Kind: captions
Language: en
a plane plummets out of the sky a
speedrunner inexplicably jumps to a
higher platform what the what the and an
election recount is triggered all
because of the same invisible phenomenon
that permeates the
Universe on May 18th 2003 voters in
Belgium went to the polls in many
regions voting was done on a computer
something the belgians had been
experimenting with for over a decade but
the system had a backup each voter would
insert a magnetic card into the machine
and make their selection on screen their
vote was saved both to the computer and
the Magnetic card which they dropped
into a box for
redundancy late that night as the votes
were being tabulated one of the election
officials detected a problem with the
results from scarbeck a municipality in
central Brussels Maria vindevogel a
little known candidate with her own
party received more votes than was
mathematically possible they knew this
because of the way the preferential
voting system works so they took out the
magnetic cards and started a recount one
by one they fed each of them through the
machines again and after several hours
the recount was complete the vote totals
for every candidate were exactly the
same as before except for Maria vindal
in her case the recounted number of
votes was less than the original by
4,000
96 so what went wrong how had her
original tally been inflated by over
4,000 votes computer experts were
brought in to run extensive tests on the
software they combed through the code
but could find no bugs they got the
computer that had made the initial
erroneous tally and tested the hardware
again and again but they could not
replicate the error everything about the
hardware seemed to be in perfect working
order and this left only one one
possible explanation and it is seriously
weird the clue comes from the excess
number of votes Vogal received
4,096 computers work using binary
strings of zeros and ones each
coresponding to a power of two so
somewhere inside the computer tabulating
all the votes was a string of bits
representing the number of votes Maria
received it started the day all zeros
and then as each vote for her came in it
would increment by one physically this
is done by turning on a transistor for
one and turning it off for zero what's
remarkable about the number
4,096 is that it is exactly a power of
two 2 to the^ of 12 that is the 13th bit
so for Maria Vogal to receive an extra
4,096 votes only one thing needed to
happen the 13th bit had to flip from a
zero to a one
but why would that happen computers work
precisely because bits don't flip unless
we want them to or do they looking into
the problem Belgian investigators found
reports of similar issues from big
computer companies starting in the
1970s in 1978 Intel reported some
strange errors popping up in their 16
kilobit Dynamic random access memory or
Dam ones would spontaneously flipped to
zeros with no apparent cause the problem
turned out to be the ceramic packaging
the chip was encased in with the demand
for Semiconductor packaging skyrocketing
in the 1970s a new manufacturing plant
was constructed on the Green River in
Colorado unfortunately this site
happened to be just Downstream of an old
uranium Mill radioactive atoms made
their way into the river and then into
the ceramic packaging for Intel's
microchips Intel scientists
investigating the problem found that
even Trace Amounts of uranium and
Thorium in the ceramic were sufficient
to cause problems in their Dam memory
was stored as the presence or absence of
electrons in a semiconductor well the
alpha particles emitted by uranium and
thorium were energetic and ionizing
enough to create electron whole pairs in
the Silicon if an alpha particle struck
in just the right place it could create
a large number of free charge carriers
causing electrons to accumulate in the
well flipping a one to a zero this is
known as a single event upset a type of
soft error the error is soft because the
device hasn't been damaged the bit has
changed but you could erase it and
rewrite it with no problems
investigators exposed the chips to Alpha
emitters with different levels of
activity and just as you'd expect they
found the number of bit flips directly
correlated with the number of alpha
particles the chip had been exposed to
the reason this problem was identified
in the 1970s was because chip components
had been miniaturized to the point where
a single alpha particle could produce
enough charge to flip a
bit immediately these findings attracted
a lot of attention before the paper was
published it was widely circulated in
the industry and as a result chip
manufacturers were a lot more careful to
avoid radioactive materials when
producing their microchips and packaging
therefore the bit flip that gave Maria
vogo 4,000 96 extra votes wasn't caused
by natural radioactivity in the computer
so where did it come from after enry
beel discovered radioactivity with
uranium in 1896 scientists sought a way
to measure it how radioactive were
different materials and one way to do
this is with a gold leaf electrometer
when it's charged the leaf is repelled
and you can measure the amount of charge
by the angle of the leaf now if ionizing
radiation enters the chamber it rips
electrons off air molecules creating
positive and negative charges opposite
charges are attracted to the leaf
discharging it over time the higher the
level of ionizing radiation the faster
the device
discharges in 1910 Theodore wolf took
his electrometer to the top of the
Eiffel Tower since radioactivity was
found in the soil and rocks of Earth he
expected that 300 M up the radiation
would be just a few perent of the ground
radiation instead he found only a slight
decrease in 1911 Austrian physicist
Victor hes decided to take this
experiment further literally he loaded
electroscopes into the basket of a
hydrogen balloon in his first two
flights he observed the same thing as
wolf up to an altitude of 1100 M both
trips revealed no fundamental change in
radiation compared to the values
observed on the ground but the next year
he conducted seven balloon flights up to
an altitude of 5,200 M and here he
discovered something remarkable while
there was an initial drop in radiation
for the first several hundred meters
above 1 km or so the level increased
with increasing altitude at his maximum
height the level of radiation was
several times greater than it was on the
ground the radiation appeared to be
coming not from the Earth
but from the
sky hes scheduled one of his balloon
flights during a solar eclipse and as
the moon passed in front of the sun he
carefully watched his instruments but
the readings were unaffected even with
the sun half covered the level of
radiation was the same since no
influence of the eclipse on the
penetrating radiation was noted we
conclude that even if a part of the
radiation should be of cosmic origin It
hardly emanates from the Sun
Victor Hess had discovered cosmic rays
high energy radiation from space but
what were these Rays exactly and where
were they coming from well today we know
they aren't electromagnetic Rays as many
suspected but particles around 90% are
protons 9% are helium nuclei and 1% are
heavier
nuclei some of them are from the Sun but
they have comparatively low energy High
energy cosmic rays moving very close to
the speed of light come from exploding
Stars
Supernova in our own Galaxy and in
others and the highest energy particles
are thought to come from black holes
including the super massive black holes
at the centers of galaxies but it's hard
to pin down exactly where cosmic rays
come from because as charged particles
they're deflected by magnetic fields in
space so they can wind their way through
the universe for billions of years a
cosmic ray detected on October 15th 1991
had an energy of 51 jewles that is a
single subatomic particle with the
energy of a baseball going 100 km per
hour for obvious reasons it was dubbed
the OMG particle but primary cosmic rays
like these don't make it down to Earth's
surface instead they collide with air
molecules around 25 km above the ground
and create new particles like P these
Collide and Decay into other particles
like neutrons protons muons electrons
positrons and photons which in turn
collide with other air molecules in one
long Cascade so from a single primary
cosmic ray comes a shower of particles
streaming towards the Earth it is one of
these particles that investigators
suspect struck a transistor in a
computer in Belgium fli the 13th bit
from a zero to a one and giving Maria
Vogal
4,096 extra
votes but how often do things like this
happen in 1911 Charles Wilson made it
possible to see the cosmic rays all
around us when he perfected his Cloud
chamber an enclosure with super
saturated water or alcohol vapor when a
cosmic ray passes through the chamber it
ionizes the gas causing Vapor to
condense into tiny droplets on on the
ions revealing the path of the particle
alpha particles helium nuclei leave
short thick tracks while beta particles
electrons leave long skinny trails in
1932 Carl Anderson identified a trail
that looked like it was made by an
electron but in the applied magnetic
field it curved in the wrong direction
implying it had a positive charge
Anderson had found the anti- electron or
positron it was the first confirmed irm
Med sighting of antimatter 4 years later
also using a cloud chamber he discovered
the muon again in cosmic rays for his
discovery of the patron Anderson was
awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in
1936 he shared the prize with Victor
Hass the man who discovered cosmic rays
in the first place invisible particles
that affect our lives in ways most of us
are oblivious
to this is possibly the rarest thing to
ever happen in a video game in 2013 user
DOTA teabag was speedrunning Super Mario
64 on the console in the level Tick Tock
Clock he suddenly upw warps onto a
Higher platform what the she get
invisible walls what please say you got
invisible no that was the craziest thing
I've ever seen though the move shaves
off a few seconds and it seems like a
newly discovered glitch in the game that
could give speedrunners an edge user pan
and cook 12 put out a $1,000 Bounty for
anyone who could replicate the upw warp
but so far after 6 years no one has been
able to the best explanation anyone can
come up with is that a cosmic ray caused
the glitch it's been shown that a single
bit flip in the first bite of Mario's
height coordinate could have caused the
effect on the main level the bite was 1
00101 but if you flip the last one to a
zero it changes his vertical position
and just by chance this new height
coincides with the higher floor pan and
cook 12 wrote a script to manually flip
the bit at the right moment and was able
to achieve the same upw warp this is a
particularly visible bit flip but the
truth is cosmic rays are triggering bit
flips all the time an upset there
transient there can alter the function
of these devices and we call that a
single vent functional interrupt so an
entire process can hang so a blue screen
death that you get might actually have
been a neutron or whatnot when people
see the blue screen of death could that
be caused by a cosmic ray absolutely
these days there are a number of ways
computer chips are made resilient in the
face of bit flips like error correction
code or ECC memory but you can't totally
prevent bit flips from happening in 1996
IBM estimated that for each 256 megab of
ram one bit flip occurs per month and
the main culprit seems to be neutrons
created in the shower of particles from
cosmic rays starting in 2009 Toyota
recalled millions of vehicles due to the
problem of unintended acceleration we
were in the fast lane driving at about
70 and he said that the car was
continuing to accelerate and he couldn't
bring it to a stop many speculated that
cosmic ray induced bit flips in the
electronic control system were the cause
so much so that NASA was called in to
help with the investigation but it turns
out cosmic rays were probably not the
culprit NASA identified as the main
causes sticky accelerator pedals poorly
fitted floor mats and most commonly
drivers pushing on the accelerator
thinking it was The Brak but cosmic rays
have caused crashes of supercomputers
especially at higher elevations Los
Alamos National Labs located 2200 m
above sea level is constantly dealing
with Neutron induced supercomputer
crashes so the software Auto saves
frequently and neutron detectors have
been installed throughout the facility
if you go even higher like climbing up
to cruising altitude in a plane you can
see the radiation from cosmic rays
increasing on a guer counter to.5 micro
per hour at 18,000 ft up to 1 micr per
hour at 23,000 ft over two micro per
hour at 33,000 ft and over 3 micro CS
per hour at even higher altitudes and
towards the poles at cruising altitude
this increases the chance of a single
event upset by 10 to 30 times this isn't
critical if it happens in your laptop
but what if it occurs in the flight
computer on October 7th 2008 an Airbus
A330 took off from Singapore to Perth
just over 3 hours into the flight the
plane suddenly pitched down diving 200 m
in 20 seconds inside the plane everyone
experienced negative 8 G's of
acceleration it would have felt like the
plane had flipped over the gForce was
enough even with our three-point harness
to lift us both out of the sea and push
us forward as well minutes later the
plane dropped another 120 M 119 people
on board were injured many from bumping
their heads into the ceiling so the
pilots decided to make an emergency
landing in lman in the investigation
that followed the fault seemed to occur
with the first air data inertial
reference unit or adero for short this
computer supplies critical data like air
speed angle of attack and altitude the
way it supplies each of these pieces of
information is in a 32bit binary word
the first eight bits identify the type
of information and bits 11 to 29 encode
the actual data what seems to have
happened is that a bit flip in the first
eight bits meant altitude information
was mislabeled as angle of attack
information inside the cockpit alarms
went on for overs speed and stall
simultaneously something that should be
impossible but the plane nosed down
sharply to correct what it thought was a
stall throwing passengers and crew into
the ceiling investigators looked into
software bugs software corruption a
hardware fail physical environment
factors and electromagnetic inter
interference but each of these
possibilities was found to be unlikely
based on multiple sources of evidence
the other potential triggering event was
a single event effect resulting from a
high energy atmospheric particle
striking one of the integrated circuits
within the CPU module one of the
challenges with single event upsets is
that they are soft errors they don't
leave a trace but interestingly the
Airbus A330 was built in 1992 when there
were no specific regulatory or aircraft
manufacturer requirements for Airborne
systems to be resilient to single event
effects with the space shuttle
redundancy was built in from the start
for navigation and control there were
four computers simultaneously running
identical software If one computer had a
soft error the other three would
overrule it and using this setup they
could also track the frequency of bit
flips on one 5day Mission STS 48 there
were 161 separate bit
flips above the atmosphere cosmic rays
are so energetic sometimes you can even
see them once in a while you have your
eyes closed and you're not asleep yet
and if you wait a little
while uh you occasionally will see a
flash of light and we think it is uh
heavy particles or or individual bursts
of energy coming from radiation that are
either going through the eyeball itself
or going through the optic nerve
and uh they the way that your body
registers radiation going through it is
amazingly Enough by showing you a little
Flash in one of your eyes just to remind
you that you are subject to the
radiation of not only our sun but every
Star of the universe that is that is
radiating at you I picture back to the
first astronauts who must have closed
their eyes and seeing that radiation and
going I'm not going to tell anybody
about this cuz uh no one's told me about
I'm not and I can just imagine the first
two guys that said hey I amum sometimes
I see flash as a light do you see flash
as a light and then oh we all see flash
as a light oh okay well that's that's
all right
then for Missions to other planets
protecting Electronics is critical if a
single bit of information controls a
critical function on your spacecraft
let's say your thrusters and that goes
from a one to a zero from a on off or
vice versa you could lose the mission
that's why the computer on the
perseverance Rover that just landed on
Mars is 20 years old it's a power PC
launched in 2001 with only 256 MB of RAM
and 2 GB of flash storage but it is
radiation hardened meaning the design
materials circuits and software are
built to withstand 40 times the
radiation of an ordinary computer it's
been used on over a dozen space missions
going back to 2005 in fact when we first
started doing the power PC testing years
ago the way we did it we just simply
stuck an operating system processor in a
beam line where we we generate these uh
particles on the planet and look for
blue screen to death you can kind of
figure out what's going wrong and try to
undo that so you don't get to the blue
screen of death because a spacecraft
that gets into that mode is basically
unrecoverable as the Voyager One
spacecraft Departed the solar system one
of the ways we could tell was by an
increase in the flux of cosmic rays it
experienced although on Earth the
particles streaming from the Sun in the
solar wind are a source of radiation
further out these same particles
maintain a protective bubble the
heliosphere it helps deflect and slow
cosmic rays from Interstellar space
protecting the solar system from
ionizing radiation but the sun has an
11-year activity cycle so this
protection fluctuates the flux of cosmic
rays on Earth is much lower when the sun
is active than when it's
dormant in the history of our planet
cosmic rays may have played an even
larger role flipping bits not in
electronics but in the genetic codes of
living organisms providing some of the
variation on which natural selection
acts Maria Vogal is now a member of the
Belgian chamber of Representatives
elected by people not not a particle but
her story is a reminder of the zillions
of particles winding their way through
the universe for millions or billions of
years one of which might at any moment
Change Your Life by passing through a
tiny transistor and
CRA discovering the origin of cosmic
rays or where 4096 extra votes came from
or how to protect the Mars rover from
radiation requires problem solving which
is a perishable skill and the best way
to keep your problem solving skills
sharp is to solve a diverse range of
problems which you can do with the
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