- On December 1st, 2022,
the journal "Nature" published a cover story
about a holographic wormhole.
It was purportedly created inside a quantum computer
to probe the intersection of quantum mechanics and gravity.
The story kicked off a frenzy of tweets and news headlines.
- Nobody has seen the wormhole.
Nobody has produced one.
- Well, we'll take the world's best
quantum computer and see if we can map that
into building the wormhole.
- The wormhole becomes traversable, it opens.
You really can go through.
- Bull (beep). (host laughing)
(magnets clicking)
- This video is sponsored by Shopify.
The problem was, of course,
that no wormhole had been created.
- It feeds on itself, right?
When one story starts,
then other media outlets grab hold of it
and so it spreads very, very quickly.
- What actually happened is that a super,
a quantum computer is built
and within this quantum computer,
you can do some calculations.
Calculations that can be done with my iPhone
because all the most powerful quantum computers today,
at most do calculations
that can easily be done on my iPhone.
- You basically have something
that represents the mathematics of a wormhole.
But the way the story was sold, of course,
is that in doing this, whatever calculation they did,
they had created the wormhole.
- They say so in the same sense in which I could say,
"Look, my children has built a rocket
"that goes to the moon."
Say, "Wow, what kind of child you have?
"Yeah, here it is."
And I show you a little sketch on a piece of paper
when there is a drawing of a rocket going to the moon
and say, "Look!"
So what the quantum computer has done is exactly that.
There's a little sketch of what could be perhaps a warm hole
in some hypothetical theory, which is probably wrong.
Is this interesting?
Yes, it is interesting
because the fact that with quantum computers
you can do these things mean that quantum computers,
a little bit, sort of begin working.
So people get excited about that and then they go out
and tell to the world, "Oh, we've created a wormhole
"in a quantum computer,"
over overemphasizing the wormhole,
which probably don't exist, the theory being used of that,
which probably is wrong,
and the utility of quantum computers,
which is not yet there.
So that's an example of bad communication,
very bad communication.
I was embarrassed,
I was angry with my colleagues who did that.
- To me, it looks like the source
of this problem is bad incentives.
Scientists need to secure funding for their research
and increasingly that depends on
attracting public attention to their work.
- It's just become part of the culture of science,
that it's expected that you will have some
sort of media attention
and to get that attention, you have to sell your science
and often it's not the result of the science
that is the story, it's something else.
- Universities seek to promote themselves
to attract students and bolster their reputations.
- And nowhere in the scientific method is,
and you release a press release,
but it's just become part of the norm now.
- Press releases simplify and may overstate the research
and journalists just want to get
as many clicks on their stories as they can.
The end result of this incentivized game
of telephone can be oversimplified
sensationalized headlines, science that is just plain wrong.
Now, I myself have been guilty
of over-hyping a science story.
Back in 2014, I made a video about the bicep two experiment.
So this is one of the hugest discoveries
in science of all time.
Researchers reportedly detected polarization
in the cosmic microwave background radiation.
Allegedly it was caused by gravitational fluctuations
just a fraction of a second after the big bang.
The result was considered the first real evidence
of the quantum nature of gravity
and a smoking gun for inflation theory.
Experimenters even surprised Andre Lind,
one of the founders of inflation theory with the news.
- Let's just hope that it is not a trick.
I always leave with this feeling,
what if I'm tricked?
What if I believe in this just because it is beautiful?
- Unfortunately, further observations showed
that it was likely just dust in our own galaxy
rather than primordial gravitational waves
that created the polarization in the CMB.
So I took down my video
and to this day I am wary about making videos
about breaking science news.
Like any type of breaking news, there is a high probability
that early reports will turn out to be wrong.
Just a few months ago, a paper was uploaded
to the Archive Pre-print Server
claiming to have discovered the first room temperature
ambient pressure superconductor.
This again triggered a flood of media attention.
- [Reporter] A monumental breakthrough,
room temperature superconductor LK99.
- One of the most important scientific
breakthroughs of the 21st century.
- If the discovery were real, it would've been a big deal.
- The room temperature superconductor stuff,
of course, is such a dream 'cause if it worked,
it would revolutionize everything, right?
Transmission of energy, that kind of stuff.
The world would be different if it worked.
- But even before attempts to replicate the material
and its properties failed,
there were clear signs that the claim was false.
In the only published plot showing resistivity
versus temperature, the resistivity did not drop to zero
as you'd expect at the supposed critical temperature.
Instead, it continued to decrease below this value.
Plus the resistivity scale was given in units
of 10 to the minus two ohm centimeters.
On that scale, any ordinary conductor
would appear to have zero resistivity.
Copper's resistivity, for example,
is on the order of 10 to the minus six ohm centimeters.
A video showed the material apparently levitating
above a permanent magnet in a supposed demonstration
of the Meisner effect.
But in that same video, the material
also sticks to the magnet,
something a superconductor would not do.
And finally there is this plot,
showing that over the past a hundred years,
scientists have found new materials
with progressively higher critical temperatures.
But as of now, all the highest temperature materials
only super conduct at very high pressures.
For an ambient pressure room temperature superconductor,
we would need a jump in critical temperature
of around 125 degrees Celsius.
That's a lot and this brings up the point
that it is the most unexpected and surprising results
that get the most attention,
but it is also these very same results
that are the most likely to be false.
In social science, it's been shown that studies
that later fail to be replicated,
receive on average 153 more citations
than studies that can be replicated.
Similar buzz surrounds faulty research
in the physical sciences.
- The Italians, I'm Italian,
came out announcing into the world some time ago
that the neutrino was faster than light
and then measured it and it turned out to be a plug
that was not fitting well
and so the entire machine was not working well.
- When the truth is discovered,
it rarely gets as much attention as the original finding.
- The fallout where everybody was going,
"Oh, well this doesn't work and this doesn't look right
"and there's no way this material can do
"what they say it's doing."
That sort of fizzles in the background,
it doesn't get the same media attention.
- There is the apt saying,
"A lie can travel around the world
"while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
But that saying might need to be updated
in the age of social media when lies now have
an even greater advantage.
Do you think it's a bigger problem now than it used to be?
- I must admit that I think it's getting worse.
I think there's a feeling
that you've got to change the world
to be noticed by the media.
- Over-hyping science discoveries can give people
a false sense of how science works.
If that latest discovery I hear about turns out to be false,
what else could be untrue?
- People keep telling me that cosmology's in crisis
and all this kind of stuff because that's the kind of stories
they hear in the media.
Eventually people will say,
"Well, why are we funding these things
"if it's always just turmoil?"
- Making bold unsubstantiated claims
also reduces trust in scientists.
- So we are enlarging a little bit.
The conversation here is not just single pieces of news.
I think there are entire fields which are hyped.
- Wait, entire fields of science that are-
- Yes. - Hyped.
- Yes.
- But aren't really legit
or just they're all hot air or...
- Oh no, no, they're not hot air.
- [Host] Fusion, fusion's big in the news.
People think it's close, right?
There's startups,
there's people getting billions of dollars.
- Exactly, I don't know where we are there.
Again, it's not my field,
but there was one particular announcement,
what is it?
One year ago or something.
- [Host] I remember this announcement.
- Scientists have produced a nuclear fusion reaction
that created more energy than was expended,
a breakthrough to tap into the same kind of energy
that powers the sun and the stars.
- Simply put, this is one of the most
impressive scientific feats of the 21st century.
(audience applauding) Right?
(audience applauding)
- Which is bull (beep) again
because it was in the context of military research,
nuclear energy, basically for weapons in a way of doing it,
which at the present, has no visible way
of how to become industrial way of producing energy.
- [Host] Yeah, there's no way to scale.
- There's no way to scale it up.
- [Host] This is just lasers at appellate.
- Just little thing and you compress it enormously
and then it's basically it explodes
because it's a mini, mini nuclear explosion
and then you have more energy
than the actual pressure energy
that was needed to compress it.
That's correct, but you need huge amount of,
excessive energy for doing that.
That was sold as a big step toward the solving the energetic
problem of the world, but it's not.
- Back in '87, fusion,
already people were talking about it
like it's around the corner.
We just need 20 years more work and we'll crack it.
And we have exactly the same story today
with the current experiments.
- Something that is not overhyped
is this video sponsor, Shopify.
And I would know, because I've been
personally using Shopify for eight years.
You know something a lot of people don't know about me
is that before I was a YouTuber,
I worked as a science teacher at a tutoring company
in Sydney.
But I was always frustrated by this misconception
students had that bonds store energy, they don't.
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of the traditional ball and stick model of molecules.
One where the atoms snapped together magnetically.
I came across these little ball magnets
and in my first prototype I pushed them
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(magnets clicking)
But one thing I had no clue about
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They had simple templates.
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Shopify allowed me to process payments,
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Plus, it also integrates
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So, for example, I could offer multiple different methods
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I also got set up for Google shopping
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The whole store runs with very little attention from me,
which is great because I'm always working on the next video.
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I highly recommend Shopify to anyone
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And now back to science hype.
Science is interesting in that you can divide it up
into basically two categories.
One is an established body of knowledge
and the other is speculations, things that might be true,
but we don't really have any solid evidence for them yet.
And because there can be an infinity of bad ideas
and only one truth,
most of these speculations are likely wrong.
But the way certain topics are discussed in the media,
it may be impossible to tell
if they're part of the established body of knowledge
or just very fanciful speculation.
- There are too many books out there saying,
"We have understood that the world's
"made by strings and string theory."
It's not true, not at all.
We have not understood that the world
is described as string theory.
We have a very interesting tentative theory,
which is string theory, which has that some success
and some failures and that's interesting.
If you want to tell about this research,
do tell about this research,
but don't tell people that
it's what we have learned about the world.
- One question I have is,
how do we get past the over-hyping of science?
Because it seems like the system is set up
to reward over-hyping.
It rewards the journalists 'cause they get the clicks.
It rewards the scientists,
they may get the money or the attention.
So I don't know, I'm kind of curious
whether a solution is possible.
- Yeah, I think there is one,
and it's exactly what you're doing.
By talking about the fact
that there is a risk of overhyping.
If I can go out and say,
"Oh, my quantum computer produced a wormhole,"
and nobody says anything, that's a problem.
If we talk about the risk of over-hyping,
if we talk about the risk of presenting ideas,
theories, radical results,
which are very, very tentative, as solid,
then we sort of immunize ourself against this danger.
- Science is not presented on the news
like sport is presented on the news.
At the end of the news, you get 10 minutes of sports
where they will talk about the fact
that somebody kicked a ball around in a field
and it's not that particularly important.
So you get the full rundown
of lots of bits and pieces of what's going on.
But to get a science story,
it has to be Earth shattering kind of thing.
It has to be a big story.
What many scientists would like is this larger picture
of the fact that the entire enterprise is moving forward.
That there are lots of things happening
and we definitely know more tomorrow than we do today,
but that's not the way that it gets picked up by the media.
- Well, ultimately, almost everyone is incentivized
to sensationalize scientific findings.
So I think it's important to remember that
anytime you hear a science story on the news,
surprising, unexpected results
that have not been independently replicated,
they are more likely than not to be wrong.
But despite this, I remain convinced that science
is the best way to get at the truth.
I mean, sure, in the short term,
some may seek the spotlight
by rushing the data analysis,
overstating results or circumventing peer review.
but in the long term,
that is not going to win you the Nobel Prize.
The bold claims, mistakes and dead ends,
they will fade into oblivion
and only sound science that is vigorously tested
and independently validated,
that is what makes it into the accepted body of knowledge.
(magnets clicking)