The Brobdingnagian difficulties of communicating frontier science captured in two links:
(1) Hannah Devlin's Guardian article on Jonathan Oppenheim's proposal to resolve the incompatibility between quantum mechanics & general relativity:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/dec/04/wobbly-spacetime-may-resolve-contradictory-physics-theories
(2) The 158-equation Nature paper by Oppenheim & collaborators on the theory & possible tests: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43348-2#Sec9
Kudos to Hannah for even attempting to take this on & no, I don't understand Jonathan's work either 😬✌️
@markmccaughrean Your post puts me in mind of late 2022 when news reports were making it sound like someone had created a wormhole in a lab, when, in fact, they had executed a quantum computation that approximated a field theory process that is conjectured to be mathematically dual to a wormhole (in a different dimension and geometry of spacetime than we have).
In that case I was grateful for the article by @JenLucPiquant clarifying the matter:
@markmccaughrean "entanglement" eh? Surely no pun intended. ;-)
Yes, I was very excited when I saw that story on the dimethyl sulphide until I got to the part where it was only a 1-sigma detection, at which point it seemed rather premature for the popular press to be getting excited. It's still interesting work, but it's clearly a "more research is needed" situation, especially considering IIRC there was a previous putative H2O detection for the same planet that "evaporated" when further data was taken.
@internic Yeah, 1 sigma is noise – no kind of detection whatsoever. It should never have been mentioned by the scientists involved. I wouldn’t say it was premature: it was irresponsible.
@markmccaughrean Right, I'm not aware of any scientific context in which 1 sigma is considered significant.
I never saw whether there was a journal publication about it. I would hope no journal would deem a 1-sigma signal worthy of publication.
@internic @JenLucPiquant Yes, I remember that daft story doing the rounds.
Of course in some cases, the scientists or their institutional PR teams get a little creative with their story-telling in order to excite the media (the 1 sigma “detection” of possibly biochemical dimethyl sulphide in an exoplanet atmosphere comes to mind), which of course adds a whole other entanglement to the interface.