Neutral mention · rule
Unfortunately I have not found this to be true (though it is in this case). There are quite a number of articles that are misleading or flat out false. The best example is the quantum wormhole article and video[0,1], because it is egregious and doesn't take much nuance or expertise see the issues. I'm glad they made a note and wrote a follow-up[2], but all this illustrates what is wrong with the picture. For one, the article and video were published the same day as it was published in Nature[3]. Sure, they are getting wind of the preprints, but in this case there was none! They're often acting as a PR firm for many of the big universities and companies, unfortunately so…
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is Nature. The article was published Nov 30th, but the note didn't come till March 29th![4] You might think, oh it took that much time to figure out that there were problems, but no, only a few days after the publication (Dec 2nd) even Ars Technica was posting about the misinformation. They even waited over a month after Kobrin, Schuster, and Yao placed their comment on ArXiv[6]. Scott Aaronson had already written about it[7]. There was so much dissent in that time frame that it is hard to explain it as an accident. A week or two and it wouldn't be an issue. But I think Peter Woit explains it best[8] (published, yes, Nov 30th). This work is getting the full-press promotional package: no preprint on the arXiv, embargoed info to journalists, with reveal at a press conference, a cover story in Nature, accompanied by a barrage of press releases. This is the kind of PR effort for a physics result I’ve only seen before for things like the Higgs and LIGO gravitational wave discoveries. It would be appropriate I suppose if someone actually had built a wormhole in a lab and teleported information through it, as advertised. I hate to say it, but you need to be careful with Quanta and others that __should__ be respectable. And I don't think we should let these things go. They are unhealthy for science and fundamentally create more social distrust for science. Now science skeptics can point to these same things as if there isn't more nuance all because they were more willing to take money from Google and CIT than wait a day and get some comments from other third party sources. (The whole peer review thing is another problem, but that's a different rabbit hole). [0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uOJCS1W1uzg [2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/wormhole-experiment-called-in... [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05424-3 [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20230329191417/https://www.quant... [5] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/no-physicists-didnt-... [6] https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.07897 [7] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6871 [8] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13181