From:
c.h.thompson
Sent: 27
June 2003 23:14
To:
letters@newscientist.com
Subject: The
real world is not a simulation
The Editor
Dear Sir
It's all
very well crazy theorists thinking the whole universe is a simulation, but that
does not justify treating computer simulations done by researchers as if they
were real experiments! Twice in the
past few weeks you have, I regret to say, been guilty. What I'm talking about this time is the
article by Charles Choi (June 21, page 17).
On the cover we find "Molecules without electrons". Inside we read that it is "time to
chuck out another well-known scientific 'fact' -- that to persuade positively
charged atomic nuclei to bind together into molecules you need negatively
charged electrons to balance out the repulsion". Now this may or may not be the case, but the fact is that they
have not yet done the experiment!
They've only simulated it!
On May 10,
p28, Michael Brooks (or someone else on his behalf?) committed a similar crime,
again with sensational announcements on the cover. His article "Curiouser and curiouser" was presented as
if there had been some kind of breakthrough that enabled us to "see inside
the quantum world"! Nothing of
the kind! The main story was about some
purely theoretical work -- a thought-experiment, not a real one. A few real experiments were discussed,
but their interpretation was far from self-evident. The statement in the cover
headline was blatantly false.
Could you
possibly try and return to your old standards? I don't think my memory is deceiving me when it says that this is
a recent trend ... or is it? The
substitution of simulations for real experiments is new, but was it so very
different when you fell with glee on the story of Tittel measuring the speed of
quantum information 2000? Sensation
sells copy! I was not taking the New
Scientist when Alain Aspect came into the limelight in 1982 or so. I imagine his experiments would have gained
him the headline "Quantum entanglement confirmed: quantum partices can
interact instantaneously, however far apart they are". Ah well, at least he had done real
experiments. It's a shame the story of
the "realists" who tried to tell the world that they did not
show anything impossible did not seem quite so newsworthy. Yes, you mentioned them, but only in a book
review ...
Yours
sincerely
Caroline H
Thompson
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