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Instant Messaging With Neutrinos
An anonymous reader writes "A group of scientists has for the first time sent a message using a beam of neutrinos – nearly massless particles that travel at almost the speed of light. The message was sent through 240 meters of stone and said simply, 'Neutrino.' From the article: 'Many have theorized about the possible uses of neutrinos in communication because of one particularly valuable property: they can penetrate almost anything they encounter. If this technology could be applied to submarines, for instance, then they could conceivably communicate over long distances through water, which is difficult, if not impossible, with present technology. And if we wanted to communicate with something in outer space that was on the far side of a moon or a planet, our message could travel straight through without impediment.'"
Pretty early on in the piece to be slashdotted. Pulled for some reason?
Using the holy grail of OSes...
The link doesn't seem to work but the article is here
Once we get cheap narrow-beam neutrino transmitters and receivers that can do gigabit/terabit speeds, I'll buy several thousand and set up true point-to-point peer-to-peer networking with my neutrino-enabled peers all over the planet! Fiber optics required? Hah! Just point and shoot!
Thanks in advance
Since the link in the summary gives a 404, here's what appears to be the same article direct from the school's website:
http://www.rochester.edu/news/show.php?id=4022
The title of the article is a verbatim match to the URL in the summary, so I'm pretty sure it's the same article.
I, for one, think that anything with the potential for better internet access X feet below the water is an excellent idea.
Should SETI switch to monitoring neutrino transmissions now?
If you can do that, well, that just means you can now detect a sub's nuclear reactor super-easy. Don't they give off neutrinos?
I don't know how many (old) articles I've read on neutrinnos. They all said "we'll likely never be able to detect them", etc etc. If we can detect them well enough to communicate via them, ever, that'd be slick.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
SETI should look for Alien messages in Neutrinos. Not radio waves.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
No more weak signals because something is blocking line of transmission to the nearest tower.
All I have to do to send the message from my handset is be walking around with an unlicensed particle accelerator strapped to my back. The receiver component, OTOH will need to be carried by my personal valet, The Incredible Hulk.
think about it. we are lookin for radio waves(flame on)/ digital signals from the greater beyond, when something else could be the form of which we are look for currently. what if we had the money to look for other types of signals that can be sent out over longer distances of space. forgive me im pretty hammered off some local black diamond rampage.
Think of the possibilities!
Can I get a cell phone that works indoors, now?
It's like the old Steven Wright joke about putting instant coffee in a microwave oven.
"I sent an instant message with faster than light neutrinos......"
Benford had it first. One of my favorite authors.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I wonder exactly what you need to do to stop the signal? I am sure if this became mainstream (or whatever stream it could become) that there will be businesses start-up trying to prevent those signals.
I dub it, the Signal Jammer.
The first person who figures out how to do this reliably will make a huge profit. There are already undersea cables which exist for the sole purpose of reducing latency between NY and UK stock exchanges. Neutrinos going _through_ the earth (arriving at the Nikkei for instance) would have a significantly shorter time of flight and would give traders a massive advantage.
Someday there will be an article on a new tech where the first possible application that they think of isn't military.
Humankind, there may be hope for you yet.
www.gaiageek.com
they sent word "neutrino" but on the other end, they recieved message "Thanks fucking god you _finally_ figured this out. Lets just say that Milky Way contains four intelligent civilizations, and yours is not among three smartest".
839*929
Quantumly entangled bits (say electrons) - used for network interfaces (one on either side of the communications stack) and you have Andrew Wiggins favorite communications mechanism, the Ansible.
Now if only we could read the state of the electrons without modifying their quantum state, we'd actually be able to do this today.
Imagine the angst the NSA/CIA/FBI would feel when they couldn't tap into the secure, wireless, unlimited speed (potentially - need more, parallel a few more qbits), zero latency (at least for the transmission) communcations.
I am not that good in Physics, so I'll post my questions here:
I heard that photons don't collide with other photons, that's why two beams can cross path and still behave as though they were travelling without any hindrance
Will Neutrinos behave like photons? Or will Neutrinos collide with other Neutrinos?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Neutrino transmission was the only way earth was able to contact the station.
Of course, I seem to recall it only worked for a certain short window of time - maybe the station got occluded by Ringworld after that?
#DeleteChrome
If neutrinos can pass through thousands of miles of solid rock without apparently being affected by it, how are you going to make a receiving antenna of any practical size?
I imagine if you were clever you could use timeslots to communicate multiple bytes or whole words from a carefully selected dictionary with a single detection event.
Stop and think about how our current Internet is cabled. Now, imagine an increase in competition in at the ISP level. Pairing agreements could be created by simply directing your networked neutrino transmitter to an agreed up location. As a consumer, you point your device to an ISP. This of course assuming such technology is cheap, portable, and fast. At the very least, possible at all.
Life is not for the lazy.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2847
The stupid press release left off the most important number which was the communication bit rate: 0.1 bits per second.
Paper abstract: "Beams of neutrinos have been proposed as a vehicle for communications under unusual circumstances, such as direct point-to-point global communication, communication with submarines, secure communications and interstellar communication. We report on the performance of a low-rate communications link established using the NuMI beam line and the MINERvA detector at Fermilab. The link achieved a decoded data rate of 0.1 bits/sec with a bit error rate of 1% over a distance of 1.035 km, including 240 m of earth. "
Some crucial details were left out.
The "transmitter" uses the Fermilab accelerator ring to generate neutrinos. 6km of particle accelerator.
The "receiver" is a neutrino detector the size of a large house.
The data rate is so low that it took 20 minutes to transmit one word.
Neutrinos still interact with other particles very infrequently. These researchers have no way around that. They just used a very powerful beam and a huge detector to pick up the very rare events. It's a stunt, not an advance.
He penetrates everything he encounters! Here, let me squirt a message into you...
Hmmm, what to read tonight? How about somethiNEUTRINO. Now, what was I saying?
Their they're doing there hair.
The problem with neutrinos is how to catch something that travels through anything including the receiver ?
The mean free path of a neutrino is about 22 light years of lead !!
So to detect neutrinos, you simply catch 1 in 10^10 or so. That's ok unless your message is not the one you caught. A pretty tricky business I say. You wont be getting mobiles working on that principal for a while.
Has anybody thought this through? Is this safe? Is this going to be one of those things where we find out it gives everyone cancer in 20 yrs and it is too late to do anything about it?
I suspect Dan just said this to please the suits who probably sign off on his funding, while laughing to himself. Using a "neutrino communication system" sounds a bit like buliding a house out of ice cream. It might be *just about* possible with huge expense and effort, but it is laughably ridiculous compared to the other options that are available.
Don't the same properties that would make them useful also make them nearly impossible to work with? How do you build an antenna for something that passes through everything? Is my iPhone, 50 years from now, going to be attached to a football field-sized tub of heavy water? Finally, there will be no wrong way to hold it!
So, neutrinos are very good at traveling right through what we think of as solid objects. They also have no electric charge (nor magnetic charge, heh). If you use them to encode a signal, how do you receive the signal? How do the neutrinos interact with your receiver?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
but not Barada Nikto...
http://youtu.be/Jm2MB14JTSM
If they could run TCP over it, that'll greatly reduce the current speed-of-light and no-line-of-sight limitations.
For antipodal locations, it's about 40,075 km round trip (best case) with current technology versus 12,756 km for a direct route.
You just cannot block it.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
The beam could be intercepted at any point, without it being interrupted. It would also have horrific energy consumption per bit transmitted.
For practical communication using lasers to do something similar is much closer: http://iopscience.iop.org/0295-5075/87/1/10010/pdf/0295-5075_87_1_10010.pdf
From teh abstract: "If these experiments nd evidence for hidden photons, laser communications through matter are possible. We show that, using methods from free-space optics, a channel capacity of more than 1 bit per second is possible in the near future, for distances up to the Earth’s diameter"
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Been there, done that.
Yeah but I bet it's a lot easier to jam electromagnetic communications in space. Probably not so for neutrinos.
How no one yet pointed out that it's still not instant messaging? Everything that travels at some speed (even if it would travel faster then a light) implies delay in sending message from point A in the universe to point B. 'Instant' implies either infinite speed regardless of distance or other mechanism (not involving traveling at all). Read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superluminal_communication
Now all we need is a neutrino-blocking carpet.
No, that was Transatlantic Trip IV: Laying the Cable
Well it's a great thing that technology never improves then. We'll almost certainly never develop better neutrino detection technology.....especially considering we just plain don't have time, what, in between skinning bears, chopping up bones with primitive stone axes, and stacking up big rocks to form a crude fire pit at our latest migratory camp.
Gotta run now, tribe needs a hand. A hunter found a field of skunky smelling trees with big flowery arms, totally covered in some weird looking crystals. Looks like great kindling for the bonfire. Ugh is stacking em up and getting ready to light. Back later...
... they can penetrate almost anything they encounter ...
Well... "penetrating" seems a bit out place... I think a more appropriate description would be something like "chance of interacting with other other particles is extremely low"
Which of course makes detecting neutrino's a hell of a job. To get an impression of how hard that is, consider this:
"About 65 billion (6.5×1010) solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimeter perpendicular to the direction of the Sun in the region of the Earth." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino) and the size of the largest neutrino observatory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SskyDuTfH0o ,
http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/IceCube-schema.jpg
Sending neutrino messages is old hat. Receiving them is a bit more difficult, because neutrinos are so damned difficult to detect. They basically don't interact with anything, which is why Fermilab can shoot a neutrino beam an a 735 km underground trip to Minnesota. So to receive your IM, you need a detector the mass of the USS Iowa. I sent out "Dinner is served" back in the 80s, by the way.
The problem is that ordinary matter is too empty: trying to catch neutrino with ordinary matter is like trying to catch air with a tennis racket. I predict that extremely dense forms of matter (like the kind you find in a neutron star) would have no problem catching neutrinos. This will even allow miniaturized handheld neutrino detectors. This is way out of our league for now.
sosus nuclear bomb plutonium neutrino
There was an urban legend/joke that back in the Cold War there was a list of "sensitive" words in emails that would cause a computer somewhere in the bowels of the NSA to start logging.
The list was something like "SOSUS (used to communicate with submarines), Plutonium, Nuclear Bomb and so on"
According to the story there was another list of non sensitive words - quiche being the only one I can remember. If these words were found the logging would be stopped.
So you'd see "sosus plutonium nuclear bomb quiche" in people's signatures on alt.religion.kibology.
Then again, I bet they really used Bayesian filters even back then.
quiche american idol katy perry
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
At least the sleeves won't block the signal
" for instance, then they could conceivably communicate over long distances through water, which is difficult, if not impossible, with present technology."
VLF I think the submitter needs to learn about what is used for Submarines before speculating about it.
And the neutreno transmission setup is not a spray and pray like RF communications. so it would be useless for submarine communication unless it was to sattelites where they can use high accuracy positioning servos to get a direct line to the intended submarine.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
For starters, photons may be of different wavelengths. What about neutrinos? As far as I know, they are all identical like electrons or protons. If this technology is widely adopted how is the recipient going to distinguish between different transmitters?
Maybe radio is too primitive and therefore wrong thing to be listening for when searching for evidence of galactic communications.
The message was just "neutrino"? No sense of history. How about a nice "What hath God wrought?"
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
...pick any zero.
The data rate is 100mb/sec -- that's 100 millibits per second.
The transmitter is a large particle accelerator.
The receiver is a cave full of money.
Bastards! Don't they know what neutrinos can do to the plane's core or something like that? It's 1012 all over again but this time it's for real!
*sigh*
"If I have been able to see so far, It is because I went out and bought a damn binoculars" - Ze da Esquina
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I can see so many applications for this:
personal mobile neutrino transceivers with limitless range
wireless comms for spelunkers and support/rescue personnel on the surface
Question: since the abstract is talking about a "beam" of neutrinos, does this mean that the thing is unidirectional? If so, I foresee a problem with applications like the above, however, there is a possibility to use it from fixed sites with literally a beeline between terminals - extreme narrowcasting of messages, especially if encrypted, would make for one hell of a secure transport layer particularly if you can measure the density of neutrinos hitting the receiver - you can instantly tell if the messages are being intercepted. If the beam is going through the *planet*, you can be pretty sure it ain't getting intercepted.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I guess the aliens from the movie Independence Day didn't have neutrino walkie talkies.
Have we figured out that one yet?
Anyway, ever since I read that story, I was more amazed about them being able to transmit/capture neutrinos that way than about the neutrinos being faster than light.
The new cable from London to NYSE shaves 6ms off the 65ms trip: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8753784/The-300m-cable-that-will-save-traders-milliseconds.html
The cable follows the curvature of the planet, and the neutrinos don't, so it's already expensive for such an obsolete technology. And Australia gets closer by a factor of about pi/2, even if they have a perfectly optimal cable now. Neutrinos might be slightly faster or slower than photons in the cable, I don't know. So this invention makes it possible to approach the theoretical network latency limit.
...like gamma radiation? Not that I am worried, I know that neutrinos have almost no interaction with normal matter and we are constantly exposed to them. Nevertheless, to send messages they have to interact at least a little. If the goal is to receive messages with neutrinos without the necessity of huge water tanks somewhere in a mountain the detection has to be improved, and/or the signal must be much stronger. I am just wondering if it is possible to create such an intensive neutrino beam that it actually becomes harmful.
Seems like as good a place as any to ask a (probably ignorant) question I've had about neutrino detection.
Part of the problem detecting neutrinos is that they only interact with nuclei, so since atoms are mostly empty space, the neutrino rarely even gets a chance to interact. But, if you took a very pure crystal, with the nuclei arranged in a precise lattice pattern, and then rotated it at a very slight angle to the incoming neutrino beam, could you engineer it so that you maximized the number of nuclei each neutrino would pass through? Picture here Would this have any effect on detector efficiency or even allow you to construct a directional detector?
Are you a retard? Nothing in your post made even the slightest bit of sense.
photon-photon collisions do happen, just at a very low cross section for low energy photons. See: Photon-Photon Collisions – Past and Future http://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/getdoc/slac-pub-11581.pdf
ARRGGHH - title had a > - but it dissapeared
Traders already pay crazy prices to get low-latency access. The speed of light is an issue. This is especially interesting over the London to New York route, with traders paying extra for priority on a special cross-Atlantic link.
The two-hour latency for this neutrino beam is going to be from background noise. Increase the beam intensity and it goes away. I've no doubt that passing direct through the Earth is faster than going along the surface. For worst-case routes, neutrinos win by a factor of pi.
And you have create a quadrillion for everyone you detect. It will be a while before Apple puts neutrino sources and receivers in an iPhone :-)
IIRC, neutrino direction is detectable. Just ignore ones coming from the reactor. Energy level or type might also work to distinguish the neutrinos.
That could be a boon for HFT. No need for buying properties in New Jersey. Trading from any location at yocto-second frequency.
My wife must communicate with neutrinos already. Her communications pass right through me, completely unhindered and unreceived.
Better known as 318230.
if a normal Neutrino can pass thru anything...how good a coherent neutrino stream can be for directional communication?
If this is a superior communications technology, developed approximately 250 years after radio became widespread it makes sense that we could find interstellar transmissions using it.
Perhaps we should be cautious about over using it until we listen for a while.
I'd also like to recommend Piers Anthony (I know, but sometimes he's great) "Macroscope" for those that haven't read it.
SETI, needs to switch to neutrino detectors, instead of radio.
it sounds crazy.
"The message that the scientists sent using neutrinos was translated into a binary code, turning the beam on and off for 1s and 0s. And after the neutrinos were detected, a computer set up on the other end successfully translated the code into English: the word “neutrino” was received." from http://tothecenter.com/2012/03/neutrino-beam-messaging-through-787-feet-of-stone/