entropy

[Don Quixote de la Mancha]

The Physics collaboration I was with at CERN a while back used a
radioactive source and a Geiger counter to seed the random number
generator used for their Monte Carlo simulations of the experiment's
particle detector.

High-quality randomness is important for such an application because
the detector was very large and complex.  The Monte Carlo was used to
calculate the detector's acceptance - roughly speaking, it's
sensitivity - to the particle interactions we were studying.  The
published measurements were - again roughly - the observed
measurements divided by the acceptance.

If our Monte Carlo had any kind of non-randomness in it, it would have
been very difficult for us to tell.  It would have caused a systematic
error in the calculated acceptance, which would have caused a
systematic error in our published measurements.

But it's just like a bunch of Physicists to go to all the trouble to
build a randomness source out of a Geiger counter.  A noisy resistor
or diode would have done the job just as well.

If you'd like to know more about our work, we were the Spin Muon Collaboration:

   http://na47sun05.cern.ch/

We scattered high-energy Muons off of Helium nuclei in order to study
the spin of the particles that make up the He nucleus.  Not just the
protons and neutrons, but the quarks that compose them, as well as the
virtual particles that transmit the strong force that binds them all
together.

Don
-- 
Don Quixote de la Mancha
quixote at dulcineatech.com
http://www.dulcineatech.com

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