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> 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

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?

I had assumed it was a play on the saying "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" but I didn't see that in the article.
> This naming-proposal couldn't possibly cause any problems down the line...

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.

To be fair, it isn't that different from why we have imaginary numbers. Or why the reals are calls reals.

Which. Yeah, has been a pretty bad thing for people in understanding those. :(

I guess we can no longer use this phrase:

"The best kind of science is magic, and the best kind of magic is science."

> "The best kind of science is magic, and the best kind of magic is science."

Who has ever used that phrase?

>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.

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.
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.

Thanks for this - holography as a theory strikes me as an absurd math trick - if a 3d world is really just a 2d surface, would it not logically follow that said 2d surface is itself merely a projection from 1d, and perhaps that is a projection from 0d?

Obviously I don’t understand this, and probably won’t but what limits the dimension reduction?

Going the other way, would our 3d space not be the “surface” of a deeper 4d space, and that of a 5d space, etc?

I gotta say every aspect of this headline reads like bullshit. Unfortunately
Quanta usually has fairly good articles, but the headlines are often very bad.
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.

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)
Time crystals, AFAIK, are actually descriptive: they're crystals in the sense that they produce regularities through occupying the lowest energy state - they just do that in time, not just space.
It's older than that. Atoms have neither orbitals, nor shells. Neither describes a probability field at various energy levels surrounding the nucleus.

Analogies aid understanding, even if on an abstract level.

As all programmers know: naming things (abstracting ideas for human interpretation) is hard.
In absolute, those are irrevocably pliable scientific facts.
That is an incredibly unfortunate term to use for the phenomenon.
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I agree, although there is a long tradition of terrible naming in the sciences.

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.

Mathematicians shouldn’t be allowed to name anything, it’s beyond ridiculous
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.
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.

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.

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.
"Einstein cast gravity not as a force but as the geometric bending of space and time. In a popular analogy, the fabric of space-time is like the flat expanse of a mattress, and a massive object like a star is like a bowling ball sitting on top. The weight of the bowling ball compresses the mattress, forming a dimple — matter tells space-time how to curve.

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.

Quanta article are getting longer and longer. AI effect?
They can choose any word to name a new feature; and they choose "magic"... Next one, it'll be "dark magic".
Whole lotta bike shedding going on in this thread.
This whole thread is embarrassing to be honest. Lots of clueless people on a notoriously difficult field complaining that the experts on such field decided to use this or that word.

As the old saying goes, better to stay silent and look like a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

> while these locations can be constricted by these particles

Anyone else get Game of Life vibes?

If particles are "entangled", that means they are not separated. Correct? So why are we still looking at the universe as materialists?

Gravity is the force created by a mesh of entanglements. Entanglement is not the "connective tissue". Entanglement is the whole universe. Only our minds disentangle the universe out of necessity.

In other words, there are no particles, only waves. A planet is not a chunk of matter, it is a wave. a planet has no real boundary, that is a product of human consciousness.

Can anyone else not stand quanta magazine? Everything posted here from there is the most woo-based, mis-represented, science mumbo jumbo. I didnt read the article cause this seems like a prime example of that so someone can correct me if I’m wrong
I got nothing, but recall an old joke... "Magic is real, unless declared int!"
Strictly from a linguistic perspective: what a terrible and dumb term ('magic') to try and introduce into physics.

How does gravity work? Magic!

Well, I read it, but none of it made any sense, so ok gravity is “magic”