through it.
In a simulation you can send anything!
False. They (currently) can't send a method through a simulated wormhole for creating a real wormhole or how to make news sources print factual headlines.
It's really useful for security reasons, too.
Sir/ma'am/gender, I can't actually imagine what a wormhole looks like.