The Goddam Particule | Hacker News Reader

The Goddam Particule

sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com

19 pointsernesto9514 comments

> I truly understand why HFts have expressed interest in neutrinos: the fastest technology available to link different exchanges is microwave, but microwave need towers/dishes above the ground, and the world is a sphere, so you have to deal with the curve of the Earth, and because of the curve HFTs are losing time. Too bad. Mother Nature is not helping.

Well, then they should go and build themselves a vacuum tube; their microwaves will fly faster :).

Physics researchers already have to field reams of emails and calls from perpetual motion cranks, add greedy traders in search of FTL comms to the list. I hope one of them sells them a box of quantum chromo-entangled magnets.

Yeah right, 'HFT' are so capable of immediately grasping a (potential) fundamental physics change and immediately wishing the results into useful networking hardware.

Then it turns out it could have been an oscillator or optical fiber problem, so this line drawn of interest is timid at best and totally unfounded.

Terrible article.

i think you misread. it just said they were interested in not having to go around the earth when you can go through it i think... this is expected and nothing to do with opera, and i'm sure plenty of people outside of HFT have thought about it too.

Except that neutrinos are so inert that it would take light years of water and photo detectors, to convert them into reliable signals.

...or so many of them that we turn that chunk of earth into a radioactive mess. XD

What is this incoherent rambling about the LCH and stock trading?

Measuring particle accelerators by length doesn't make sense, and I highly doubt that particles in the LHC travel faster than microwaves in air.

> I highly doubt that particles in the LHC travel faster than microwaves in air

Particle beams in an accelerator travel in (near)vacuum. Speed of light in a medium is lower than in vacuum. In particular, the speed of light (and hence microwaves) in air is around 0.999723 c (per [0]), which is less than 0.999999 the article says about speeds in LHC.

[0] - http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+light+in+air

The refractive index is inversely proportional to the wavelength though. And according to the linked papers that happens to be ~25mm (11ghz) to ~50mm (6ghz). Wolfram alpha doesn't even have valid answers in that range. Only between 400 and 1200nm.

Good point, I didn't knew that. Given how much trouble I'm having finding a relevant index for microwave range, I'm going to assume equal probabilities to the following statements: "microwaves in air indeed move slower than particles in LHC" and "the author just used n=1.0003 for microwaves in air".

they don't, but they also don't collide with air and interact with it... thats the key difference.

am i missing a joke? the use of the word particule everywhere instead of particle?

its quite jarring... otherwise the article is quite interesting.

I think the author might be French, or francophone. Most of the interface of the blog appears in French on my machine.

I believe the author is Belgian.

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