# LHC Black Holes for the Terminally Un-Reassured

Could the LHC have killed us all?

No, no it could not.

But…

I’ve had this conversation a few times over the years. Usually, the people I’m talking to are worried about black holes. They’ve heard that the Large Hadron Collider speeds up particles to amazingly high energies before colliding them together. They worry that these colliding particles could form a black hole, which would fall into the center of the Earth and busily gobble up the whole planet.

This pretty clearly hasn’t happened. But also, physicists were pretty confident that it couldn’t happen. That isn’t to say they thought it was impossible to make a black hole with the LHC. Some physicists actually hoped to make a black hole: it would have been evidence for extra dimensions, curled-up dimensions much larger than the tiny ones required by string theory. They figured out the kind of evidence they’d see if the LHC did indeed create a black hole, and we haven’t seen that evidence. But even before running the machine, they were confident that such a black hole wouldn’t gobble up the planet. Why?

The best argument is also the most unsatisfying. The LHC speeds up particles to high energies, but not unprecedentedly high energies. High-energy particles called cosmic rays enter the atmosphere every day, some of which are at energies comparable to the LHC. The LHC just puts the high-energy particles in front of a bunch of sophisticated equipment so we can measure everything about them. If the LHC could destroy the world, cosmic rays would have already done so.

That’s a very solid argument, but it doesn’t really explain why. Also, it may not be true for future colliders: we could build a collider with enough energy that cosmic rays don’t commonly meet it. So I should give another argument.

The next argument is Hawking radiation. In Stephen Hawking’s most famous accomplishment, he argued that because of quantum mechanics black holes are not truly black. Instead, they give off a constant radiation of every type of particle mixed together, shrinking as it does so. The radiation is faintest for large black holes, but gets more and more intense the smaller the black hole is, until the smallest black holes explode into a shower of particles and disappear. This argument means that a black hole small enough that the LHC could produce it would radiate away to nothing in almost an instant: not long enough to leave the machine, let alone fall to the center of the Earth.

This is a good argument, but maybe you aren’t as sure as I am about Hawking radiation. As it turns out, we’ve never measured Hawking radiation, it’s just a theoretical expectation. Remember that the radiation gets fainter the larger the black hole is: for a black hole in space with the mass of a star, the radiation is so tiny it would be almost impossible to detect even right next to the black hole. From here, in our telescopes, we have no chance of seeing it.

So suppose tiny black holes didn’t radiate, and suppose the LHC could indeed produce them. Wouldn’t that have been dangerous?

Here, we can do a calculation. I want you to appreciate how tiny these black holes would be.

From science fiction and cartoons, you might think of a black hole as a kind of vacuum cleaner, sucking up everything nearby. That’s not how black holes work, though. The “sucking” black holes do is due to gravity, no stronger than the gravity of any other object with the same mass at the same distance. The only difference comes when you get close to the event horizon, an invisible sphere close-in around the black hole. Pass that line, and the gravity is strong enough that you will never escape.

We know how to calculate the position of the event horizon of a black hole. It’s the Schwarzchild radius, and we can write it in terms of Newton’s constant G, the mass of the black hole M, and the speed of light c, as follows:

$\frac{2GM}{c^2}$

The Large Hadron Collider’s two beams each have an energy around seven tera-electron-volts, or TeV, so there are 14 TeV of energy in total in each collision. Imagine all of that energy being converted into mass, and that mass forming a black hole. That isn’t how it would actually happen: some of the energy would create other particles, and some would give the black hole a “kick”, some momentum in one direction or another. But we’re going to imagine a “worst-case” scenario, so let’s assume all the energy goes to form the black hole. Electron-volts are a weird physicist unit, but if we divide them by the speed of light squared (as we should if we’re using $E=mc^2$ to create a mass), then Wikipedia tells us that each electron-volt will give us $1.78\times 10^{-36}$ kilograms. “Tera” is the SI prefix for $10^{12}$. Thus our tiny black hole starts with a mass of

$14\times 10^{12}\times 1.78\times 10^{-36} = 2.49\times 10^{-23} \textrm{kg}$

Plugging in Newton’s constant ($6.67\times 10^{-11}$ meters cubed per kilogram per second squared), and the speed of light ($3\times 10^8$ meters per second), and we get a radius of,

$\frac{2\times 6.67\times 10^{-11}\times 14\times 10^{12}\times 1.78\times 10^{-36}}{\left(3\times 10^8\right)^2} = 3.7\times 10^{-50} \textrm{m}$

That, by the way, is amazingly tiny. The size of an atom is about $10^{-10}$ meters. If every atom was a tiny person, and each of that person’s atoms was itself a person, and so on for five levels down, then the atoms of the smallest person would be the same size as this event horizon.

Now, we let this little tiny black hole fall. Let’s imagine it falls directly towards the center of the Earth. The only force affecting it would be gravity (if it had an electrical charge, it would quickly attract a few electrons and become neutral). That means you can think of it as if it were falling through a tiny hole, with no friction, gobbling up anything unfortunate enough to fall within its event horizon.

For our first estimate, we’ll treat the black hole as if it stays the same size through its journey. Imagine the black hole travels through the entire earth, absorbing a cylinder of matter. Using the Earth’s average density of 5515 kilograms per cubic meter, and the Earth’s maximum radius of 6378 kilometers, our cylinder adds a mass of,

$\pi \times \left(3.7\times 10^{-50}\right)^2 \times 2 \times 6378\times 10^3\times 5515 = 3\times 10^{-88} \textrm{kg}$

That’s absurdly tiny. That’s much, much, much tinier than the mass we started out with. Absorbing an entire cylinder through the Earth makes barely any difference.

You might object, though, that the black hole is gaining mass as it goes. So really we ought to use a differential equation. If the black hole travels a distance r, absorbing mass as it goes at average Earth density $\rho$, then we find,

$\frac{dM}{dr}=\pi\rho\left(\frac{2GM(r)}{c^2}\right)^2$

Solving this, we get

$M(r)=\frac{M_0}{1- M_0 \pi\rho\left(\frac{2G}{c^2}\right)^2 r }$

Where $M_0$ is the mass we start out with.

Plug in the distance through the Earth for r, and we find…still about $3\times 10^{-88} \textrm{kg}$! It didn’t change very much, which makes sense, it’s a very very small difference!

But you might still object. A black hole falling through the Earth wouldn’t just go straight through. It would pass through, then fall back in. In fact, it would oscillate, from one side to the other, like a pendulum. This is actually a common problem to give physics students: drop an object through a hole in the Earth, neglect air resistance, and what does it do? It turns out that the time the object takes to travel through the Earth is independent of its mass, and equal to roughly 84.5 minutes.

So let’s ask a question: how long would it take for a black hole, oscillating like this, to double its mass?

We want to solve,

$2=\frac{1}{1- M_0 \pi\rho\left(\frac{2G}{c^2}\right)^2 r }$

so we need the black hole to travel a total distance of

$r=\frac{1}{2M_0 \pi\rho\left(\frac{2G}{c^2}\right)^2} = 5.3\times 10^{71} \textrm{m}$

That’s a huge distance! The Earth’s radius, remember, is 6378 kilometers. So traveling that far would take

$5.3\times 10^{71} \times 84.5/60/24/365 = 8\times 10^{67} \textrm{y}$

Ten to the sixty-seven years. Our universe is only about ten to the ten years old. In another five times ten to the nine years, the Sun will enter its red giant phase, and swallow the Earth. There simply isn’t enough time for this tiny tiny black hole to gobble up the world, before everything is already gobbled up by something else. Even in the most pessimistic way to walk through the calculation, it’s just not dangerous.

I hope that, if you were worried about black holes at the LHC, you’re not worried any more. But more than that, I hope you’ve learned three lessons. First, that even the highest-energy particle physics involves tiny energies compared to day-to-day experience. Second, that gravitational effects are tiny in the context of particle physics. And third, that with Wikipedia access, you too can answer questions like this. If you’re worried, you can make an estimate, and check!

# What Might Lie Beyond, and Why

As the new year approaches, people think about the future. Me, I’m thinking about the future of fundamental physics, about what might lie beyond the Standard Model. Physicists search for many different things, with many different motivations. Some are clear missing pieces, places where the Standard Model fails and we know we’ll need to modify it. Others are based on experience, with no guarantees but an expectation that, whatever we find, it will be surprising. Finally, some are cool possibilities, ideas that would explain something or fill in a missing piece but aren’t strictly necessary.

The Almost-Sure Things

Science isn’t math, so nothing here is really a sure thing. We might yet discover a flaw in important principles like quantum mechanics and special relativity, and it might be that an experimental result we trust turns out to be flawed. But if we chose to trust those principles, and our best experiments, then these are places we know the Standard Model is incomplete:

• Neutrino Masses: The original Standard Model’s neutrinos were massless. Eventually, physicists discovered this was wrong: neutrinos oscillate, switching between different types in a way they only could if they had different masses. This result is familiar enough that some think of it as already part of the Standard Model, not really beyond. But the masses of neutrinos involve unsolved mysteries: we don’t know what those masses are, but more, there are different ways neutrinos could have mass, and we don’t yet know which is present in nature. Neutrino masses also imply the existence of an undiscovered “sterile” neutrino, a particle that doesn’t interact with the strong, weak, or electromagnetic forces.
• Dark Matter Phenomena (and possibly Dark Energy Phenomena): Astronomers first suggested dark matter when they observed galaxies moving at speeds inconsistent with the mass of their stars. Now, they have observed evidence for it in a wide variety of situations, evidence which seems decisively incompatible with ordinary gravity and ordinary matter. Some solve this by introducing dark matter, others by modifying gravity, but this is more of a technical difference than it sounds: in order to modify gravity, one must introduce new quantum fields, much the same way one does when introducing dark matter. The only debate is how “matter-like” those fields need to be, but either approach goes beyond the Standard Model.
• Quantum Gravity: It isn’t as hard to unite quantum mechanics and gravity as you might think. Physicists have known for decades how to write down a naive theory of quantum gravity, one that follows the same steps one might use to derive the quantum theory of electricity and magnetism. The problem is, this theory is incomplete. It works at low energies, but as the energy increases it loses the ability to make predictions, eventually giving nonsensical answers like probabilities greater than one. We have candidate solutions to this problem, like string theory, but we might not know for a long time which solution is right.
• Landau Poles: Here’s a more obscure one. In particle physics we can zoom in and out in our theories, using similar theories at different scales. What changes are the coupling constants, numbers that determine the strength of the different forces. You can think of this in a loosely reductionist way, with the theories at smaller scales determining the constants for theories at larger scales. This gives workable theories most of the time, but it fails for at least one part of the Standard Model. In electricity and magnetism, the coupling constant increases as you zoom in. Eventually, it becomes infinite, and what’s more, does so at a finite energy scale. It’s still not clear how we should think about this, but luckily we won’t have to very soon: this energy scale is vastly vastly higher than even the scale of quantum gravity.
• Some Surprises Guarantee Others: The Standard Model is special in a way that gravity isn’t. Even if you dial up the energy, a Standard Model calculation will always “make sense”: you never get probabilities greater than one. This isn’t true for potential deviations from the Standard Model. If the Higgs boson turns out to interact differently than we expect, it wouldn’t just be a violation of the Standard Model on its own: it would guarantee mathematically that, at some higher energy, we’d have to find something new. That was precisely the kind of argument the LHC used to find the Higgs boson: without the Higgs, something new was guaranteed to happen within the energy range of the LHC to prevent impossible probability numbers.

The Argument from (Theoretical) Experience

Everything in this middle category rests on a particular sort of argument. It’s short of a guarantee, but stronger than a dream or a hunch. While the previous category was based on calculations in theories we already know how to write down, this category relies on our guesses about theories we don’t yet know how to write.

Suppose we had a deeper theory, one that could use fewer parameters to explain the many parameters of the Standard Model. For example, it might explain the Higgs mass, letting us predict it rather than just measuring it like we do now. We don’t have a theory like that yet, but what we do have are many toy model theories, theories that don’t describe the real world but do, in this case, have fewer parameters. We can observe how these theories work, and what kinds of discoveries scientists living in worlds described by them would make. By looking at this process, we can get a rough idea of what to expect, which things in our own world would be “explained” in other ways in these theories.

• The Hierarchy Problem: This is also called the naturalness problem. Suppose we had a theory that explained the mass of the Higgs, one where it wasn’t just a free parameter. We don’t have such a theory for the real Higgs, but we do have many toy models with similar behavior, ones with a boson with its mass determined by something else. In these models, though, the mass of the boson is always close to the energy scale of other new particles, particles which have a role in determining its mass, or at least in postponing that determination. This was the core reason why people expected the LHC to find something besides the Higgs. Without such new particles, the large hierarchy between the mass of the Higgs and the mass of new particles becomes a mystery, one where it gets harder and harder to find a toy model with similar behavior that still predicts something like the Higgs mass.
• The Strong CP Problem: The weak nuclear force does what must seem like a very weird thing, by violating parity symmetry: the laws that govern it are not the same when you flip the world in a mirror. This is also true when you flip all the charges as well, a combination called CP (charge plus parity). But while it may seem strange that the weak force violates this symmetry, physicists find it stranger that the strong force seems to obey it. Much like in the hierarchy problem, it is very hard to construct a toy model that both predicts a strong force that maintains CP (or almost maintains it) and doesn’t have new particles. The new particle in question, called the axion, is something some people also think may explain dark matter.
• Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry: We don’t know the theory of quantum gravity. Even if we did, the candidate theories we have struggle to describe conditions close to the Big Bang. But while we can’t prove it, many physicists expect the quantum gravity conditions near the Big Bang to produce roughly equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Instead, matter dominates: we live in a world made almost entirely of matter, with no evidence of large antimatter areas even far out in space. This lingering mystery could be explained if some new physics was biased towards matter instead of antimatter.
• Various Problems in Cosmology: Many open questions in cosmology fall in this category. The small value of the cosmological constant is mysterious for the same reasons the small value of the Higgs mass is, but at a much larger and harder to fix scale. The early universe surprises many cosmologists by its flatness and uniformity, which has led them to propose new physics. This surprise is not because such flatness and uniformity is mathematically impossible, but because it is not the behavior they would expect out of a theory of quantum gravity.

The Cool Possibilities

Some ideas for physics beyond the standard model aren’t required, either from experience or cold hard mathematics. Instead, they’re cool, and would be convenient. These ideas would explain things that look strange, or make for a simpler deeper theory, but they aren’t the only way to do so.

• Grand Unified Theories: Not the same as a “theory of everything”, Grand Unified Theories unite the three “particle physics forces”: the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism. Under such a theory, the different parameters that determine the strengths of those forces could be predicted from one shared parameter, with the forces only seeming different at low energies. These theories often unite the different matter particles too, but they also introduce new particles and new forces. These forces would, among other things, make protons unstable, and so giant experiments have been constructed to try to detect a proton decaying into other particles. So far none has been seen.
• Low-Energy Supersymmetry: String theory requires supersymmetry, a relationship where matter and force particles share many properties. That supersymmetry has to be “broken”, which means that while the matter and force particles have the same charges, they can have wildly different masses, so that the partner particles are all still undiscovered. Those masses may be extremely high, all the way up at the scale of quantum gravity, but they could also be low enough to test at the LHC. Physicists hoped to detect such particles, as they could have been a good solution to the hierarchy problem. Now that the LHC hasn’t found these supersymmetric particles, it is much harder to solve the problem this way, though some people are still working on it.
• Large Extra Dimensions: String theory also involves extra dimensions, beyond our usual three space and one time. Those dimensions are by default very small, but some proposals have them substantially bigger, big enough that we could have seen evidence for them at the LHC. These proposals could explain why gravity is so much weaker than the other forces. Much like the previous members of this category though, no evidence for this has yet been found.

I think these categories are helpful, but experts may quibble about some of my choices. I also haven’t mentioned every possible thing that could be found beyond the Standard Model. If you’ve heard of something and want to know which category I’d put it in, let me know in the comments!

# Simulated Wormhole Analogies

Last week, I talked about how Google’s recent quantum simulation of a toy model wormhole was covered in the press. What I didn’t say much about, was my own opinion of the result. Was the experiment important? Was it worth doing? Did it deserve the hype?

Here on this blog, I don’t like to get into those kinds of arguments. When I talk about public understanding of science, I share the same concerns as the journalists: we all want to prevent misunderstandings, and to spread a clearer picture. I can argue that some choices hurt the public understanding and some help it, and be reasonably confident that I’m saying something meaningful, something that would resonate with their stated values.

For the bigger questions, what goals science should have and what we should praise, I have much less of a foundation. We don’t all have a clear shared standard for which science is most important. There isn’t some premise I can posit, a fundamental principle I can use to ground a logical argument.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have an opinion, though. It doesn’t even mean I can’t persuade others of it. But it means the persuasion has to be a bit more loose. For example, I can use analogies.

So let’s say I’m looking at a result like this simulated wormhole. Researchers took advanced technology (Google’s quantum computer), and used it to model a simple system. They didn’t learn anything especially new about that system (since in this case, a normal computer can simulate it better). I get the impression they didn’t learn all that much about the advanced technology: the methods used, at this point, are pretty well-known, at least to Google. I also get the impression that it wasn’t absurdly expensive: I’ve seen other people do things of a similar scale with Google’s machine, and didn’t get the impression they had to pay through the nose for the privilege. Finally, the simple system simulated happens to be “cool”: it’s a toy model studied by quantum gravity researchers, a simple version of that sci-fi standard, the traversible wormhole.

What results are like that?

Occasionally, scientists build tiny things. If the tiny things are cute enough, or cool enough, they tend to get media attention. The most recent example I can remember was a tiny snowman, three microns tall. These tiny things tend to use very advanced technology, and it’s hard to imagine the scientists learn much from making them, but it’s also hard to imagine they cost all that much to make. They’re amusing, and they absolutely get press coverage, spreading wildly over the web. I don’t think they tend to get published in Nature unless they are a bit more advanced, but I wouldn’t be too surprised if I heard of a case that did, scientific journals can be suckers for cute stories too. They don’t tend to get discussed in glowing terms linking them to historical breakthroughs.

That seems like a pretty close analogy. Taken seriously, it would suggest the wormhole simulation was probably worth doing, probably worth a press release and some media coverage, likely not worth publication in Nature, and definitely not worth being heralded as a major breakthrough.

Ok, but proponents of the experiment might argue I’m leaving something out here. This experiment isn’t just a cute simulation. It’s supposed to be a proof of principle, an early version of an experiment that will be an actually useful simulation.

As an analogy for that…did you know LIGO started taking data in 2002?

Most people first heard of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in 2016, when they reported their first detection of gravitational waves. But that was actually “advanced LIGO”. The original LIGO ran from 2002 to 2010, and didn’t detect anything. It just wasn’t sensitive enough. Instead, it was a prototype, an early version designed to test the basic concept.

Similarly, while this wormhole situation didn’t teach anything new, future ones might. If the quantum simulation was made larger, it might be possible to simulate more complicated toy models, ones that are too complicated to simulate on a normal computer. These aren’t feasible now, but may be feasible with somewhat bigger quantum computers: still much smaller than the computers that would be needed to break encryption, or even to do simulations that are useful for chemists and materials scientists. Proponents argue that some of these quantum toy models might teach them something interesting about the mathematics of quantum gravity.

Here, though, a number of things weaken the analogy.

LIGO’s first run taught them important things about the noise they would have to deal with, things that they used to build the advanced version. The wormhole simulation didn’t show anything novel about how to use a quantum computer: the type of thing they were doing was well-understood, even if it hadn’t been used to do that yet.

Detecting gravitational waves opened up a new type of astronomy, letting us observe things we could never have observed before. For these toy models, it isn’t obvious to me that the benefit is so unique. Future versions may be difficult to classically simulate, but it wouldn’t surprise me if theorists figured out how to understand them in other ways, or gained the same insight from other toy models and moved on to new questions. They’ll have a while to figure it out, because quantum computers aren’t getting bigger all that fast. I’m very much not an expert in this type of research, so maybe I’m wrong about this…but just comparing to similar research programs, I would be surprised if the quantum simulations end up crucial here.

Finally, even if the analogy held, I don’t think it proves very much. In particular, as far as I can tell, the original LIGO didn’t get much press. At the time, I remember meeting some members of the collaboration, and they clearly didn’t have the fame the project has now. Looking through google news and the archives of the New York times, I can’t find all that much about the experiment: a few articles discussing its progress and prospects, but no grand unveiling, no big press releases.

So ultimately, I think viewing the simulation as a proof of principle makes it, if anything, less worth the hype. A prototype like that is only really valuable when it’s testing new methods, and only in so far as the thing it’s a prototype for will be revolutionary. Recently, a prototype fusion device got a lot of press for getting more energy out of a plasma than they put into it (though still much less than it takes to run the machine). People already complained about that being overhyped, and the simulated wormhole is nowhere near that level of importance.

If anything, I think the wormhole-simulators would be on a firmer footing if they thought of their work like the tiny snowmen. It’s cute, a fun side benefit of advanced technology, and as such something worth chatting about and celebrating a bit. But it’s not the start of a new era.

# Simulated Wormholes for My Real Friends, Real Wormholes for My Simulated Friends

Maybe you’ve recently seen a headline like this:

Actually, I’m more worried that you saw that headline before it was edited, when it looked like this:

Physicists have not created an actual wormhole. They have simulated a wormhole on a quantum computer.

If you’re willing to read more, then read the rest of this post. There’s a more subtle story going on here, both about physics and about how we communicate it. And for the experts, hold on, because when I say the wormhole was a simulation I’m not making the same argument everyone else is.

[And for the mega-experts, there’s an edit later in the post where I soften that claim a bit.]

The headlines at the top of this post come from an article in Quanta Magazine. Quanta is a web-based magazine covering many fields of science. They’re read by the general public, but they aim for a higher standard than many science journalists, with stricter fact-checking and a goal of covering more challenging and obscure topics. Scientists in turn have tended to be quite happy with them: often, they cover things we feel are important but that the ordinary media isn’t able to cover. (I even wrote something for them recently.)

Last week, Quanta published an article about an experiment with Google’s Sycamore quantum computer. By arranging the quantum bits (qubits) in a particular way, they were able to observe behaviors one would expect out of a wormhole, a kind of tunnel linking different points in space and time. They published it with the second headline above, claiming that physicists had created a wormhole with a quantum computer and explaining how, using a theoretical picture called holography.

This pissed off a lot of physicists. After push-back, Quanta’s twitter account published this statement, and they added the word “Holographic” to the title.

Why were physicists pissed off?

It wasn’t because the Quanta article was wrong, per se. As far as I’m aware, all the technical claims they made are correct. Instead, it was about two things. One was the title, and the implication that physicists “really made a wormhole”. The other was the tone, the excited “breaking news” framing complete with a video comparing the experiment with the discovery of the Higgs boson. I’ll discuss each in turn:

The Title

Did physicists really create a wormhole, or did they simulate one? And why would that be at all confusing?

The story rests on a concept from the study of quantum gravity, called holography. Holography is the idea that in quantum gravity, certain gravitational systems like black holes are fully determined by what happens on a “boundary” of the system, like the event horizon of a black hole. It’s supposed to be a hologram in analogy to 3d images encoded in 2d surfaces, rather than like the hard-light constructions of science fiction.

The best-studied version of holography is something called AdS/CFT duality. AdS/CFT duality is a relationship between two different theories. One of them is a CFT, or “conformal field theory”, a type of particle physics theory with no gravity and no mass. (The first example of the duality used my favorite toy theory, N=4 super Yang-Mills.) The other one is a version of string theory in an AdS, or anti-de Sitter space, a version of space-time curved so that objects shrink as they move outward, approaching a boundary. (In the first example, this space-time had five dimensions curled up in a sphere and the rest in the anti-de Sitter shape.)

These two theories are conjectured to be “dual”. That means that, for anything that happens in one theory, you can give an alternate description using the other theory. We say the two theories “capture the same physics”, even though they appear very different: they have different numbers of dimensions of space, and only one has gravity in it.

Many physicists would claim that if two theories are dual, then they are both “equally real”. Even if one description is more familiar to us, both descriptions are equally valid. Many philosophers are skeptical, but honestly I think the physicists are right about this one. Philosophers try to figure out which things are real or not real, to make a list of real things and explain everything else as made up of those in some way. I think that whole project is misguided, that it’s clarifying how we happen to talk rather than the nature of reality. In my mind, dualities are some of the clearest evidence that this project doesn’t make any sense: two descriptions can look very different, but in a quite meaningful sense be totally indistinguishable.

That’s the sense in which Quanta and Google and the string theorists they’re collaborating with claim that physicists have created a wormhole. They haven’t created a wormhole in our own space-time, one that, were it bigger and more stable, we could travel through. It isn’t progress towards some future where we actually travel the galaxy with wormholes. Rather, they created some quantum system, and that system’s dual description is a wormhole. That’s a crucial point to remember: even if they created a wormhole, it isn’t a wormhole for you.

If that were the end of the story, this post would still be full of warnings, but the title would be a bit different. It was going to be “Dual Wormholes for My Real Friends, Real Wormholes for My Dual Friends”. But there’s a list of caveats. Most of them arguably don’t matter, but the last was what got me to change the word “dual” to “simulated”.

1. The real world is not described by N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. N=4 super Yang-Mills theory was never intended to describe the real world. And while the real world may well be described by string theory, those strings are not curled up around a five-dimensional sphere with the remaining dimensions in anti-de Sitter space. We can’t create either theory in a lab either.
2. The Standard Model probably has a quantum gravity dual too, see this cute post by Matt Strassler. But they still wouldn’t have been able to use that to make a holographic wormhole in a lab.
3. Instead, they used a version of AdS/CFT with fewer dimensions. It relates a weird form of gravity in one space and one time dimension (called JT gravity), to a weird quantum mechanics theory called SYK, with an infinite number of quantum particles or qubits. This duality is a bit more conjectural than the original one, but still reasonably well-established.
4. Quantum computers don’t have an infinite number of qubits, so they had to use a version with a finite number: seven, to be specific. They trimmed the model down so that it would still show the wormhole-dual behavior they wanted. At this point, you might say that they’re definitely just simulating the SYK theory, using a small number of qubits to simulate the infinite number. But I think they could argue that this system, too, has a quantum gravity dual. The dual would have to be even weirder than JT gravity, and even more conjectural, but the signs of wormhole-like behavior they observed (mostly through simulations on an ordinary computer, which is still better at this kind of thing than a quantum computer) could be seen as evidence that this limited theory has its own gravity partner, with its own “real dual” wormhole.
5. But those seven qubits don’t just have the interactions they were programmed to have, the ones with the dual. They are physical objects in the real world, so they interact with all of the forces of the real world. That includes, though very weakly, the force of gravity.

And that’s where I think things break, and you have to call the experiment a simulation. You can argue, if you really want to, that the seven-qubit SYK theory has its own gravity dual, with its own wormhole. There are people who expect duality to be broad enough to include things like that.

But you can’t argue that the seven-qubit SYK theory, plus gravity, has its own gravity dual. Theories that already have gravity are not supposed to have gravity duals. If you pushed hard enough on any of the string theorists on that team, I’m pretty sure they’d admit that.

That is what decisively makes the experiment a simulation. It approximately behaves like a system with a dual wormhole, because you can approximately ignore gravity. But if you’re making some kind of philosophical claim, that you “really made a wormhole”, then “approximately” doesn’t cut it: if you don’t exactly have a system with a dual, then you don’t “really” have a dual wormhole: you’ve just simulated one.

Edit: mitchellporter in the comments points out something I didn’t know: that there are in fact proposals for gravity theories with gravity duals. They are in some sense even more conjectural than the series of caveats above, but at minimum my claim above, that any of the string theorists on the team would agree that the system’s gravity means it can’t have a dual, is probably false.

I think at this point, I’d soften my objection to the following:

Describing the system of qubits in the experiment as a limited version of the SYK theory is in one way or another an approximation. It approximates them as not having any interactions beyond those they programmed, it approximates them as not affected by gravity, and because it’s a quantum mechanical description it even approximates the speed of light as small. Those approximations don’t guarantee that the system doesn’t have a gravity dual. But in order for them to, then our reality, overall, would have to have a gravity dual. There would have to be a dual gravity interpretation of everything, not just the inside of Google’s quantum computer, and it would have to be exact, not just an approximation. Then the approximate SYK would be dual to an approximate wormhole, but that approximate wormhole would be an approximation of some “real” wormhole in the dual space-time.

That’s not impossible, as far as I can tell. But it piles conjecture upon conjecture upon conjecture, to the point that I don’t think anyone has explicitly committed to the whole tower of claims. If you want to believe that this experiment literally created a wormhole, you thus can, but keep in mind the largest asterisk known to mankind.

End edit.

If it weren’t for that caveat, then I would be happy to say that the physicists really created a wormhole. It would annoy some philosophers, but that’s a bonus.

But even if that were true, I wouldn’t say that in the title of the article.

The Title, Again

These days, people get news in two main ways.

Sometimes, people read full news articles. Reading that Quanta article is a good way to understand the background of the experiment, what was done and why people care about it. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t think anything said there was wrong, and they cover essentially all of the caveats you’d care about (except for that last one 😉 ).

Sometimes, though, people just see headlines. They get forwarded on social media, observed at a glance passed between friends. If you’re popular enough, then many more people will see your headline than will actually read the article. For many people, their whole understanding of certain scientific fields is formed by these glancing impressions.

Because of that, if you’re popular and news-y enough, you have to be especially careful with what you put in your headlines, especially when it implies a cool science fiction story. People will almost inevitably see them out of context, and it will impact their view of where science is headed. In this case, the headline may have given many people the impression that we’re actually making progress towards travel via wormholes.

Some of my readers might think this is ridiculous, that no-one would believe something like that. But as a kid, I did. I remember reading popular articles about wormholes, describing how you’d need energy moving in a circle, and other articles about optical physicists finding ways to bend light and make it stand still. Putting two and two together, I assumed these ideas would one day merge, allowing us to travel to distant galaxies faster than light.

If I had seen Quanta’s headline at that age, I would have taken it as confirmation. I would have believed we were well on the way to making wormholes, step by step. Even the New York Times headline, “the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine”, wouldn’t have fazed me.

(I’m not sure even the extra word “holographic” would have. People don’t know what “holographic” means in this context, and while some of them would assume it meant “fake”, others would think about the many works of science fiction, like Star Trek, where holograms can interact physically with human beings.)

Quanta has a high-brow audience, many of whom wouldn’t make this mistake. Nevertheless, I think Quanta is popular enough, and respectable enough, that they should have done better here.

At minimum, they could have used the word “simulated”. Even if they go on to argue in the article that the wormhole is real, and not just a simulation, the word in the title does no real harm. It would be a lie, but a beneficial “lie to children”, the basic stock-in-trade of science communication. I think they could have defended it to the string theorists they interviewed on those grounds.

The Tone

Honestly, I don’t think people would have been nearly so pissed off were it not for the tone of the article. There are a lot of physics bloggers who view themselves as serious-minded people, opposed to hype and publicity stunts. They view the research program aimed at simulating quantum gravity on a quantum computer as just an attempt to link a dying and un-rigorous research topic to an over-hyped and over-funded one, pompous storytelling aimed at promoting the careers of people who are already extremely successful.

These people tend to view Quanta favorably, because it covers serious-minded topics in a thorough way. And so many of them likely felt betrayed, seeing this Quanta article as a massive failure of that serious-minded-ness, falling for or even endorsing the hypiest of hype.

To those people, I’d like to politely suggest you get over yourselves.

Quanta’s goal is to cover things accurately, to represent all the facts in a way people can understand. But “how exciting something is” is not a fact.

Excitement is subjective. Just because most of the things Quanta finds exciting you also find exciting, does not mean that Quanta will find the things you find unexciting unexciting. Quanta is not on “your side” in some war against your personal notion of unexciting science, and you should never have expected it to be.

In fact, Quanta tends to find things exciting, in general. They were more excited than I was about the amplituhedron, and I’m an amplitudeologist. Part of what makes them consistently excited about the serious-minded things you appreciate them for is that they listen to scientists and get excited about the things they’re excited about. That is going to include, inevitably, things those scientists are excited about for what you think are dumb groupthinky hype reasons.

I think the way Quanta titled the piece was unfortunate, and probably did real damage. I think the philosophical claim behind the title is wrong, though for subtle and weird enough reasons that I don’t really fault anybody for ignoring them. But I don’t think the tone they took was a failure of journalistic integrity or research or anything like that. It was a matter of taste. It’s not my taste, it’s probably not yours, but we shouldn’t have expected Quanta to share our tastes in absolutely everything. That’s just not how taste works.

# Confidence and Friendliness in Science

I’ve seen three kinds of scientific cultures.

First, there are folks who are positive about almost everyone. Ask them about someone else’s lab, even a competitor, and they’ll be polite at worst, and often downright excited. Anyone they know, they’ll tell you how cool the work they’re doing is, how it’s important and valuable and worth doing. They might tell you they prefer a different approach, but they’ll almost never bash someone’s work.

I’ve heard this comes out of American culture, and I can kind of see it. There’s an attitude in the US that everything needs to be described as positively as possible. This is especially true in a work context. Negativity is essentially a death sentence, doled out extremely rarely: if you explicitly say someone or their work is bad, you’re trying to get them fired. You don’t do that unless someone really really deserves it.

That style of scientific culture is growing, but it isn’t universal. There’s still a big cultural group that is totally ok with negativity: as long as it’s directed at other people, anyway.

This scientific culture prides itself on “telling it like it is”. They’ll happily tell you about how everything everyone else is doing is bullshit. Sometimes, they claim their ideas are the only ways forward. Others will have a small number of other people who they trust, who have gained their respect in one way or another. This sort of culture is most stereotypically associated with Russians: a “Russian-style” seminar, for example, is one where the speaker is aggressively questioned for hours.

It may sound like those are the only two options, but there is a third. While “American-style” scientists don’t criticize anyone, and “Russian-style” scientists criticize everyone else, there are also scientists who criticize almost everyone, including themselves.

With a light touch, this culture can be one of the best. There can be a real focus on “epistemic humility”, on always being clear of how much we still don’t know.

However, it can be worryingly easy to spill past that light touch, into something toxic. When the criticism goes past humility and into a lack of confidence in your own work, you risk falling into a black hole, where nothing is going well and nobody has a way out. This kind of culture can spread, filling a workplace and infecting anyone who spends too long there with the conviction that nothing will ever measure up again.

If you can’t manage that light skeptical touch, then your options are American-style or Russian-style. I don’t think either is obviously better. Both have their blind spots: the Americans can let bad ideas slide to avoid rocking the boat, while the Russians can be blind to their own flaws, confident that because everyone else seems wrong they don’t need to challenge their own worldview.

You have one more option, though. Now that you know this, you can recognize each for what it is: not the one true view of the world, but just one culture’s approach to the truth. If you can do that, you can pick up each culture as you need, switching between them as you meet different communities and encounter different things. If you stay aware, you can avoid fighting over culture and discourse, and use your energy on what matters: the science.

# From Journal to Classroom

As part of the pedagogy course I’ve been taking, I’m doing a few guest lectures in various courses. I’ve got one coming up in a classical mechanics course (“intermediate”-level, so not Newton’s laws, but stuff the general public doesn’t know much about like Hamiltonians). They’ve been speeding through the core content, so I got to cover a “fun” topic, and after thinking back to my grad school days I chose a topic I think they’ll have a lot of fun with: Chaos theory.

Chaos is one of those things everyone has a vague idea about. People have heard stories where a butterfly flaps its wings and causes a hurricane. Maybe they’ve heard of the rough concept, determinism with strong dependence on the initial conditions, so a tiny change (like that butterfly) can have huge consequences. Maybe they’ve seen pictures of fractals, and got the idea these are somehow related.

Its role in physics is a bit more detailed. It’s one of those concepts that “intermediate classical mechanics” is good for, one that can be much better understood once you’ve been introduced to some of the nineteenth century’s mathematical tools. It felt like a good way to show this class that the things they’ve learned aren’t just useful for dusty old problems, but for understanding something the public thinks is sexy and mysterious.

As luck would have it, the venerable textbook the students are using includes a (2000’s era) chapter on chaos. I read through it, and it struck me that it’s a very different chapter from most of the others. This hit me particularly when I noticed a section describing a famous early study of chaos, and I realized that all the illustrations were based on the actual original journal article.

On the one hand, there’s a big fashion right now for something called research-based teaching. That doesn’t mean “using teaching methods that are justified by research” (though you’re supposed to do that too), but rather, “tying your teaching to current scientific research”. This is a fashion that makes sense, because learning about cutting-edge research in an undergraduate classroom feels pretty cool. It lets students feel more connected with the scientific community, it inspires them to get involved, and it gets them more used to what “real research” looks like.

On the other hand, structuring your textbook based on the original research papers feels kind of lazy. There’s a reason we don’t teach Newtonian mechanics the way Newton would have. Pedagogy is supposed to be something we improve at over time: we come up with better examples and better notation, more focused explanations that teach what we want students to learn. If we just summarize a paper, we’re not really providing “added value”: we should hope, at this point, that we can do better.

Thinking about this, I think the distinction boils down to why you’re teaching the material in the first place.

With a lot of research-based teaching, the goal is to show the students how to interact with current literature. You want to show them journal papers, not because the papers are the best way to teach a concept or skill, but because reading those papers is one of the skills you want to teach.

That makes sense for very current topics, but it seems a bit weird for the example I’ve been looking at, an early study of chaos from the 60’s. It’s great if students can read current papers, but they don’t necessarily need to read older ones. (At least, not yet.)

What then, is the textbook trying to teach? Here things get a bit messy. For a relatively old topic, you’d ideally want to teach not just a vague impression of what was discovered, but concrete skills. Here though, those skills are just a bit beyond the students’ reach: chaos is more approachable than you’d think, but still not 100% something the students can work with. Instead they’re learning to appreciate concepts. This can be quite valuable, but it doesn’t give the kind of structure that a concrete skill does. In particular, it makes it hard to know what to emphasize, beyond just summarizing the original article.

In this case, I’ve come up with my own way forward. There are actually concrete skills I’d like to teach. They’re skills that link up with what the textbook is teaching, skills grounded in the concepts it’s trying to convey, and that makes me think I can convey them. It will give some structure to the lesson, a focus on not merely what I’d like the students to think but what I’d like them to do.

I won’t go into too much detail: I suspect some of the students may be reading this, and I don’t want to spoil the surprise! But I’m looking forward to class, and to getting to try another pedagogical experiment.

# The Folks With the Best Pictures

Sometimes I envy astronomers. Particle physicists can write books full of words and pages of colorful graphs and charts, and the public won’t retain any of it. Astronomers can mesmerize the world with a single picture.

NASA just released the first images from its James Webb Space Telescope. They’re impressive, and not merely visually: in twelve hours, they probe deeper than the Hubble Space Telescope managed in weeks on the same patch of sky, as well as gathering data that can show what kinds of molecules are present in the galaxies.

(If you’re curious how the James Webb images compare to Hubble ones, here’s a nice site comparing them.)

Images like this enter the popular imagination. The Hubble telescope’s deep field has appeared on essentially every artistic product one could imagine. As of writing this, searching for “Hubble” on Etsy gives almost 5,000 results. “JWST”, the acronym for the James Webb Space Telescope, already gives over 1,000, including several on the front page that already contain just-released images. Despite the Large Hadron Collider having operated for over a decade, searching “LHC” also leads to just around 1,000 results…and a few on the front page are actually pictures of the JWST!

It would be great as particle physicists to have that kind of impact…but I think we shouldn’t stress ourselves too much about it. Ultimately astronomers will always have this core advantage. Space is amazing, visually stunning and mind-bogglingly vast. It has always had a special place for human cultures, and I’m happy for astronomers to inherit that place.

# Proxies for Proxies

Why pay scientists?

Maybe you care about science itself. You think that exploring the world should be one of our central goals as human beings, that it “makes our country worth defending”.

Maybe you care about technology. You support science because, down the line, you think it will give us new capabilities that improve people’s lives. Maybe you expect this to happen directly, or maybe indirectly as “spinoff” inventions like the internet.

Maybe you just think science is cool. You want the stories that science tells: they entertain you, they give you a place in the world, they help distract from the mundane day to day grind.

Maybe you just think that the world ought to have scientists in it. You can think of it as a kind of bargain, maintaining expertise so that society can tackle difficult problems. Or you can be more cynical, paying early-career scientists on the assumption that most will leave academia and cheapen labor costs for tech companies.

Maybe you want to pay the scientists to teach, to be professors at universities. You notice that they don’t seem to be happy if you don’t let them research, so you throw a little research funding at them, as a treat.

In most jobs, you’re supposed to do what people pay you to do. As a scientist, the people who pay you have all of these motivations and more. You can’t simply choose to do what people pay you to do.

So you come up with a proxy. You sum up all of these ideas, into a vague picture of what all those people want. You have some idea of scientific quality: not just a matter of doing science correctly and carefully, but doing interesting science. It’s not something you ever articulate. It’s likely even contradictory, after all, the goals it approximates often are. Nonetheless, it’s your guide, and not just your guide: it’s the guide of those who hire you, those who choose if you get promoted or whether you get more funding. All of these people have some vague idea in their head of what makes good science, their own proxy for the desires of the vast mass of voters and decision-makers and funders.

But of course, the standard is still vague. Should good science be deep? Which topics are deeper than others? Should it be practical? Practical for whom? Should it be surprising? What do you expect to happen, and what would surprise you? Should it get the community excited? Which community?

As a practicing scientist, you have to build your own proxy for these proxies. The same work that could get you hired in one place might meet blank stares at another, and you can’t build your life around those unpredictable quirks. So you make your own vague idea of what you’re supposed to do, an alchemy of what excites you and what makes an impact and what your friends are doing. You build a stand-in in your head, on the expectation that no-one else will have quite the same stand-in, then go out and convince the other stand-ins to give money to your version. You stand on a shifting pile of unwritten rules, subtler even than some artists, because at the end of the day there’s never a real client to be seen. Just another proxy.

# Gateway Hobbies

When biologists tell stories of their childhoods, they’re full of trails of ants and fireflies in jars. Lots of writers start young, telling stories on the playground and making skits with their friends. And the mere existence of “chemistry sets” tells you exactly how many chemists get started. Many fields have these “gateway hobbies”, like gateway drugs for careers, ways that children and teenagers get hooked and gain experience.

Physics is a little different, though. While kids can play with magnets and electricity, there aren’t a whole lot of other “physics hobbies”, especially for esoteric corners like particle physics. Instead, the “gateway hobbies” of physics are more varied, drawing from many different fields.

First, of course, even if a child can’t “do physics”, they can always read about it. Kids will memorize the names of quarks, read about black holes, or watch documentaries about string theory. I’m not counting this as a “physics hobby” because it isn’t really: physics isn’t a collection of isolated facts, but of equations: frameworks you can use to make predictions. Reading about the Big Bang is a good way to get motivated and excited, it’s a great thing to do…but it doesn’t prepare you for the “science part” of the science.

A few efforts at physics popularization get a bit more hands-on. Many come in the form of video games. You can get experience with relativity through Velocity Raptor, quantum mechanics through Quantum Chess, or orbital mechanics through Kerbal Space Program. All of these get just another bit closer to “doing physics” rather than merely reading about it.

One can always gain experience in other fields, and that can be surprisingly relevant. Playing around with a chemistry set gives first-hand experience of the kinds of things that motivated quantum mechanics, and some things that still motivate condensed matter research. Circuits are physics, more directly, even if they’re also engineering: and for some physicists, designing electronic sensors is a huge part of what they do.

Astronomy has a special place, both in the history of physics and the pantheon of hobbies. There’s a huge amateur astronomy community, one that both makes real discoveries and reaches out to kids of all ages. Many physicists got their start looking at the heavens, using it like Newton’s contemporaries as a first glimpse into the mechanisms of nature.

More and more research in physics involves at least some programming, and programming is another activity kids have access to in spades, from Logo to robotics competitions. Learning how to program isn’t just an important skill: it’s also a way for young people to experience a world bound by clear laws and logic, another motivation to study physics.

Of course, if you’re interested in rules and logic, why not go all the way? Plenty of physicists grew up doing math competitions. I have fond memories of Oregon’s Pentagames, and the more “serious” activities go all the way up to the famously challenging Putnam Competition.

Finally, there are physics competitions too, at least in the form of the International Physics Olympiad, where high school students compete in physics prowess.

Not every physicist did these sorts of things, of course: some got hooked later. Others did more than one. A friend of mine who’s always been “Mr. Science” got almost the whole package, with a youth spent exploring the wild west of the early internet, working at a planetarium, and discovering just how easy it is to get legal access to dangerous and radioactive chemicals. There are many paths in to physics, so even if kids can’t “do physics” the same way they “do chemistry”, there’s still plenty to do!

# Keeping It Colloquial

In the corners of academia where I hang out, a colloquium is a special kind of talk. Most talks we give are part of weekly seminars for specific groups. For example, the theoretical particle physicists here have a seminar. Each week we invite a speaker, who gives a talk on their recent work. Since they expect an audience of theoretical particle physicists, they can go into more detail.

A colloquium isn’t like that. Colloquia are talks for the whole department: theorists and experimentalists, particle physicists and biophysicists. They’re more prestigious, for big famous professors (or sometimes, for professors interviewing for jobs…). The different audience, and different context, means that the talk plays by different rules.

Recently, I saw a conference full of “colloquium-style” talks, trying to play by these rules. Some succeeded, some didn’t…and I think I now have a better idea of how those rules work.

First, in a colloquium, you’re not just speaking for yourself. You’re an ambassador for your field. For some of the audience, this might be the first time they’ve heard a talk by someone who does your kind of research. You want to give them a good impression, not just about you, but about the whole topic. So while you definitely want to mention your own work, you want to tell a full story, one that gives more than a glimpse of what others are doing as well.

Second, you want to connect to something the audience already knows. With an audience of physicists, you can assume a certain baseline, but not much more than that. You need to make the beginning accessible and start with something familiar. For the conference I mentioned, a talk that did this well was the talk on exoplanets, which started with the familiar planets of the solar system, classifying them in order to show what you might expect exoplanets to look like. In contrast, t’Hooft’s talk did this poorly. His work is exploiting a loophole in a quantum-mechanical argument called Bell’s theorem, which most physicists have heard of. Instead of mentioning Bell’s theorem, he referred vaguely to “criteria from philosophers”, and only even mentioned that near the end of the talk, instead starting with properties of quantum mechanics his audience was much less familiar with.

Moving on, then, you want to present a mystery. So far, everything in the talk has made sense, and your audience feels like they understand. Now, you show them something that doesn’t fit, something their familiar model can’t accommodate. This activates your audience’s scientist instincts: they’re curious now, they want to know the answer. A good example from the conference was a talk on chemistry in space. The speaker emphasized that we can see evidence of complex molecules in space, but that space dust is so absurdly dilute that it seems impossible such molecules could form: two atoms could go a billion years without meeting each other.

You can’t just leave your audience mystified, though. You next have to solve the mystery. Ideally, your solution will be something smart, but simple: something your audience can intuitively understand. This has two benefits. First, it makes you look smart: you described a mysterious problem, and then you show how to solve it! Second, it makes the audience feel smart: they felt the problem was hard, but now they understand how to solve it too. The audience will have good feelings about you as a result, and good feelings about the topic: in some sense, you’ve tied a piece of their self-esteem to knowing the solution to your problem. This was well-done by the speaker discussing space chemistry, who explained that the solution was chemistry on surfaces: if two atoms are on the surface of a dust grain or meteorite, they’re much more likely to react. It was also well-done by a speaker discussing models of diseases like diabetes: he explained the challenge of controlling processes with cells, when cells replicate exponentially, and showed one way they could be controlled, when the immune system kills off any cells that replicate much faster than their neighbors. (He also played the guitar to immune system-themed songs…also a good colloquium strategy for those who can pull it off!)

Finally, a picture is worth a thousand wordsas long as it’s a clear one. For an audience that won’t follow most of your equations, it’s crucial to show them something visual: graphics, puns, pictures of equipment or graphs. Crucially, though, your graphics should be something the audience can understand. If you put up a graph with a lot of incomprehensible detail: parameters you haven’t explained, or just set up in a way your audience doesn’t get, then your audience gets stuck. Much like an unfamiliar word, a mysterious graph will have members of the audience scratching their heads, trying to figure out what it means. They’ll be so busy trying, they’ll miss what you say next, and you’ll lose them! So yes, put in graphs, put in pictures: but make sure that the ones you use, you have time to explain.