Here's an abstract to one of your "papers": "The paper presents selected tools, as described by their developers. The list includes Hello Quantum, Hello Qiskit, Particle in a Box, Psi and Delta, QPlayLearn, Virtual Lab by Quantum Flytrap, Quantum Odyssey..."

Et patati et patata - no way to tell what you're about with your review other than enumeration and platitudes. Yet you criticize authors of a review paper (detail revealed by immediate next sentence, one you curiously decided to omit from quoting) that clearly state their angle first and at least have something to say. It's just not aligned with your opinions, nothing to do with writing.

You by the way demand "results" of a review paper. What were the research results of you playing quantum web games?

I see Bram Cohen got the original authors of "proof of space" or whatever this is to author papers with him, and also got inflationary pressure in there, but if that's the extent of research, well, that's still not how the economy works. At least ransomware gangs won't switch from encrypting to deleting stuff altogether for space.

The wider conclusion is that living organisms do evolve around quantum effects (if the molecule existed a priori somehow) or maybe even evolve to the point of reaching and then harnessing them (making the molecule).

Now to what's Penrose about. Seldom anybody actually reads the guy or know the context. He was after the computational theory of mind. Not necessarily looking for a theory, but sneering at one big non-theory. This is in context of the 80's with unhinged stuff coming from the AI community (same as today). He was wondering if brain could really be this reducible and a known model of computation (he hasn't done a good review) from the physical point of view. For him a full logical reductionism necessiated excissing the measurement problem (the basic point goes back to Niels Bohr who thought biology cannot be entirely physics because of this). So he proposed a crude version that fleshes out measurement as a real physical process. His idea has the main upside of removing both quantum and AI mysticism.

This received angry and mostly off-topic response based on caricature summaries like elsewhere in this thread. Of course lending themselves to such caricatures says a lot about writing if not the ideas, but it's an honest try that ain't entirely silly and without upsides. The microtubules guy is someone else who Penrose was just happy to see come and collaborate with later. He'd be happy with any kind of other stuff, such as from the original article. BTW the author is Philip Ball, a long time editor of the Nature journals, and he's got a new book out about interpretations of quantum mechanics that is really superb to anything else on the market by far (that is could be better but isn't worthless).

As for the description of alleged emotional states involved, I'm oblivious and not seeing the relevance. Recounting the events and actions taken sufficed for a horrific story. The author deemed it important however to make it into something even more colourful with threats of some unspecified future actions (how does one harass a journal?).

The managing editor you speak of went on leave and has an interim replacement. I can see that entirely appropriate if only because of how retraction was handled by deletion and overwriting, instead of a proper notice in place. This was extremely unprofessional administration, which is usually a duty of the managing editor solely. The other possibility I described is that it wasn't really published the usual way, which is even more damning.

By that telling it was published practically on the spot, especially for mathematics where things are famously glacially slow. Browsing through the journal one mostly sees submission and publication dates separated by many months. Last published paper in the current volume was received over a year before. But this paper made it in three weeks.

So it was fast tracked by an editor. Editorial board could take issue with that, arguing it haven't gone by the review properly or whatever the usual procedures before publication are. It might have been put up on the web by the managing editor (since on leave and replaced in the interim) or whomever had the admin password, but editorial board to whom the journal's reputation really belongs hasn't deemed it to be their publication.

Of the timeline, author says he's uploaded to ArXiv in September, while by that time he was on revision 3 of https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.04184 uploaded in March. What was added in September however was a piece of journalism in an appendix, that then disappeared in most recent revisions. Last revision was posted just 2 weeks ago, apparently there still were arguments to strengthen (or journalism to remove) before Quillette ran the story.

There he paints his work as "science" and some people including the editorial board as "activists". By Google however appears the same Ted Hill founded a site "to promote campus activism in general" and "to serve as a focal point for organizing activists" where he chronicles his long history of activism http://www.motherfunctor.org/CompleteHistory2013.php

What no journal does is to replace erroneously published article with another entirely unrelated one in-place. This is a very poor behaviour on the part of the managing editor here, who is currently on leave and replaced.

Nature is unusual, for example they publish letters complaining about ArXiv's moderation, beside publishing a lot of editorial and opinion stuff.

Also from the description, which is not impartial being by the author, it is admitted it was snuck into an online journal by one of its editors. We don't know anything about the nature of peer review in this case other than when the wider board of editors got a know of that, majority of them allegedly threatened to resign.

It is however a very bad form by the managing editor to publish another article in the place of the other, even if that one was decided to be published erroneously. NYJM journal page says he's on leave and ceded his duties to an interim replacement.

The rest is a stream of words.

As such it is a work of social science. It might even have been respectable in social science journal. Economists input a lot of assumptions into calculus 101 level equations and call that a "mathematical proof" of an economic theory.

If the author wanted this to be a interdisciplinary discussion, why drag it into a mathematical journal where actual mathematical truths are published?

Author says himself he was unable to formulate actual mathematical idea and recruited help. Why ask Tabachnikov, who is a geometer specializing in classical mechanics, instead of someone with like a clue about statistical modeling? He then compares his experience to one he had fighting in Vietnam... which only makes me wonder if that wasn't the point: to either succeed with a flag-planting diversion or be able to make that comparison and hero of himself anyways.

There is topological structure https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2879/mapping-natura... http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/arithmetic+topology as well as geometric (arithmetic geometry). Question is how does the picture correspond to any of it. Glancing at the UMAP paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03426 it looks like a proper invariant preserving embedding, so maybe loops in the image are real. Even if not, it does hint artistically at sorts of stuff that exist.

As for the epicycles comparison, it's actually apt. They could have given complex plane and Fourier analysis for free if they had a chance (not to mention Copernicus actually used more of them than Ptolemy)(which incidentally is also the case with Many-World-necessiated landscapes and parameter spaces - just as much additional layer but with additional problems that are, in contrast, untractable by current math).

Bohmian formalism would require something perhaps no less aesthetically repulsive, but surely more alien: a preferred foliation of spacetime to avoid a preferred reference frame. Turns out it wouldn't have to be an artificial choice, as it can be derived from the wave function itself https://arxiv.org/abs/1307.1714 (that would also mean this preference existing within QM irrespective of any interpretation).

On the other hand formalism works seamlessly mathematically, which cannot be said of standard quantum mechanics. Even this year's Fields medalist Figalli has a paper on how good things are in Bohmian land.

Otherwise it would be old people game.