No this is all wrong. Fire crackles clearly depend on state. Nuclear decay is memoryless; decays are independent events.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_decay#Mathematic...
> theoretical >12 sources
What?
Re:Convert standard Geiger counter to RNG
by nonrandomstring on Monday November 13, 2023 @03:50PM
(#38255198)
Thanks for the correction on nuclear state. It's hard to imagine
anything having absolutely no state - but I guess a nucleus is not a
"thing" as such, even if surrounded by lots of similar non-things.
Does state not subsist in the total assembled mass in my example of
near-critical collection?
Re:Convert standard Geiger counter to RNG
by nonrandomstring on Tuesday November 14, 2023 @07:36AM
(#38262551)
Just answering myself after some reading today.
No, not really Because fission caused by free neutrons (which are rare) is something different from more common "spontaneous" radio-decay.
That does beg the question; what is the cause that we don't yet understand, what lies behind little bits of the universe falling apart?
Directing the sensor at a small point source makes clustering higher than if pointing it up into space [0] and receiving the "planar wave" background radiation of the Universe.
I took a while to figure this out when measuring the audio clicks and crackles from fire. I expect similar statistics to apply on a nuclear level (physicists please correct me). Within small, local sources common effects can be linked to common instigators. In other words events beget events. So a local variation in some variable sets off a bunch of related things [1].
As you sum this over an ever larger number of suitably decoupled sources, the central limit theorem starts to apply and what was bad uniform/even distribution becomes good Gaussian. In practice you need more than the theoretical >12 sources, but once you approach a few hundred uncorrelated sources the bell curve gets pretty good.
[0] probably assume the sky/space is an infinite number of sources all at very large distances.
[1] In the (dangerous) limit imagine a near critical mass of Uranium emitting bursts of chain cascades.