A Modern Horror Story - Part III
Our Halloween tradition is to present a true-life scary tale:
You wake up. Emergency and rescue radios are down.
Your location app is offline and planes are grounded worldwide.
You attempt to go shopping, but the credit card isn't working. The ATM is down, too.
As the day progresses both cell and internet service is lost, stores and restaurants are closed, and you can't even get gas.
By the next morning the power is out.
The cause? GPS is down.

If this feels like a bad sequel, it is. The potential collapse of modern society caused a GPS outage was identified two decades ago, with fears raised over and over since then. And, like Michael Myers, the threats keep coming:

• Intentional jamming in Ukraine, Israel, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Panama Canal.
• Increasing solar activity (see below).
• Anti-satellite missiles that could blow up GPS and commercial satellites.
• Counter-space weapons that provide plausible deniability, including jamming and laser dazzling, kidnapper satellites that can “seize control of a satellite, “nesting doll” satellites, and other rendezvous satellites.

While the US continues to "admire the problem," not everybody is standing idly by:

• China developed BeiDou as a response to their “Unforgettable Humiliation”, and recently announced plans to develop a "High-precision Ground-Based Timing System."
• India's plans to develop IRNSS was triggered by “US denial of GPS.”
• Europe developed Galileo to address concerns that 10% of their GDP relies on a system with “inherent shortcomings which could be compromised by a malicious actor.”
• The UK recently announced their Position, Navigation and Timing framework which "include a crisis plan in the event current PNT services are unavailable."
• Other countries are developing their own alternatives to GPS, including Russia's GLONASS, Japan's QZSS, and Korea's KASS.

Happy Halloween!

Last Week's Theme: The Alchemy of Light

• Presenting at the International Timing and Sync Forum this week, and attending the UK PNT Leadership Seminar next week.
• Developing new proposals working with partners, with more in development.
• Working on new IP and provisional patents.

• The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) predicts that the next solar maximum “will be earlier, stronger and last longer than estimates made in 2019.” This is a concern as “geomagnetic storms triggered by plasma outbursts known as coronal mass ejections can affect electrical grids, GPS signals, drag satellites out of orbit and pose a radiation risk to airline workers and astronauts.”
• The WSJ also notes that a large solar event could "seriously damage parts of our power-distribution infrastructure," knock out the repeaters in fiber optic cables, and damage satellites.
• The US Army has responded to the GPS jamming in Ukraine by initiating a PNT Assessment Experiment to put "emerging and established tech through the wringer." According to the director of the Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing/Space Cross-Functional Team: “Across the board, GPS isn’t the only game in town. You have to have other capabilities to achieve [assured positioning, navigation and timing].”
• The future for quantum in space could include satellites with "hyper-sensitive quantum accelerometers, gyroscopes, and clocks, navigating the solar system with unmatched precision....miniaturized quantum sensors, working in unison to image exoplanets, map asteroids, and detect elusive dark matter. Space telescopes harnessing quantum optics to peer back to the very origins of our universe with clarity exponentially beyond present capability...quantum communication channels spanning vast cosmic distances, weaving a web of connectivity between planets and space settlements. Beams of entangled photons enabling teleportation of massive amounts of data across the void. Cryptographic keys distributed via satellite securing our space-based infrastructure from the threat of computational attacks."

• ITSF, Oct 30 – Nov 2, Antwerp, Belgium
• UK PNT Leadership Seminar, Nov 7, London, UK

Entanglement is Spookier than you Think
Everybody knows Einstein's famous quote calling entanglement "spooky action at a distance."
It registered his disbelief at the apparent "non-local" action of entanglement. Einstein favored the idea that hidden "local variables" are at work, but clever experiments based on the work of John Stewart Bell seems to prove that local hidden variable theory is incorrect, or at least incomplete.
The famous, but misunderstood, Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser illustrates this and the observer effect, where a particle moves from the quantum to classical realm through quantum decoherence.
It starts with the famous double-slit experiment first performed in 1801.
When light is shown through a double slit, an interference pattern emerges on the other side, suggesting that light acts as a wave.
But then Einstein came along in 1905 and found that light is actually made up of discrete energy packets called photons.
A few decades later the double-slit experiment was re-created with individuals photons. When you fire a bunch of photons through a double-slit, you get the same interference pattern. No surprise there, as Thomas Young showed in 1801.
If you fire them one by one, instead of en masse, you can see them land on the other side. But keep firing more and the familiar interference pattern emerges.
What are they interfering with? Well, it turns out that the photons themselves are in a wave superposition.
Then scientists found a way to detect which slit the individual photons went through. When they did this, the interference pattern disappeared. Just the act of detecting which path it went down eliminated the interference pattern - the detection caused quantum decoherence.
In a very clever set of experiments called the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser, scientists figured out a way to detect, using pairs of entangled photons, which path a photon took through a slit by the partner photon.
While it seems as though the future event was predicted by the pattern shown in the past, that is not actually the case - but it did spawn a lot of confusion.

To learn more, please email us or schedule a meeting here.