Weird screenplay showerthought: Guy’s dinner plans fall through, decides to have a couple brandys at the bar and drunkenly responds to a spam email which turns out to be legit, responds to even more, every single spam email is legit, and ends up traveling the world in order to help a cabal of disenfranchised Nigerian princes recover 28 billion dollars from a Pakistani street gang full of tech-savvy hackers with samurai swords and really fast street bikes. Obviously starring Nicolas Cage
If you email this to mr Cage there’s a 50/50 chance he’ll go for it. 100% chance if it ends up in his spam folder but he somehow still comes across it.
Cage will 100% do it if the money is right.
This concept has legs, let’s get this thing green lit!
Back when I was working on my (never completed) dissertation, I would sometimes call up televangelists’ hotlines and talk about my research. It was pretty amusing how they would initially try to steer the conversation to the God stuff but then give up as I kept relentlessly returning to my subject. Eventually they were reduced to “uh huh … uh huh” but they couldn’t just hang up on me because they weren’t allowed to. I actually worked through some problems this way.
In programming, this is called ‘Rubber Duck Debugging.’
The televangelists, in this case, were the rubber duck.
I work on quantum systems coupled to noisy environments (noisy as in causing random fluctuations). Atoms coupled to a light field are my specialty. Anyway, I just got invited by a predatory journal in the field of acoustics, vibrations and noise?!
Hey, noise is noise. What color is yours, white, pink or blue?
I describe the atoms using a so called Lindblad master equation. The atoms are kept in this description, but the light field is eliminated using two assumptions:
- The coupling between the two is very weak.
- Correlations between the two decay so fast that this can be considered instantaneous.
The later produces white noise.
That’s cool
In most fields " so fast that’s instantaneous" is pretty fast, but in nuclear and quantum physics that’s a whole new level.
What is the order of magnitude of your " too fast ”? I will invert that to state the bandwidth in Hertz.
Typical transition frequencies between two levels of an atom are 10^15Hz. The coupling between atoms and light is on the order of the decay rate at which photons are transmitted, which sits at around 10^6Hz.
Nigerian princes need my help.