How viable do you think neutrino-based communication would be? It’s one of the few things that could notably cut nyc<->tokyo latency, and it would completely kill blackout zones. I realize current emitters and detectors are huge, expensive and high-energy, but I don’t have a sense of how fundamental those problems are.
I don’t think it’s going to be practical this century. The difficulty is that the same properties that let you cut the latency are the ones that make the detectors huge: Neutrinos go right through the Earth, and also right through your detector. There’s really no way around this short of building the detector from unobtainium, because neutrinos interact only through the weak force, and there’s a reason it’s called ‘weak’. The probability of a neutrino interacting with any given five meters of your detector material is really tiny, so you need a lot of them, or a huge and very dense detector, or both. Then, you can’t modulate the beam; it’s not an electromagnetic wave, there’s no frequency or amplitude. (Well, to be strictly accurate, there is, in that neutrinos are quantum particles and therefore of course are also waves, as it were. But the relevant wavelength is so small that it’s not useful; you can’t build an antenna for it. For engineering purposes you really cannot model it as anything but a burst of particles, which has intensity but not amplitude.) So you’re limited to Morse code or similar. Hence you lose in bandwidth what you gain in latency. Additionally, neutrinos are hard to produce in any numbers at a precise moment. You’re relying on muon decays, which of course are a fundamentally random process. So the variables you’re actually controlling are the direction and intensity of your muon beam, and at respectable fractions of lightspeed you just can’t turn them around on a dime. Plus you get the occasional magnet quench or whatnot, and lose the beam and have to spend five minutes building it up again. So, not only are you limited to dots and dashes, you can’t even generate them fast and reliably.
All that said, what application other than finance really needs better latency than you get by going at lightspeed through orbit? And while it’s true that people would make money off that, I don’t see any particular social return to it. Liquidity is a fine thing, but I cannot fathom that it matters to have it on millisecond scales—seconds should be just fine, and we’re already way beyond that just with lightspeed the long way around. As for blackout zones, are you thinking of cellphones? I suggest that this is a bad idea. To get a reliable signal in a man-portable detector you would have to have a very intense neutrino burst indeed; and then you’d also get a reliable signal in the body of the guy holding it. We detect neutrinos by the secondary radiation they cause. I haven’t worked the numbers, but even if cancers were rare enough to put up with, think of the lawsuits.
I like this comment because it is full of sentence structures I can follow about topics I know nothing about. I write a lot of thaumobabble and I try to make it sound roughly like this, except about magic.
My thaumobabble is mostly in Elcenia. If you’re only looking for thaumobabble samples and don’t have any interest in the story, you might want to skip around to look at mentions of the name “Kaylo”, because he does it a lot.
All that said, what application other than finance really needs better latency than you get by going at lightspeed through orbit?
Through orbit is very bad for low latency. Lowest latency is through undersea optical fiber with modern technology, and that gives around 100ms round-trip for New York-Tokyo (according to Wolfram Alpha), at best. So probably around 150ms in real life conditions, with routing and not taking exactly the most straight path. Which isn’t that great.
As a geek, my first though is : ssh ! ;) Starting at 100ms and above, the ssh experience starts to feel laggy, you don’t have instantanous-feeling reaction when you move the cursor around, which is not pleasant.
More realistically : everything that is “real-time” : phone/voip/video conferencing, real-time gaming like RTS or FPS, maybe even remote-controlled surgery (not my field of expertise, so not sure for that).
My experience with games across the Pacific is that the timezone coordination is much more an issue than latency, but then again I don’t play twitch games. So, I take your point, but I really do not see neutrinos solving the problem. If I were an engineer with a gun held to my head I would rather think in terms of digging a tunnel through the crust and passing ordinary photons through it!
Well, for values of ‘exist’ equal to “within vast particle accelerators”. You produce muons by a rather complicated process: First you send a proton beam at graphite, which produces kaons and pions. You focus these beams using magnetic fields, and they decay to muons. Muons are relatively long-lived, so you guide them into a circular storage ring. They decay to a muon neutrino, an electron anti-neutrino, and an electron.
I’m not sure whether accuracy is a good question in these circumstances. Our control of the muons is good enough to manipulate them as described above, and we’re talking centimeter distances at quite good approximations to lightspeed, but it’s not as though we care about the ones that miss, except to note that you don’t go into the tunnel when the beam is active.
You do get quite a lot of other particles, but they don’t have the right mass and momentum combinations for the magnets to guide them exactly into the ring, so they end up slightly increasing the radiation around the production apparatus.
The above is for the Gran Sasso experiment; there may be other specific paths to muon beams, but the general method of starting with protons, electrons, or some other easily accessible particle and focusing the products of collisions is general. Of course this means you can’t get anywhere near the luminosity of the primary beams, since there’s a huge loss at each conversion-and-focusing.
How viable do you think neutrino-based communication would be? It’s one of the few things that could notably cut nyc<->tokyo latency, and it would completely kill blackout zones. I realize current emitters and detectors are huge, expensive and high-energy, but I don’t have a sense of how fundamental those problems are.
I don’t think it’s going to be practical this century. The difficulty is that the same properties that let you cut the latency are the ones that make the detectors huge: Neutrinos go right through the Earth, and also right through your detector. There’s really no way around this short of building the detector from unobtainium, because neutrinos interact only through the weak force, and there’s a reason it’s called ‘weak’. The probability of a neutrino interacting with any given five meters of your detector material is really tiny, so you need a lot of them, or a huge and very dense detector, or both. Then, you can’t modulate the beam; it’s not an electromagnetic wave, there’s no frequency or amplitude. (Well, to be strictly accurate, there is, in that neutrinos are quantum particles and therefore of course are also waves, as it were. But the relevant wavelength is so small that it’s not useful; you can’t build an antenna for it. For engineering purposes you really cannot model it as anything but a burst of particles, which has intensity but not amplitude.) So you’re limited to Morse code or similar. Hence you lose in bandwidth what you gain in latency. Additionally, neutrinos are hard to produce in any numbers at a precise moment. You’re relying on muon decays, which of course are a fundamentally random process. So the variables you’re actually controlling are the direction and intensity of your muon beam, and at respectable fractions of lightspeed you just can’t turn them around on a dime. Plus you get the occasional magnet quench or whatnot, and lose the beam and have to spend five minutes building it up again. So, not only are you limited to dots and dashes, you can’t even generate them fast and reliably.
All that said, what application other than finance really needs better latency than you get by going at lightspeed through orbit? And while it’s true that people would make money off that, I don’t see any particular social return to it. Liquidity is a fine thing, but I cannot fathom that it matters to have it on millisecond scales—seconds should be just fine, and we’re already way beyond that just with lightspeed the long way around. As for blackout zones, are you thinking of cellphones? I suggest that this is a bad idea. To get a reliable signal in a man-portable detector you would have to have a very intense neutrino burst indeed; and then you’d also get a reliable signal in the body of the guy holding it. We detect neutrinos by the secondary radiation they cause. I haven’t worked the numbers, but even if cancers were rare enough to put up with, think of the lawsuits.
I like this comment because it is full of sentence structures I can follow about topics I know nothing about. I write a lot of thaumobabble and I try to make it sound roughly like this, except about magic.
“Thaumobabble”? That’s a nice coinage.
Where can I read some of your best thaumobabble ? In addition to the Luminosity books, I mean; I’d read those.
I do enjoy me some fine vintage thaumobabble.
My thaumobabble is mostly in Elcenia. If you’re only looking for thaumobabble samples and don’t have any interest in the story, you might want to skip around to look at mentions of the name “Kaylo”, because he does it a lot.
No no, I do want to read the story ! The thaumobabble is just icing on the cake. It’s also a fun word to say. Thaumobabble.
Through orbit is very bad for low latency. Lowest latency is through undersea optical fiber with modern technology, and that gives around 100ms round-trip for New York-Tokyo (according to Wolfram Alpha), at best. So probably around 150ms in real life conditions, with routing and not taking exactly the most straight path. Which isn’t that great.
As a geek, my first though is : ssh ! ;) Starting at 100ms and above, the ssh experience starts to feel laggy, you don’t have instantanous-feeling reaction when you move the cursor around, which is not pleasant.
More realistically : everything that is “real-time” : phone/voip/video conferencing, real-time gaming like RTS or FPS, maybe even remote-controlled surgery (not my field of expertise, so not sure for that).
My experience with games across the Pacific is that the timezone coordination is much more an issue than latency, but then again I don’t play twitch games. So, I take your point, but I really do not see neutrinos solving the problem. If I were an engineer with a gun held to my head I would rather think in terms of digging a tunnel through the crust and passing ordinary photons through it!
Wait wait wait. A muon beam exists? How does that work? How accurate is it? Does it only shoot out muons, or does it also shoot out other particles?
Well, for values of ‘exist’ equal to “within vast particle accelerators”. You produce muons by a rather complicated process: First you send a proton beam at graphite, which produces kaons and pions. You focus these beams using magnetic fields, and they decay to muons. Muons are relatively long-lived, so you guide them into a circular storage ring. They decay to a muon neutrino, an electron anti-neutrino, and an electron.
I’m not sure whether accuracy is a good question in these circumstances. Our control of the muons is good enough to manipulate them as described above, and we’re talking centimeter distances at quite good approximations to lightspeed, but it’s not as though we care about the ones that miss, except to note that you don’t go into the tunnel when the beam is active.
You do get quite a lot of other particles, but they don’t have the right mass and momentum combinations for the magnets to guide them exactly into the ring, so they end up slightly increasing the radiation around the production apparatus.
The above is for the Gran Sasso experiment; there may be other specific paths to muon beams, but the general method of starting with protons, electrons, or some other easily accessible particle and focusing the products of collisions is general. Of course this means you can’t get anywhere near the luminosity of the primary beams, since there’s a huge loss at each conversion-and-focusing.
There is actually some research being done into the creation of a muon collider.
Here’s another article saying basically the same thing I say below, but with extra flair.