How will we ever be able to know what is true and what is not?

How do you know now?

Most just appeal to authority.

This is the worst way to know what's true.

 

The first step in evaluation is to apply The Mazeloski Criterion of "Is this statement reasonable", and then look at enough evidence to either verify or negate it. Certainly that will require some effort.

 

Mazeloski...

The musician? Or the baseballer?

 

The musician? Or the baseballer?

Neither!! He was a second and third year level classes instructor at the technical college I graduated from, Lawrence Institute of Technology). Quite a great instructor, in fact.
Unfortunately that school no longer exists. It became a horribly expensive university with a graduate school for MBA degrees. The pitiful demise of a great institution.

 

Hello,

You know what is kind of funny, one of the first electrical engineering textbooks I got, dated something like 1975, had a discussion of charge in I think it was the first chapter, and it talked about 'counting' the charges that passed a given point in a certain time. That would mean going in either direction, left or right as observed from outside the wire. It started something like, "If we could count the charge moving from left to right and the charge moving from right to left...", and that was discussing the basics of current flow. It's kind of funny that today we might be able to actually do that with the right equipment and of course a good laboratory. Quantum sensors are the big thing now.

 

Actually counting charges passing by is of interest mostly to those well paid folks with too much time on their hands.
The serious hazard of quantum computers, at least from the folks with good intentions, will be that too many folks will leave "all of the thinking" to them. At that point either somebody will make a mistake or those folks with BAD intentions will start actions that will not be good for anyone.

 

Actually counting charges passing by is of interest mostly to those well paid folks with too much time on their hands.
The serious hazard of quantum computers, at least from the folks with good intentions, will be that too many folks will leave "all of the thinking" to them. At that point either somebody will make a mistake or those folks with BAD intentions will start actions that will not be good for anyone.

Imagine how accurate our current measuring meters would be with a quantum electrical current sensor. High resolution, high accuracy, if it becomes practical for everyday use at some point. That's what one of the goals is (to be practical) although I believe they already have some but I do not think for current yet, but they might.

It's interesting that with an analog volt meter we are actually sampling the current, so I would imagine volt meters would become super duper accurate also, as long as we can get super duper precision resistors too. Perhaps a future resistor might work by counting the flow of charge and limiting it based on the count per unit time.
I am sure we all already know these things all have to become practical at some point, but that's the usual progression of things. Everyone wants to sell stuff, and the better it is, the more they can get. That's a strong driver for 'progress'.

 

counting the flow of charge...

This doesn't make your measurement more accurate, as shot noise becomes dominant at low currents.

 

This doesn't make your measurement more accurate, as shot noise becomes dominant at low currents.

Hi,

I think you mean "for now" shot noise becomes dominate at low currents. It's good that you brought this up anyway though it's something else to think about.

There are ways of detecting what is noise and what is not noise using special filtering (mostly digital). I can imagine this would be of great help here. This comes into play with digital image processing also. How well it works out probably depends on the designer and any theories that come about after the sensor is constructed. Should be interesting anyway.

I might be able to show some math but I haven't had to use this in a while now. I can however show two images before and after with a simpler noise type filter.

Counting the charge particles may be difficult though, but it's interesting if it could be done right. The count would then already be present in the digital world

 

Analog Panel Meters actually measure force (fields) and the old definition of A was a force between wires was 1 Ampere (a rate).

“Two infinitely long, parallel, straight and conducting wires are said to carry a current of one Ampere each in the same direction, if they attract each other with a force of about 2∗10−72∗10−7 [Two times ten raised to the negative seventh] Newton/Meter when placed one Meter apart, in Vacuum.”

https://www.vtc1.org/cms/lib/PA03000913/Centricity/Domain/20/Chapter 15.pdf

The 'new' SI 2019 ampere is defined as 1/(1.602 176 634 × 10–19) elementary charges per second.
https://www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/ampere-future

 

I think you mean "for now"...

For now and forever.

It's a quantum effect: an individual electron may or may not be present for counting. Current is the average of a huge number of individual electrons passing a point over a period of time, the shot noise of which goes up by the square root of the number of electrons (therefore increasing S/N as current increases).

The only "filter" that is useful is time. The lower the current, the more time you need to measure in order to get the same precision.

BTW, photomultipliers have been around for decades which count individual photons. The noise issue is precisely the same: you need lots of photons or lots of time to average the noise out.

 

For now and forever.

It's a quantum effect: an individual electron may or may not be present for counting. Current is the average of a huge number of individual electrons passing a point over a period of time, the shot noise of which goes up by the square root of the number of electrons (therefore increasing S/N as current increases).

The only "filter" that is useful is time. The lower the current, the more time you need to measure in order to get the same precision.

BTW, photomultipliers have been around for decades which count individual photons. The noise issue is precisely the same: you need lots of photons or lots of time to average the noise out.

Hi,

In general I am not entirely sure what you are trying to say here. It sounds almost like you are saying that it's impossible to filter out noise or at least reduce noise. It can't be that though because there are techniques that have been used for ages although they may vary a lot from one application to the next.

Your reply is interesting, but you are talking about a more simplistic form of filtering. Averaging works for some signals, but a more advanced method of "filtering" is needed in order to eliminate or at least decrease the noise content (which may also include averaging). I put that word in quotes because it's not even called "filtering" anymore, it's would be called "liftering", which is an involute of the word "filtering", with the first three letters "fil" reversed to "lif" and that replaces the first three letters: "fil-terin" to "lif-tering".
In fact, it's no longer dealing with the signal in the frequency or time domain, it's now referred to as the "quefrency" which is another involute of the word "frequency".

This might all sound very strange, but it's been around for a fairly long time although maybe not always used to reduce noise.
The simple view of this that makes it sort of understandable is that the actual signal content is convolved with the noise, and through the process of liftering the signal and the noise are separated. That gives the opportunity to reduce the noise sometimes by a large percentage. This is even when the signal varies itself.

I am not entirely sure what the limits of this technique would be for every application, but it does work. Would it not work at all for the application being discussed here? The application is not even here yet so it's hard to say. For the photomultiplier application I would think the "filtering" or "liftering" would be used on the electrical signal not the photons themselves. Do they use this technique presently for photomultiplier applications? Presently I don't know but they do have other techniques for reducing noise, and some of them we would never think of unless we read about them. Another example might be LIDAR.

I believe it's a bit more complicated than we might be able to discuss here with the measuring method being applied to different applications itself. So we have the measuring instruments with their respective quantum efficiencies, then the application of those measuring instruments for differing purposes with their different noise sources.

 

I suppose that my analog multi-meter must draw a bit of current, but my Beckman DMM certainly does not draw very much current.
And as for filtering, most of it is not "Absolute", but only "good enough" for the application.

 

There are old Quantum effect low noise amplifiers but modern solid state devices can be better.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/27827424

https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/maser-in-the-radio-waves.135071/post-1128057

Masers were used as a type of Parametric Amplifier before low noise solid state devices. In normal amplification the agent (the physical element of amplification using direct local power) has a noise resistance factor that fixed by the random movement of atomic particles (or holes) in the active device. Parametric amplifiers use the properties of EM fields (alternating local power) and varying electrical reactance ( nonresistive component of impedance in an AC circuit) as the 'agent' for a gain factor using modulation.

 

I suppose that my analog multi-meter must draw a bit of current, but my Beckman DMM certainly does not draw very much current.
And as for filtering, most of it is not "Absolute", but only "good enough" for the application.

I have a few analog voltage meters; one I know draws about 50ua which is not too bad.
Yeah the DMM's have very little current draw when measuring voltage.

 

https://thequantuminsider.com/2024/...m-computer-to-hack-military-grade-encryption/
Chinese Scientists Report Using Quantum Computer to Hack Military-grade Encryption

IMO most of the article is one big lie, with the best you can say is, deceptive and grossly misleading. Not only did their attack fail, they're not even attacking AES-256 (a symmetric quantum-resistant cipher vs what's really at risk with asymmetric public key algorithms like RSA when used for key exchange/management for a symmetric cipher).
Calling it Military-grade Encryption is like calling canned soup Military-grade if guys in the field eat it from the can.

 

IMO most of the article is one big lie, with the best you can say is, deceptive and grossly misleading.

AI, Quantum computing, Nuclear Fusion, Room Temperature Superconducting, same problem. The goal has switched from advancing science to raising money.

 

Telling a lie to confuse the enemy is a valid military technique. Demoralizing opponents has been used for many centuries. Nothing new there.
Nuclear fusion success has "been 20 years down the road" for many decades and is still only claimed to have succeeded for microseconds. But it has certainly provided good careers for a small group of researchers in the interim. The problem that I see with it is that it looks too much like perpetual motion with a whole lot of excess energy produced. Some of us see a problem making that happen.

 

Telling a lie to confuse the enemy is a valid military technique. Demoralizing opponents has been used for many centuries. Nothing new there.
Nuclear fusion success has "been 20 years down the road" for many decades and is still only claimed to have succeeded for microseconds. But it has certainly provided good careers for a small group of researchers in the interim. The problem that I see with it is that it looks too much like perpetual motion with a whole lot of excess energy produced. Some of us see a problem making that happen.

The military is not confused by this sort of blatant propaganda.

Sustained nuclear fusion is proven science (our sun has been doing it for billions of years), the problem is one of engineering it to human scale, it's a very hard engineering problem. Nuclear fusion is much burning a fuel like gasoline but it's at the nuclear reaction mode instead of chemical. In an ICE, 1 Gal (about six pounds) of fuel can move tons of steel, tens of miles. That would seem like magic too if one didn't understand chemistry.

 

...our sun has been doing it for billions of years...

But not the way we are trying to do it.

Otherwise, we'd have to manage with a mere 100 W/m^3.

Hardly worth the effort.