For the First Time, a Message Sent With Neutrinos

brilliant- you could theoretically send messages at the speed of light between any 2 points on earth, without needing optical fibers. the potential applications of this are limitless.

Very, very cool. This sounds really interesting, even if the word that was communicated is not very original.

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"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours"

- Stephen Roberts

Wow, it finally happened. It was suggested over 40 years ago about someday being able to communicate with these little boogers, now we finally have done it. The military was interested in this type of communications because technically they could penetrate through the earth, a direct line of site, without interference....

Ron Bennett

Also worth mentioning, now we may be considered intelligent enough to communicate with alien life forms throughout the Universe...

Ron Bennett

"...Even with a multi-ton detector like MINERvA, only about one in 10 billion neutrinos is spotted..."

Anyone else see this as a problem? The same properties that allow neutrinos is mass through solid rock makes them very hard to detect. I could see this used for communication between fixed points, but putting a neutrinos detector on a ship or a sub is going to be rather impractical.

Like all thing it will get smaller, and cheaper, it need not be said the computer is the perfect example.

It would be interesting to find out if we learn "Neutrinos" can move faster than light. They are going to do a retest with the fixed equipment in May. Could we be standing on the brink of FTL communication. Tantalizing!

cholin3947 wrote - Anyone else see this as a problem? The same properties that allow neutrinos is mass through solid rock makes them very hard to detect.

rlb2 reply - true, however it's a beginning. When we find a way to change those little neutral ones, neutrinos, into little positive ones after they went though a special manmade particle field after they went through the earth before hitting the detector then we will have a much bigger breakthrough.

Ron Bennett

@rlb2,
You kind of miss the point here. These are fundamental particles; you can't alter the charge of them... or really anything about them. And the reason they are so potentially valuable is exactly because they have no charge; give them a charge and they'll be scattered by the Earth's magnetic field, as well as any local electromagnetic disturbances.

You can't change a fundamental particle by putting it through some 'field' and you can't get these same results with a non-neutral particle anyway.

The only way to interact with a neutrino is to have it collide with other particles. Matter is INCREDIBLY dense. All mass is at the nucleus of an atom, and everywhere about it is vaccuum. Somehow you have to make the neutrinos collide with the nuclei more reliably within your detector, or just make a detector so sensative that it will work with the small collisons rates of any matter. Either way, its a lot of effort, and won't have too many common-day applications.

brian144 Point well taken, however I was referring to giving them a charge right before they hit the detector not way up in earth's atmosphere.

We may not do that now but neutrons naturally decay into protons, neutrino morph into other neutrinos all the time so to manipulate neutrinos to decay into a particle we can detect isn't out of the question by passing it through a strong field by bending the laws of quantum mechanics. The main point here is a "field" that may be made out of specialized particles, possibly frozen close to absolute temperature resulting in a Bose statistics or a Fermi statistics.

I like it when someone tells me I can't do that, reminds me of "Everything that can be invented has been invented." supposedly made by the head of the patent office in the 1800's.

Re: Batqul, Humanity has always been good at 'crossing our fingers, even when it means waiting for the next generation to decifer what they found. Take again the obvious example of the computer going all the way back to its humble predecessor, the evacuated tube.

To cholin3947:
I believe there is a neutrino detector array under construction in Mediterranean Sea today.
What if decades from now each of those detectors shrunk to coin size etc. and all surface of a submarine covered w/ them which uses a huge volume of water around as a detector?
Still impossible? :-)

To the sequel of the movie "4th Of July", the aliens will no longer commandeer Earths satellites to have the alien landing craft communicate with the mother ship. These are advance intelligence -yes these aliens are still hostile- that travel the cosmos; they will be smart and use their neutrino communications to send a message directly, right through earth.

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See life in all its beautiful colors and from different perspectives too!

While this is "impressive," it's not much of anything to get excited about. Neutrinos will never be something that your average cell phone will be able to use. Sure, you could make the cell tower sensitive to them, but phones are just too small to have enough mass to pick them up. It simply isn't efficient for ordinary uses.

That said, if you're in a nuclear submarine, this tech could prove invaluable. Beam some neutrinos up to a communications satellite from way below the surface without giving away your position to the enemy. That is what this will be used for. I can't imagine anything else.

@rlb: Neutrinos don't really decay into anything. They morph into other forms of themselves, but that's about it. You can't just pass them through a field, contrary to what you may think. Now, if we go to the extreme length of locally screwing with quantum mechanics, then you could screw with all sorts of stuff so yeah you could do it then but good luck pulling that off. Neutrino communication will remain something useful only in very specific circumstances.

Volt wrote - "@rlb: Neutrinos don't really decay into anything. They morph into other forms of themselves, but that's about it. You can't just pass them through a field, contrary to what you may think"

rlb2 reply - Sorry but you are wrong neutrinos are predicted to decay. A neutrino it is a fermion, what are fermions they are particles which obeys the Fermi–Dirac statistics and follows the Pauli exclusion principle. What are electrons and protons they are fermions. As said before neutrons decay into protons which is positive charged , so it is not unreasonable to think that neutrinos decay. Finding that decaying mechanism and what charge it takes afterwards will unleash a new type of physics.

There have been numerous papers written on neutrino decay, one paper claims that a high number of solar neutrinos decay while entering earth's atmosphere. If they are right then the first field we create to research this should be made out of super-cold liquid nitrogen or oxygen molecules before it hits the detector.

It wouldn't hurt for people with the right equipment to do some tests by shooting a stream of neutrinos through a magnetic field like earths then through liquid oxygen, or liquid ozone, or liquid nitrogen then record their results. The obvious sometimes is the one the most overlooked...

Ron Bennett

Incidentally electrons are charged leptons, neutrinos are neutral leptons, electron neutrino a lepton was first postulated in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli to explain why the electrons in beta decay were not emitted with the full reaction energy

Ron Bennett

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1100100111100100100000011010100111
0101011100110111010000100000011100
1101110000011001010110000101101011
0111001100100000011101000110111100
1000000110110101111001001000000111
0010011011110110001001101111011101
0000100000011010000110010101100001
0111001001110100
(translated)
binary just speaks to my robot heart

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Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.

"Most communication presently is done by sending and receiving electromagnetic waves, the university explains, and that is how radios, cell phones, and televisions operate. But electromagnetic waves can be blocked by many liquids and solids, but not so for neutrinos, which can pass freely through entire planets without blockage issues." Nice...I don't really understand it, but that's awesome. www.tothecenter.com/2012/03/neutrino-beam-messaging-through-787-feet-of-stone/

rubiegrae,
(HOW A NEUTRINO PASSES FREELY)

"...The neutrino (meaning "small neutral one" in Italian) is denoted by the Greek letter ν (nu). All evidence suggests that neutrinos have mass but that their mass is tiny even by the standards of subatomic particles. Their mass has never been measured accurately.

Neutrinos do not carry electric charge, which means that they are not affected by the electromagnetic forces that act on charged particles such as electrons and protons. Neutrinos are affected only by the weak sub-atomic force, of much shorter range than electromagnetism, and gravity, which is relatively weak on the subatomic scale. They are therefore able to travel great distances through matter without being affected by it.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrinos

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Amun-Re, She was ban into a female form, but lived
her life free around abosticals with passion.
She was a King! "BEAUTIFUL!"

Since neutrinos are so hard to detect maybe the key to using them for information transmission would be to have apparatus that would entangle neutrinos, and hold them in a static pattern, such that upon disruption of that pattern, a detectable gamma ray is detected by the reciever, while also said disruption would have to automatically trigger another entangled pair to form (via a sort of chain reaction that is automatic) so that the next bit can be sent. This would mean that once the signal was "locked on" then essentially no 'new' neutrino would be 'sent' but rather the quantum states would simply be changing on the recieving end, based on the series of bits set up on the sending side. I'm saying the collapse of the quantum wave function would need to stimulate the retrieval and re-entangling of the next bit to send. I guess you'd need two entanglements however so that "both entangled=1" and "only one entangled=0" so that you have a state being sent, rather than merely 'time between entanglements' having to be used as the carrier of the signal.

Easier said than done. Much like the Ali G. flying hoverboard. You do the science, I'll do the marketing!

One obvious practical application that could be realized immediately if there was budget for it: earth / moon relay. You would not require world wide communication system. You don't need the moon to be line-of-sight. Just point the emitter and fire.

This is super cool.

I worry about unintended consequences. Will we have a Neutrino global warming eventually?

Could be the start of a star-trek style communication though :)

The idea of being able to send a message to China by going through the world, not around it, and with virtually no signal loss, is intriguing. We just need to figure out a way to capture neutrinos reliably, because we obviously have the obility to produce an astounding bandwidth of them. I don't doubt that someone will figure out a way, the only question si whether is will be 5 years from now, or 100 years from now when we already have something better.

Hey Robot, did you get my message...?
No, You sent a message to me?
Yes, I sent it via my neutrino transmitter!
Oh, sorry, I did not have my neutrino detector turned on
and so it must of just passed right through!

.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense, i.e. facts.
Religion sees beyond the senses, i.e. faith.