logoalt Hacker News

quietsegfaultyesterday at 7:50 PM2 repliesview on HN

Earth’s geomagnetic noise fluctuations are on the order of nanoteslas (10^-9 T), which is 18 orders of magnitude above the signal they claim to have pulled out.

It’s below the thermal noise floor of any physical measurement system that obeys thermodynamics. You can’t engineer around it because it’s not an instrumentation problem. The signal is smaller than quantum noise limits at that scale. “AI” filtering doesn’t help when there’s no signal to filter. You can’t computationally recover energy that isn’t there.

This is certainly bullshit of the finest, most grassy and odorous caliber.


Replies

fluorinerocketyesterday at 10:10 PM

What if they have a bunch of prerecorded data for the guys heart, then use a lock in amplifier to see if there is a signal in the noise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lock-in_amplifier

kuhsaftyesterday at 8:43 PM

Background noise is pretty random. A cardiac signal is pretty regular.

show 1 reply