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Physicist Uses Laser Light As Fast, True-Random Number Generator
MrKevvy writes
"An Ottawa physicist is using laser light to create truly random numbers much faster than other methods do, with obvious potential benefits to cryptography: 'Sussman's Ottawa lab uses a pulse of laser light that lasts a few trillionths of a second. His team shines it at a diamond. The light goes in and comes out again, but along the way, it changes. ... It is changed because it has interacted with quantum vacuum fluctuations, the microscopic flickering of the amount of energy in a point in space. ... What happens to the light is unknown — and unknowable. Sussman's lab can measure the pulses of laser light that emerge from this mysterious transformation, and the measurements are random in a way that nothing in our ordinary surroundings is. Those measurements are his random numbers.'"
"the measurements are random in a way that nothing in our ordinary surroundings is"
Nonsense. They are random in precisely the same way that a good bouncy roll of the dice are. They are random in precisely the same way that a temperature measurement of a cup full of boiling water 10 seconds after it is poured is. They are random in precisely the same way that the sound coming out of a piezoelectric microphone taped to a car window travelling at 60 MPH is. They are random in precisely the same way that the noise of a reverse-biased silicon junction is.
Perhaps the author meant to say "the measurements are random in a way that no pseudorandom number generator algorithm is."
A Heiselber's Uncertainty Principle attacks!
It says "hello"!
It is very effective!
That was what Einstein thought. So he set up a thought experiment to prove that quantum was only apparently random, called the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paradox. Turned out, after Aspect ran the experiment, that Einstein was wrong. Reality was more random than he thought. It still might be the case that there's an order behind the quantum randomness, but that's currently more an article of faith than scientific insight.
I knew you were going to say that.