
MIT scientists find weird quantum effects over hundreds of miles - jonbaer
http://news.mit.edu/2016/neutrinos-weird-quantum-effects-over-hundreds-miles-0719
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suprgeek
Lets not forget that they are speaking about neutrinos - particles that are
notoriously hard to detect precisely because they hardly interact with
"regular" matter.

So the fact that they traveled hundreds? of miles still in superposition
states just means that they did not interact with anything over those
distances.

I am failing to understand how this is weird, in-fact this is exactly what the
theory calls for.

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lvs
Yes, that's the point. The press office just got clickbaity with the word
"weird," as it always does for any QM paper.

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Animats
Now the high-frequency trading people will have to build accelerators and
detectors so they can transmit in a straight line through the earth. They
could knock off an entire millisecond or two between London and New York and
beat everybody else.

~~~
ISL
It gets proposed fairly often. The tricky part is detecting enough neutrinos
in a coincidence window to make a meaningful trading signal.

Such an experiment is also very expensive.

~~~
Animats
A $300 million cable is being laid across the Atlantic just to cut off 5ms for
high-frequency trading.[1] Bandwidth will cost 50x normal on that cable.

[1]
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8753784/The-300m-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8753784/The-300m-cable-
that-will-save-traders-milliseconds.html)

~~~
jessriedel
Neutrino experiments cost of order a billion dollars. The event rate for
anthropogenic neutrinos sources at the MINOS detector (from the article) is a
few hundred events over 1 year.

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ex/0607088v2.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-
ex/0607088v2.pdf)

So the bandwidth for this state-of-the-art billionish-dollar detector is
measured in μbps :)

~~~
ChuckMcM
Flipped over, if you can invent a reliable neutrino detector and influencer
that costs say $150M you have a very risk tolerant market to sell into.

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XaspR8d
Uninformed question: isn't this somewhat what we'd expect? Neutrinos interact
very weakly with matter so they're much more likely to stay in superposition?
Or is this happening at a much greater scale than expected?

~~~
Bartweiss
That's my impression also: distance travelled as an inherent property
shouldn't 'break' quantum effects. It matters only because larger scale
implies a larger chance of interaction, and because it relates to no-go
theorems. Still, I don't think these effects _have_ been seen over such
distances, even if they were expected.

Despite the title, the scientists quoted don't sound baffled as much as
excited. I think this is a case of "we found it after all!"

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jdimov10
Spooky

~~~
akozak
Spooky because of the metaphors used to describe quantum mechanical phenomena,
or because it has implications or applications that you're wary of?

~~~
szupie
I think that's a reference to Einstein's famous ridicule of quantum mechanics,
"spooky action at a distance".

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make3
What a clickbaity title.

~~~
graphenebro
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x1798DE
MIT's press office _is_ master of the clickbait-overhype one-two punch, but in
this case "MIT Scientists" is a justified because this is a release from the
MIT press office. It's standard form for institutions, local news, etc.

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dkraft
The only determination I can make is that there is no proof that the same
neutrino was observed. All that was observed is neutrinos in two places.
Probably are neutrinos everywhere you look.

