The Sun seen through the Earth in “neutrino light” (2007)

There is no hard boundary to the core of the sun. The "core" is by definition where nuclear fusion reactions occur. However, those reactions don't just stop at a certain radius...but instead just occur at a lower and lower rate. So even if you could determine with 100% precision where a neutrino came from within the sun, you would still measure some exponential-like decay as a function of radius.

But to add even more complexity there's ~10 different nuclear processes within the sun that produce neutrinos. Those processes all have different radial profiles. So even if you measure with 100% accuracy the radial profile of neutrinos associated with one or two nuclear processes...you still haven't really measure the core of the sun...you've just measured it for a few specific reactions. And for the neutrinos produced by many of the reactions this method cannot work, those neutrinos are too low in energy to provide direction information. And beyond that there are a handful of nuclear reactions that occur within the sun that don't produce neutrinos. So there doesn't really exist any way to measure the radial profile of those nuclear processes.

And this all assume you can perfectly tell where the neutrino came from within the sun, which is also impossible. There will always be some relatively poor "resolution associated with your ability to place a neutrinos origin. Here is the "hard" physics limit to your angular resolution for a relatively high solar energy neutrino...it only gets worse as the energy goes down https://i.imgur.com/h3n8c4V.png. But getting to even that resolution is impossible b/c an interaction will only produce so many photons from Cherenkov radiation (think 100s of photons). Then it becomes a statistics problem...what's the best angular resolution you could possibly achieve given an average number of photons that's around (say) 500. It ends up the answer is "pretty good" but far from perfect. And all of that is assuming the electron scattered from the solar neutrino will travel in only one direction...that's extremely untrue, the electron will always bounce off of other electrons & atoms after scattering. This multiple-scattering leads to even worse angular resolution.

Here's a paper on the subject if you'd like further detail https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.02558.pdf

Every time the Internet regurgitates this link it is misinterpreted by essentially everyone that comments on it.

If I'm reading that paper above correctly, which despite its silly premise appears to have been seriously written (by undergrads, but the numbers pass the smell test), neutrinos have ~1/70th the power flux of solar anyhow, assuming you could catch all of them, which you can't.

To be "charitable", maybe someone multiplied the solar neutrino flux/sqcm by their "maximum" energy (wikipedia numbers: 17e10 x 8e6 ~= 0.2w) and thought "that could power things!!!"

But more likely this is some sort of deliberate scam.

Without a miraculous scientific breakthrough the math doesn't add up. We don't know of any way to capture neutrons in a way that would provide meaningful power. For those reasons, I'll suggest this is more likely a scam than a sincere or realistic effort.

If corporates are literally blowing holes to mountains to get faster and more direct data links between trading places. Then it sounds like just a question of time when the technology matures enough (if it's possible already).

Plus error correction... When you add error correction and consider the number of missed bits and the need to retransmit / keep transmitting, it's probably not possible to realize a latency win here.

A particle accelerator would be much more responsive.

The immense detectors on the other side would stay, and you'll need entire minutes just to get a single neutrino anyway (and then, how many do you need to be sure? at least 2, I imagine.)

There was a new HN thread about such a beam just an hour ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528970

We'd modulate this high-energy beam. Data bandwidth would likely be quite low, but in terms of latency, it should be the fastest.

A beam directly going through Earth (e.g. from North America to Asia) is definitely going to be faster than optical fibre (or satellite) links that have wrap around the Earth.

I'm assuming neutrinos are sparse in nature, which is 50,000 metric ton pool of water was needed to detect the neutrinos emanating from the sun. But if we artificially create a highly concentrated beam of many many neutrinos, even a 99.99% loss / non-detection rate shouldn't be problem. (Again, bandwidth would be low, but we are aiming to minimize latency.)

   We report on the performance of a low-rate communications link established using the NuMI beam line and the MINERvA detector at Fermilab. 
   The link achieved a decoded data rate of 0.1 bits/sec with a bit error rate of 1% over a distance of 1.035 km, including 240 m of earth.

Is this image telling us anything new? Can this method be used for any type of observation? Or it simply serve as observation in the opposite direction: knowing where the neutrinos come from, you can infer in what cone the bounced electrons can move?

A fun thought: if one day, a secret organization starts running an undisclosed nuclear fusion reactor, will it show up on this "photo"?

For example, when Project Orion was being seriously considered the scientists had to find ways of making large quantities of fairly powerful nuclear weapons cheaply and quickly. Based on something Freeman Dyson said, I think they succeeded to some extent, but that secret now has died with the scientists who worked on it.

There has to be a lot of writing squirrelled away somewhere, because there are restrictions like "You agree to obtain a validated export license when exporting if this product is incorporated into the design, development, production, or other activities related to chemical weapons, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, or ballistic missiles." but no available literature on how these packages may actually be used in this context. (https://welsim.com/download)

One of the reasons Nuclear Testing is now very uncommon is because computers and software are now advanced enough to simulate them accurately. And yet, despite that, there is no "Nuclear Weapons design: A modern approach" available for public consumption. These are worked on by physicists so someone must be wasting time by writing books somewhere.

I wonder how much more feasible it is to send information via neutrinos if 0.000000013 Mbps were considered reasonable speed.