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Neutrino-Powered Financial Trading In Our Future?
An anonymous reader writes "In a new feature on the future of high-frequency trading, Wired suggests that neutrino-powered financial trading systems may be coming soon, which would enable extremely low-latency information to be transmitted directly through the center of the Earth between major financial exchanges. If finance becomes the killer app for neutrino communication technology, it may ultimately make Neutrino SETI feasible. Quoting: 'It is only a matter of time, perhaps a few decades, says Alexander Wissner-Gross, a Harvard physicist, before some hedge fund decides it needs a particle accelerator to generate neutrinos, and then everyone will want one. Yes, they travel slower than light, but they indisputably can tunnel through the earth, cutting thousands of miles off an intercontinental message. And just a few days before the Battle of the Quants, right before the bad news about faster-than-light neutrinos, researchers announced they had sent a message by neutrino from the Fermilab accelerator in Chicago to a detector a kilometer away. According to Dan Stancil of North Carolina State University, the signal traveled at "very close to" the speed of light. Unfortunately, the data rate was only about 0.1 bits per second, meaning it would be useless for much more than sending a yes/no signal. "With the right modulation scheme, this could be increased by at least one or two orders of magnitude," Stancil said, adding "I don’t know of a compelling commercial application." But we’ve all heard the (apocryphal) story that Thomas J. Watson of IBM predicted "a world market for maybe five computers."'"
If you send the neutrino on too weak a power it will face interferences from other neutrinos produced by natural radioactive decay and solar processes
But if you want to send your neutrino and to ensure people on the other side of the planet can receive it, you have to send it at least with a power of in the order of millions of electron-volts - that is a lot of juice we are talking about !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
'tis goen through the planet core.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
You insensitive clod. Are you suggesting that going to the moon wasn't a hoax?
Some of our highest technological achievements end up being used to do one of two things: manipulate capital markets, or blow people up. Expect a neutrino-powered civilian obliterator any day now.
I find it depressing for some reason, that we would develop a technology specifically so a few guys will be able to trade stocks .0000001 second faster.
should involve regulations that limit the rate at which trades can be made or that put a cost on high-frequency trades such as to remove their profit incentives. It's an investment market, we don't need thieves grabbing mismatched buy/sell orders and sitting in the middle shaving pennies off transactions. You know all those movies where someone proposes "rounding" sub-penny transaction losses down to the nearest penny and adding them all to a bank account? Someone on Wall Street saw that and said "bro, we can totally do this lulz! Just give us a way to trade faster than anyone else, and we'll make BILLIONS!" How is this still legal? I mean by every definition this is theft. I, for one, don't want to see us trying to come up with technologies to help these billionaires continue robbing you, me, and everyone else.
It also doesn't help that we haven't actually observed superluminal phenomena of any sort (tachyons, quantum teleportation, warp drives, etc). Something to keep in mind when discussing the wonders of tachyon communication.
If you send the neutrino on too weak a power it will face interferences from other neutrinos produced by natural radioactive decay and solar processes
First electron-volts measure energy. Power is energy per unit time i.e. joules per second. Energy is a property of each neutrino - a neutrino does not have a power. Power is a property of a beam of neutrinos and is the mean neutrino energy multiplied by the mean number of neutrinos emitted per second. Worse, your suggestion that neutrinos with millions of electron-volts of energy will be needed to avoid interference with radioactive decay could not be more wrong: radioactive decays emit neutrinos at MeV energies! MeV neutrinos will have very similar energies to those from natural radioactive decays!
But if you want to send your neutrino and to ensure people on the other side of the planet can receive it, you have to send it at least with a power of in the order of millions of electron-volts
Again you are confusing energy and power. There are two ways to detect neutrinos over background: beam intensity and energy. Accelerators generally produce neutrinos with GeV energies (billions of electron-volts). These have some background from cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere but give more directional information when detected i.e. you can tell where they came from better than low energy neutrinos so you can greatly reduce any background. Alternatively, if you have enough beam power then you can modulate the beam intensity in the remote detector which will modulate the count rate - you just need to have enough neutrinos to dominate the background. Also you need to bury your detectors to avoid backgrounds from cosmic ray muons.
Only one way to deal with someone who thinks the moon landing is a hoax:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wcrkxOgzhU