What have I been doing?
Entropy has been on my mind for a good few years now, and sometimes it's all I find myself thinking about. In all honesty, it's mind boggling to imagine and difficult to visualise.
Recently, I decided to create an experimental contraption to determine what the best source of entropy was for my earthquake forecasting research. TLDR: it's atmospheric noise. After my initial research some time back on quantum entropy and using the QRNG API service, and spending far too much money on API requests I decided that if I really wanted to continue my research down this route; I'd need a cheaper option for observing the quantum nature of the universe.
Problem was, I didn't exactly have £1000s lying around so I decided to build a rather primitive setup instead.
All you really need to know is, it's a Geiger counter with a small uranium 238 source and some thoriated tungsten that I'm fairly certain is doing nothing at this point. As for the atmospheric noise, I collect my readings from an SDR looking at the 200 kHz band.
Visualisations
The following visuals were generated using my program and plotted on a three dimensional interactive graph. This truly helped me determine what the differences were in the entropy sources and how they behave and also how volatile they are.
Nuclear decay of uranium 238:
200 kHz atmospheric noise:
Side by side comparison:
I'll leave it up to you to drawn your own conclusions about these visualisations but found the the atmospheric noise was far more useful for my use case.
Overlay:
Video:
Conclusion
The atmospheric noise collected at 200 kHz contains the largest known set of sources for entropy. It could be anything from natural sources such as thunderstorms to human made signals. Clearly, if we could then we'd be able to filter this noise out (if there is any) but that may be a little challenging. It is still uncertain why this source is better for my earthquake forecasting project, as compared to the radioactive decay I measured which is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics as is truly as close as I can get to true entropy. Or, at least that's my theory.
So what's next? You'll have to wait until my next blog post to find out.
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