I work as a software engineer and honestly, it’s ridiculous how often I’m asked to or tempted to violate the laws of physics.
There’s classics like measuring how long it takes to send a network packet from one device to another – you can’t, because the two devices might have wildly different understandings of what time it currently is. The only way to get an accurate measurement is by measuring how long it takes to send it there + back (a.k.a. the round-trip time).
And then you divide that by 2 and pretend there’s no asymmetry in transmission speed, nor delay between the other device receiving it and sending it back. 👍
In our previous project, we were recording audio chunks of one second each and then feeding it into a detector. At some point, we got asked, if we could reduce the delay until the user gets feedback from the detector. Also, we can’t make the detector detect things more often, because it might make more mistakes. Alright, I guess, I’ll just break up the time continuum then and give the user feedback before it has finished recording. 👍
And now in our current project, we’re supposed to send network packages across the globe and also we basically can’t have any latency. Yeah, so there’s this thing called the speed of light/causality at about 300000 km/s. Halfway around the globe is about 20000 km. That leaves us with 66.7 ms of latency, at its theoretical minimum. Guess I’ll just quickly invent a way to create worm holes, no problem. 👍
Oh, good point, I recently learned that the speed of light in fiber optics is around 200000 km/s. I always thought physicists were saying “in vacuum” to be technically correct, but that’s actually a huge difference…
Send it through the earth, you can reduce it theoretically to 42.5ms
This isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds and you just need a neutrino-beam… which has a horrible bandwidth (of 0.1 bits/s) plus the ridiculous upfront cost of running two particle-accelerators for a full-duplex link. (Google it up, this exists.)
I work as a software engineer and honestly, it’s ridiculous how often I’m asked to or tempted to violate the laws of physics.
There’s classics like measuring how long it takes to send a network packet from one device to another – you can’t, because the two devices might have wildly different understandings of what time it currently is. The only way to get an accurate measurement is by measuring how long it takes to send it there + back (a.k.a. the round-trip time).
And then you divide that by 2 and pretend there’s no asymmetry in transmission speed, nor delay between the other device receiving it and sending it back. 👍
In our previous project, we were recording audio chunks of one second each and then feeding it into a detector. At some point, we got asked, if we could reduce the delay until the user gets feedback from the detector. Also, we can’t make the detector detect things more often, because it might make more mistakes. Alright, I guess, I’ll just break up the time continuum then and give the user feedback before it has finished recording. 👍
And now in our current project, we’re supposed to send network packages across the globe and also we basically can’t have any latency. Yeah, so there’s this thing called the speed of light/causality at about 300000 km/s. Halfway around the globe is about 20000 km. That leaves us with 66.7 ms of latency, at its theoretical minimum. Guess I’ll just quickly invent a way to create worm holes, no problem. 👍
Send it through the earth, you can reduce it theoretically to 42.5ms (using mean radius and speed of light in vacuum).
Oh, good point, I recently learned that the speed of light in fiber optics is around 200000 km/s. I always thought physicists were saying “in vacuum” to be technically correct, but that’s actually a huge difference…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber#Refractive_index
This isn’t as ridiculous as it sounds and you just need a neutrino-beam… which has a horrible bandwidth (of 0.1 bits/s) plus the ridiculous upfront cost of running two particle-accelerators for a full-duplex link. (Google it up, this exists.)
Quantum physics might work too. No, seriously.