Comments on: The neutrino arbitrage

By: q_is_too_short

q_is_too_short — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:39:55 +0000

as indicated above, they are especially good for sending information that does not need to be received.

By: Thadah

Thadah — Mon, 07 May 2012 15:34:06 +0000

“right through the center of the earth”

So, neutrinos don’t interact with 10^24 kg of rock, but can be easily picked up at the other end by a hypothetical $10 gizmo that does what the entire planet can’t; stop a neutrino.

By: Christofurio

Christofurio — Sat, 05 May 2012 14:50:48 +0000

And if neutrinos can go faster than light, you could tell somebody in New York about a cabinet shuffle in Tokyo before the cabinet even HAD been shuffled in Tokyo.

Okay … that faster-than-light thing turns out to have been some sort of technical glitch. One can dream, though.

By: Bernanke

Bernanke — Fri, 04 May 2012 21:50:08 +0000

So, all this investment to save 44 milliseconds. And the rationale is for arbitrage? And that arbitrage disappears as soon as the other guy gets access to the same technology?

I’ve got a bridge for sale…

By: EpicureanDeal

EpicureanDeal — Fri, 04 May 2012 19:48:29 +0000

That is, investors have funded plenty of business plans in which the likelihood of producing potential future economic value makes detecting a single neutrino look almost certain.

By: EpicureanDeal

EpicureanDeal — Fri, 04 May 2012 19:45:07 +0000

Detection-schmetection.

If some college dropout can get $87 billion for automating 20-somethings’ address books, I’m sure my colleagues on Wall Street can drum up a few billion for this excellent notion.

By: MattF

MattF — Fri, 04 May 2012 19:08:09 +0000

Well, there’s a bandwidth problem. Exactly how many neutrinos would you have to capture (above noise) to get a signal that would be profitable enough to pay for the project? You need to know that number because there’s also an itsy-bitsy detection problem– the linear dimension of a detector that would capture, say, half the neutrinos in a beam is on the order of light-years. Yes, light-years.

By: Moopheus

Moopheus — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:57:49 +0000

“Once upon a time, both physics and derivatives had beautiful, simple models: quantum electrodynamics and Black-Scholes, respectively. But nowadays they’re both vastly more complex.”

But the big difference is that QED was, in its domain, an extremely successful theory that matched experimental results to a high degree of accuracy. Other quantum field theories have been built on its foundation, to describe larger aspects of particle physics, but QED itself has never been superceded.

One could not make this claim about Black-Scholes.

By: tflahive

tflahive — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:49:27 +0000

Seems like a good idea. But, there are a few issues…Unless only one-way communication is desired, two neutrino generators (particle accelerators) will be needed to send messages. Actually, this may be a small issue. There are desk-top accelerators currently in use.

The main problem is, based on current neutrino detection capability, the receivers (neutrino detectors) would; a) need to be very large, and b) need to be protected from the multiple other sources of neutrinos and neutrino generating particles. “a” makes receivers expensive, and “b” is why the current detectors are located deep under the ground, or under the ocean, or deep in the ice. These requirements limit the receiver location, and add to the cost of neutrino communication. Also, with the possibility of interference from other sources of neutrinos, comes the possibility of miscommunication.

By: BrPH

BrPH — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:37:44 +0000

While sending neutrinos through the earth is not so hard, detecting them on the other end such that the vanishingly small fraction of interacting particles codes for anything meaningful is another story.

Neutrino detection is so hard that experiments such as that in Italy beaming them through the Alps come up with bizarre results like neutrinos traveling faster than light. (Which nobody, not even the physicist who presented those results, believes to be true. It is at this point a curiousity and a group in the USA is trying to reproduce it.) Real-time detection of neutrino flux must compete with background noise to be noticed.

Tens of billions of neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of your body every second, with virtually zero effect.

The amount of energy required to produce detectable levels of neutrinos is very high. This would be an incredibly energy-inefficient method of communication if it could be made to work.

And of course, if it were possible to create a detector and coding scheme that worked well enough, neutrino communications would be the most perfectly insecure method ever.

This sort of proposal is the kind of thing that gets picked up by con-men who cobble together some apparatus that investment bankers haven’t a clue about.

But then, hmm. Maybe I should. Make a bundle.