THIS was a huge year for me professionally, and also one of the hardest years of my life personally. I won four awards for science writing, including three for my book The Disordered Cosmos. But my dear Uncle George Preudhomme passed away, and saying goodbye was extremely difficult. Death is, unsurprisingly, often hard because we want people to go on forever. And perhaps the strangest thing about 2022 is that it feels like we are beginning to confront a kind of real-life science fiction where that will become possible.
Just a week after Uncle George’s funeral, became available for use. Those behind it, at Open AI, describe it as “a conversational AI system that listens, learns, and challenges”. Effectively, it is an artificial intelligence that anyone can converse with, just like a text message exchange or an instant messenger. The discussions about this on social media brought to mind a short story by Alexander Weinstein (no relation, as far as I know), The Year of Nostalgia. In it, a man who recently lost his wife provides all records of her to a service that creates an artificial, holographic version of her that he can talk to. Effectively, she is a ChatGPT that is trained on the words of a dead woman.
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Weinstein’s characters grapple with whether the hologram is equivalent to the real thing. It should be obvious the answer is “no”, but the same week that ChatGPT opened for public use, a somewhat-related controversy roiled the science communications community. The California Institute of Technology put out a press release stating that Maria Spiropulu and her colleagues had, for the first time, used a quantum computer to simulate a wormhole, a hypothetical structure that connects distant points in space-time.
To cover this story, various publications produced headlines like this one – subsequently changed – from , “Physicists create a wormhole using a quantum computer”. Yet the very second sentence of the press release opens: “The experiment has not created an actual wormhole…” Drama ensued on Twitter.
Scientists, myself included, were annoyed. There is a difference between a simulation and the real thing and this seems obvious when we talk about simulating a dead person versus someone actually being alive. In our daily work, my group runs simulations of dark matter candidates with various properties and in different astrophysical scenarios to get a sense of how that dark matter would behave if it were real. At no point do we conclude that we have made real, physically tangible dark matter in the process.
The argument that this wormhole scenario is different comes down to the quantum nature of the simulation machine. Theoretical physicists who work on quantum gravity have proposed that specific types of quantum systems are connected to wormholes – in a simplified space-time that is different from the one we live in. As a result, some would argue that the quantum phenomenon is identical to a wormhole. I think this is the wrong take – it is still just a simulation – and experts on quantum computing and quantum gravity seem to largely agree with me.
But the fact that there was a debate at all is intriguing. Is our constantly evolving relationship with technology shifting our sensibilities about what is real? I think 2023 will provide interesting data about the emerging answer to this question. As Weinstein’s story shows, this has implications well beyond physics.
Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy, and a core faculty member in women’s studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her research in theoretical physics focuses on cosmology, neutron stars and particles beyond the standard model.
