Science
has done a very good job describing the physics of the world around us. What
scientists call the laws and theories of physics, describe extremely well
almost all the phenomenon that we can observe in the universe. Our
understanding is not complete but never-the-less, it is an amazing
accomplishment that has occurred quite recently in the history of humans.
Currently, there is a tremendous amount of scientific research happening in all
fields, motivated by the need to know, by the fame of discovery or by the
financial rewards of bringing new products to market. For better or for worse, what an amazing time to be here to
witness these achievements.
I
classify myself as a scientist and as an experimenter. When I find a gap in my
understanding of how the universe works,
I like to read up on it. Wikipedia is a wonderful resource. Almost
always, I discover that others have already had these same questions and there
are good explanations available that describe the answer to as deep of a level
as one dares to go. The language and math of science is not easy mastered and
is, at times, intimidating. I sometimes feel the need to do a simple experiment
to prove to myself that what I read is, indeed true. Skepticism is a good
thing; it keeps our beliefs true to Reality. It has been my observation, that
new discoveries often have come from experiments that do not entirely give the
expected results. My interests have been admittedly whimsical, but I think it
is important to let your muse take you where she wants to go.
Randomness
 |
By Greg L at the English language Wikipedia,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1325234 |
I
have long thought about the concept of randomness. In the summer of 1966 I took
an experimental FORTRAN programming class at the local High school. We
communicated by teletype with the IBM computer located at UCLA. Programs were
recorded on one inch wide punched paper tape. One of the projects was to write
a random walk program. If you did a good job of generating random numbers, the
random movements (left-right-up-down) would inevitably bring the printed trail
back to near its starting point. Later in college, I used COBAL punch card
decks to model predator-prey populations. I modeled how individuals might move
about randomly until predator and prey discovered each other and watched how
the populations would change in sinusoidal cycles until the simple systems
would enviably collapse. Employed as a CLS for 40 years, I have used
statistical analysis of control results to generate the gaussian curve of
random measurement error. Indeed,
randomness is all about us: in the movement of the perfume molecules in air, in
the Brownian movement of particles under the microscope and in the background
noise of an AM radio. In this universe, it appears as though things are easily
stirred-up but difficult to become organized again. Entropy is a measure of the
amount of disorganization that systems contain, where randomized systems have
more entropy. Some think the forward arrow of time is fixed due to entropy.
Cosmic stuff.
Also
in 1966, I received a crystal radio set as a Christmas present. With it, I
could easily hear the KTMS AM broadcast from the towers located about two miles
from my house. The signal was so strong that I found I could still hear the
signal if I removed the coil and capacitor parts of the tuning circuit.
Eventually, I found that if I wired the cat whisker diode directly across the
ear piece, I could hear the local broadcast by merely touching a single lead of
the headset, to a ground. AM radio is not very popular now. Devices have
utilized higher frequencies with greater bandwidth. Receiving devices can
utilize digital signals from multiple local cell sources. I wonder what this
trend looks like when viewed far away in space. I would bet that the huge
number of weak digital transmissions would look a lot like random noise. Add
data encryption to the mix and would you even be able to tell there were
signals emanating from earth?
No
Signals from Space
In
1950, Enrico Fermi publicly wondered why intelligent life had not been
discovered elsewhere in the universe. The Drake equation estimates of current
Milky Way technological civilizations run from less than one to 2.8x10^8. Yet
sixty-six years later, Fermi's Paradox still looms. The negative result has not
been for a lack of trying; there have been decades of SETI searches. Regardless
of the eventual answer, that answer will have extraordinary implications.
How
would an advanced civilization communicate between outposts that were light
years apart? EM waves are painfully slow on a galactic scale. I wonder if
somewhere in this universe, there is a technology that allows a more efficient
form of communication. Think of how fast our technologies have advanced. What
could we develop given another 10,000 years? What would this technology be
like? If there was a better way to communicate over long distances, then it
would be the preferred way to communicate. It could be one explanation why we
have not heard anything while listening for radio waves from space. This
imagined alien communication technology would cover vast distances and contain
trillions of messages from billions of sources. I am envisioning a cosmic party
line where everyone could hear anyone's messages. I image these messages could
be digital in nature and would be encrypted. Mixing all those encrypted signals
together would produce what could appear as a random signal. I am not talking
about detecting EM waves, but rather looking at sources of locally produced
apparently random signals. We have a name for that kind of thing in our
technology; it is called noise.
Noise
Noise
is a big nuisance in electronic circuits. Engineers work hard to design
electronic circuits that amplify very small signals while preserving said
signal's fidelity against contaminating random noise. Many electronic
components produce noise; even the common resistor produces random noise as
individual electrons wander about through their quantum landscape. Reversed
biased Zener diodes are an excellent source of random noise. Zener noise
signals can be used to make soothing white noise audio outputs. Just as white
light is made up of many colors mixed together, white Zener noise contains a
wide mixture of frequencies all the way onto the radio range. I have read that
the Zener noise can come from several different quantum mechanisms depending how
the component is manufactured and how the device is used.
So
the question that nags at me is, could an encrypted message be embedded in an
apparently random noise signal? I would guess, yes it could. I can imagine a
clever programmer producing a data string
that could pass any test for randomness, yet still contain a complex message.
An example might be a binary string of a few billion digits of the number Pi.
Without knowing that you were looking at the number Pi, the string could pass
any test for randomness, yet it is not. A message could be imbedded by changing
some of the apparently random digits to other random digits. Detecting what
digits had changed would decode into the message. So is there a way to tell if
an apparently random signal contains information? I do not think so. And this
is exactly what disturbs me.
Actually,
what I asked above, may have been a trick question. I believe there is no way
to tell if a single random signal contains coded information
without having the key, but if the same message is simultaneously encoded into
each of two apparently random signals that have different keys, then would that
be detectable? I am not trying to decode the encrypted message itself; I am
just wondering if it could be demonstrated that the same message was present in
both signals. How about three signals, or a million?
If
the same signal were present in just any two random noise signals, then
something like that would have surely been detected a long time ago. Indeed,
the same signal cropping up over and over again in a wire, is the basis of
radio reception. But what about the same message, coded with two different
keys, producing two different random appearing signals... for that, I'm not so
sure anyone would have noticed or looked. It is this fanciful idea, totally
unfounded by fact, which I would like to disprove. I aim to design an
experiment that would show that these types of signals are not imbedded in
electronic random noise.
A Way Forward
I want to put to rest this crazy idea that a
coded message can be hidden within a random noise signal. How would I know a
coded message if I saw it? The answer is, that I would see the same signal on
two different detectors. So whatever I eventually build, I must build at least
two of them. The detectors/receivers must be shielded from outside RF signals
and light; the signals I want to detect are produced locally inside zener
diodes. The signals could be directional and I want to investigate all
directions with the detector. I want the detector to be analog in design. The
analog output would be sampled by a microprocessor and values stored on my
computer for later analysis. I have thought of dozens of strategies for
detecting coded signals. I could use one, two, three or more zener signals. I
could add, subtract or multiply the raw signals. I could compare the local
frequencies or timing of the zener events. I could apply frequency filters and
compare outputs. I could compare the areas under the zener curves. Compare the
height of the zener pulse. I have seen what appears to be a smaller random
signal riding on the back of the main zener signal when the applied voltage is
just at the zener threshold. I could digitize any of the above comparisons and
apply Boolean logic to them. One zener output could be used as a decryption key
for another output. The possibilities are endless and I expect that by the time
I finish running experiments, I will not have seen any correlation between two
detectors looking at two different random signals. I am hoping to gain some
solace there, regardless of how convoluted or misdirected my path.
A 100mS
average of the differences squared of the two zener rates (sampled each
mS) is plotted with 540 vertical points, corresponding to the distance from the ecliptic (Declination), and 1440
horizontal points, corresponding to the time of day (Right Ascension). The color
of each point corresponds to the amount of agreement between the rates of the
two zener diodes, with red being good agreement (lower values) and blue being
poor agreement (higher values). There should be no preferred direction that
effects the amount of agreement, so the graph is expected to be homogenous
and/or random in nature. I have finished building this thing and it is time to
give it a name. Since it views the cosmos using two point sources, I'm calling
it a Lociscope (Lō-kī-skōp).
The servo is a little shaky as it scans. I am
watching the first 24 hour image build. The image is composed of mostly light
green pixels in the mid value range with randomly scattered red, yellow and
blue pixels. In the afternoon, there were some broad and diffuse vertical bands
of lower values. I suspect these bands to be a temperature artifact, as it was
indeed warmer in the afternoon. Other than these broad vertical bands, I do not
see any grouping of colors in a particular direction or any obvious pattern to
the image. This is what I expected to see if there is no correlation between
two point sources of random waveforms and the direction in which the points
lie. I plan on making several more images in the days to come and then do some
experiments on the effect of temperature on the zener diodes. 
I squeezed a LM35DZ temperature sensor onto the
zener "receiver" board and now I read the board's temperature in degrees
centigrade on the Arduino's analog INPUT pin A0. The sensor outputs 10.0 mV per
Cº and the Arduino converts each
millivolt to 0.2048 decimal, so Arduino
decimal = Cº * 2.048. l found good linear correlation of the average
zener peak rates to the board temperature. Zener #1 average counts per
millisecond = Cº * 3.586 + 241 and Zener #2 average counts per millisecond = Cº
* 4.639 + 492. The zeners are not very well matched so I'm not surprised that
the average difference squared to the temperature correlation is not linear. By
calculating a long term average of the difference squared data, I can
compensate for drifting temperature and those broad vertical bands on the
images become much less pronounced.
