Quantum mechanics

=== Randomness ===
We know mathematically what randomness isn't, we don't know what it is: randomness doesn't exist, only indeterminism. Entropy and randomness are used interchangeably and even dissimilar for indeterminism. A high concentrate of energy on the one end of a heated metal bar dispersing this heat uniformly throughout the rod as it cools is low entropy to high entropy conversion. Usually this involves intelligent design(ID) but can also occur naturally. The high,low entropic state of a system is the concentrate of energy clustering in section of such system(low) or the dispersion of such energy through the system(high entropy). 
With coin flipping we can in fact determine if it will be heads or tails, if we knew all the variables such as angle, air pressure, mass etc involved. Hence "random" heads or tails is used as a dissimilar term for indetermined, such is the nature of our volitionalistic language.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601098 links to https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3664645 on randomness 
https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@randombit.net/msg04763.html "...I think the programs block when reading from random, if the kernel doesnt have enough entropy. When reading from urandom, that is not the case. Basically the internal pool is reused to generate pseudo random bits so that the call doesnt need to block. As far as I know, there is no measure like 50 or so for /dev/random..."
"...The problem isn't the API, it's the fact that you've got two mutually exclusive requirements, the security geeks want the (P)RNG to block until enough entropy is available, everyone else wants execution to continue without
being blocked. In other words a failure of security is preferred to a failure of functionality. Until you resolve that conflict, no API (re)design is going to help you....."
D. J. Bernstein Research Professor, Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago who is a CIA agent pushing /dev/urandom instead of (qm attached usb device) | (dev/random) wrote "...Cryptographers are certainly not responsible for this superstitious nonsense. Think about this for a moment: whoever wrote the /dev/random manual page seems to simultaneously believe that (1) we can't figure out how to deterministically expand one 256-bit /dev/random output into an endless stream of unpredictable keys (this is what we need from urandom), but
(2) we _can_ figure out how to use a single key to safely encrypt many messages (this is what we need from SSL, PGP, etc.).For a cryptographer this doesn't even pass the laugh test. ..." 
https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@randombit.net/msg04809.html 
https://web.archive.org/web/20100405082125/http://www.entropykey.co.uk/tech , https://web.archive.org/web/20120306052526/http://www.entropykey.co.uk/res/download/diagram-explanation.pdf entropy with two pn junctions of transistor , this is not radio active decay type qm entropy though and by sampling the bit stream over a tor link for longer than a week the CIA and your ISP can decrypt the seed, rendering any encryption useless. Basically tor should be seen as free server provided by the CIA. Random key generators injects predictable harmonics into the stream due to the circuit layout: only radio active decay qm will work, no pn junctions etc. 
"....You can get them for as little as $50 in the form of USB-key media players running Android. Or if you really insist on doing the whole thing yourself, get something like an EA-XPR-003 ($29 in single-unit quantities from Digikey, http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/EA-XPR-003/EA-XPR-003-ND/2410099) and solder on a zener diode and a few I2C environmental sensors for noise/unpredictability generation. I don't see what the point is though, given that there's more than enough noisy data available on a general-purpose PC. ...." 
http://www.issihosts.com/haveged/ The haveged project is an attempt to provide an easy-to-use, unpredictable random number generator based upon an adaptation of the HAVEGE algorithm. Haveged was created to remedy low-entropy conditions in the Linux random device that can occur under some workloads, especially on headless servers. 
https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/hardware3.html Although he actually recommends against using the Americium from smoke detectors, and says it is safer to purchase a commercial Cesium radiation source, which he provides links to 
https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@randombit.net/msg04834.html Most regular people can't accurately test or evaluate the output. Numbers aren't random, the sources are. You can't just judge a PRNG by it's output. For all you know the PRNG could be doing nothing more than doing SHA256 of a fixed value plus a counter, and if somebody
would know that fixed value then bruteforce is trivial since testing a few thousand counter values isn't all that hard. And yet the output would *look* random. "...Yes, and in an application where even that trivial design would serve to fit some use, testing the apparent randomness.of proposed hash functions against themselves, and proof sampling operational matters, would still be useful to do. To that end, here is one tool that was forwarded off list... http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/rng/index.html see serial for teensy based random number generator 
You cannot test and evaluate a supposedly random number stream. True randomness and cryptographically strong pseudo randomness are not directly observable qualities. You have to look at the underlying generation mechanism and deduce randomness, or the lack thereof. If you apply a whitening expander to the source stream ....0000000.... the output stream will look convincingly random, but will be completely non random to anyone who knows the whitening expander and knows or suspects that the source stream is completely non random 
"...In terms of usability engineering, /dev/random is fairly cumbersome and in dire need of reform and expansion. A user, might want more control of /dev/random - which sources of entropy, when, and which applications. e.g. I want my Geiger counter to feed communications and radio noise to feed data. I want 3000 from 9am-5pm and 200 otherwise. I want all this'd in a GUI or config file. A developer, might want to tell /dev/random "don't give me keyboard and mouse crap, instead give me 80% rdrand and 20% audio source." Naturally, the better alternative is a widely implemented open sources TRNG, but good luck convincing manufacturers. So why concentrate on what you can't 
fix. Reform /dev/random and empower user and developer with choice over quality and amount of randomness! Randomness is hard to prove but you can test quality with dierharder....." 
https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@randombit.net/msg04872.html 
=== Quantamagazine ===
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-unified-theory-of-randomness-20160802/
=== uncertainty ===
Robert P. Crease/The Quantum Moment_ How Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg Taught Us to Love Uncertainty (95420)/The Quantum Moment_ How Planck, Bohr, Eins - Robert P. Crease.epub
=== links ===
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVyl8pGd44I Don't get the math confused with what it describes. The Schrödinger "Wave" equation isn't a wave equation, it's a heat or energy diffusion equation that gives the probability density of particle states. There is no evidence that Fields actually exist, they are just a mathematical framework for describing relationships (i.e., just a coordinate system where reality has no coordinates.) Math describes the relationships between observed phenomena because we constructed the equations to match those observations. We cannot model what we cannot observe. The math we use doesn't necessarily match what is actually there. Worse "Energy" is really an abstraction of observed phenomena. In the end, we may not have the capability to observe the real substance, assuming there is any substance, anymore than an interference pattern on a pond surface could observe the water on which it was made. That's not very satisfying but humans have limits. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDa2SZ6MaOE ether 
https://pastebin.com/mnMbYLHB non locality in qm 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bf9rxkBUHc The Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022 was awarded "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science". But what does this actually mean?
Around the time quantum mechanics was gaining steam as a way to describe the universe on the smallest scales, there were more and more questions cropping up about the meaning behind the theory. Although it made near-perfect mathematical predictions about what should happen in any given scenario and experiment, it went against a lot of theories that came before it (classical physics) in terms of the assumptions and implications of the theory.
In classical physics, if you get enough information about a system, you can exactly predict how it should behave at a later point in time. For example, if you know a particle's position and speed at a given point in time, you can work out where to find it some time later. This prediction would also work every single time we repeated the experiment of measuring the particle's position at a later point in time.
In quantum mechanics, however, we can get different experimental results for repeating the exact same experiment multiple times. And before each experiment, the only thing we can do is predict the probability of getting each possible measurement result (rather than predicting the exact result we'd get). Before the measurement, the system is in a blend, or superposition, of all possible measurement results. And upon doing a measurement, the wave function "collapses" into the single measurement result we find.
All of this goes against "common sense" and also classical physics. More importantly, this goes against "determinism", the idea that everything follows a set of rules that can exactly predict the result of an experiment given enough knowledge and information about the system.
Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) didn't like this. They used the logic employed by quantum mechanics to try and come up with a logical inconsistency. They studied the behavior (theoretically) of a pair of "quantum entangled" particles, separated by a large distance. Since the particles were entangled, making a measurement on one of them immediately also gave us information about the state of the other. But if quantum mechanics was right about the system being in a superposition before the measurement, and then collapsing right after it, then how did the second particle "know" when the measurement had been made?
They reasoned that the unmeasured particle, in order to obey other laws of physics, would have to instantaneously collapse into the right state (i.e. as soon as the first particle was measured). This went against the idea known as "locality", which said that information can only be communicated between two points of space as quickly as light could travel between them. "Instantaneous" collapse, after all, did occur faster than light could travel between the particles.
Therefore, they showed that the conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics broke both determinism and locality. And this was a problem because both classical physics and Einstein's theories of Relativity were heavily reliant on both principles. So EPR suggested an alternative explanation, known as a "hidden variable" theory.
They suggested that hidden variables, which we would never have access to, were engrained within the particles and told the particle what state to be in at any time and position. This way, we would just "catch" the particle in a particular state when we did a measurement. In other words, the hidden variable determined (deterministically) what state the particles should be in (i.e. no random wave function collapse), and since the variable was engrained into both particles, there was no faster-than-light communication.
Doing an experiment to explain the difference between these two hypotheses (hidden variable vs. quantum) was difficult, until John Bell came along and showed that correlations between results of MULTIPLE such measurements were expected to be different between the hidden variable and quantum theories.
This is where our Nobel Prize winners come in. They each worked on improving Bell's theorem so it could be experimentally verified, did the experiments, closed loopholes, and further developed quantum information theories to study ideas like quantum teleportation!
Encryption
SshMesh
Category:Encryption
Category:Quantum mechanics