The laws of physics haven’t been repealed by AI

You may have read about how a colonel was rescued deep inside Iran using a technology dubbed “ghost murmer.” Great marketing, bad physics.

“By Tuesday, the New York Post reported that the CIA had deployed Ghost Murmur, a device that uses vaguely described “long-range quantum magnetometry” to find signals of human heartbeats, after which artificial intelligence software isolates each heartbeat from the noisy data.”

This is just BS on stilts.

“It’s a terrific story. It is also, according to scientists who study magnetic fields, almost certainly not true. The rescue was real—the mission involved multiple aircraft and a survival beacon carried by the airman—but Ghost Murmur, at least as publicly described, finds no support in decades of peer-reviewed physics, even with the help of AI, experts told me.

“Quantum magnetometers are real; they are ultraprecise at, for instance, detecting heart arrhythmias by measuring magnetic fields (via quantum properties) produced by the cardiac muscle. The problem is that the heart’s magnetic field is weak. “At the surface of the chest, where you’re about 10 centimeters away from the source, the magnetic field is just barely detectable,” says John Wikswo, a professor of biomedical engineering and physics at Vanderbilt University. “Now, [if] instead of going 10 centimeters away—which is a tenth of a meter—you go a meter away, the amplitude of the signal has dropped to a thousandth of what it was.” The signal becomes dramatically weaker at a kilometer.”

In addition to the absurd weakness of a human heart magnetic field over a large expanse of land, there’s all the other hearts in the area, many closer to the detector than the colonel’s.

“To find a heartbeat, a quantum Ghost Murmur tool would have to contend not just with Earth’s magnetic field and magnetic noise from natural and human-made electric currents but also with “the heartbeats of the sheep and dogs and jackrabbits—whatever else is running around out there,” says Chad Orzel, a professor of physics at Union College in New York State and author of How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog.” 

Setting aside the astronomical bullshit quotient attached to any random statement coming out of the Trump CIA, the claims alone pegged my crap detector. It’s not that I think they believe this nonsense, it’s that they believe we can and should fall for it. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-quantum-ghost-murmur-purportedly-used-in-iran-scientists/?utm_campaign=sprinklr&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkedin 

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