Arthur Fuller
fuller.artful at gmail.com
Wed Nov 30 07:51:56 CST 2011
>From slashdot: *"An Ottawa physicist is using laser light to create truly random numbers much faster than other methods do, with obvious potential benefits to cryptography: 'Sussman's Ottawa lab uses a pulse of laser light that lasts a few trillionths of a second. His team shines it at a diamond. The light goes in and comes out again, but along the way, it changes. ... It is changed because it has interacted with quantum vacuum fluctuations<http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/GENERATING+RANDOM+NUMBERS/5779618/story.html>, the microscopic flickering of the amount of energy in a point in space. ... What happens to the light is unknown — and unknowable. Sussman's lab can measure the pulses of laser light that emerge from this mysterious transformation, and the measurements are random in a way that nothing in our ordinary surroundings is. Those measurements are his random numbers.'"* -- A. Cell: 647.710.1314 Thirty spokes converge on a hub but it's the emptiness that makes a wheel work -- from the Daodejing