Never say anything

For reasons which are unclear even to myself, I decided to use Google Scholar to get a list of all archived scientific journal papers with the words "National Security Agency" published before 1975. There's a big cluster of papers funded by the NSA dealing with solid state physics, semiconductors and superconductors, from 1957 to 1961, with one paper on the properties of lithium hydride in 1959. Then there's a dry spell, followed by a steady flow of papers on mathematical techniques tangentially related to cryptography, computer security, and, of course, "Real-time recognition of ten vowel-like sounds in continuous speech". It's known that the NSA developed the cryptographic technique known as differential cryptanalysis before IBM rediscovered it in the early 1970s during the development of the Data Encryption Standard. The NSA told IBM to keep it secret, which it did. The method was independently discovered in the late 1980s, by Biham and Shamir, who published in 1990. So the NSA is pretty good at keeping things mum. But I'm a little curious if the NSA was trying for a quick run towards quantum entanglement technology in the late 1950s and early 1960s; and if so, did they find anything? And why the burst and lull? Anyway, here's the list of papers for my readers Bernard:

Microwave Measurements of the Energy Gap in Superconducting Aluminum MA Biondi, MP Garfunkel, AO McCoubrey - Physical Review, 1957 Investigation of a Shock-Induced Transition in Bismuth RE Duff, FS Minshall - Physical Review, 1957 Hyperfine Structure of Paramagnetic Ions V Heine - Physical Review, 1957 Cyclotron Resonance in Tin AF Kip, DN Langenberg, B Rosenblum, G Wagoner - Physical Review, 1957 Dorfman's Proposal Regarding Cyclotron Resonance in Ferromagnetic Substances C Kittel - Physical Review, 1957 Magnetoresistance of Single Crystals of Copper R Olson, S Rodriguez - Physical Review, 1957 Variational Calculations of Dipole Polarizabilities of Helium-Like Ions EG Wikner, TP Das - Physical Review, 1957 Nuclear Interaction of 140-to 218-Mev K Mesons BS Zorn, GT Zorn - Phys Rev, 1957 Hyperfine Interactions in F Centers WE Blumberg, TP Das - Physical Review, 1958 Investigation of Time-Reversal Invariance in the Decay of the Neutron MA Clark, JM Robson, R Nathans - Physical Review Letters, 1958 Photoconduction and Surface Effects with Zinc Oxide Crystals RJ Collins, DG Thomas - Physical Review, 1958 Magnetic Anisotropy Constant of Yttrium Iron Garnet at 0� K BR Cooper - Physical Review, 1958 Experimental Limit of the Neutrino Rest Mass L Friedman - Physical Review Letters, 1958 Acoustical Loss and Young's Modulus of Yttrium Iron Garnet DF Gibbons, VG Chirba - Physical Review, 1958 Spin-Lattice Relaxation Resonances in Solids HS Gutowsky, DE Woessner - Physical Review Letters, 1958 Approximate Theory of Ferrimagnetic Spin Waves TA Kaplan - Physical Review, 1958 Excitation of Spin Waves in a Ferromagnet by a Uniform rf Field C Kittel - Physical Review, 1958 Interaction of Spin Waves and Ultrasonic Waves in Ferromagnetic Crystals C Kittel - Physical Review, 1958 Paramagnetic Centers as Detectors of Ultrasonic Radiation at Microwave Frequencies C Kittel - Physical Review Letters, 1958 Orientation of Nuclei in Ferromagnets W Marshall - Physical Review, 1958 Majorana Formula A Meckler - Physical Review, 1958 Linear Antiferromagnetic Chain with Anisotropic Coupling R Orbach - Physical Review, 1958 Magnetic Field Dependence of Ultrasonic Attenuation in Metals at Low Temperatures S Rodriguez - Physical Review, 1958 Theory of Cyclotron Resonance in Metals S Rodriguez - Physical Review, 1958 Cross Sections for Double and Triple Meson Production in Hydrogen by Photons with Energies up to 1... JM Sellen, G Cocconi, VT Cocconi, EL Hart - Physical Review, 1958 Penetration Depth, Susceptibility, and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance in Finely Divided Superconductors M Tinkham - Physical Review, 1958 Superconducting Energy Gap Inferences from Thin-Film Transmission Data M Tinkham, RE Glover III - Physical Review, 1958 Antishielding of Nuclear Quadrupole Moments in Heavy Ions EG Wikner, TP Das - Physical Review, 1958 Paramagnetic Susceptibility in Superconductors K Yosida - Physical Review, 1958 Remarks on the Theory of Superconductivity K Yosida - Physical Review, 1958 A class of systematic codes for non-independent errors N Abramson - IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 1959 Metallic Transition in Lithium Hydride RE Behringer - Physical Review, 1959 Cross-Relaxation in Spin Systems N Bloembergen, S Shapiro, PS Pershan, JO Artman - Physical Review, 1959 Lattice Vibrations in Silicon and Germanium BN Brockhouse - Physical Review Letters, 1959 The theory of autonomous linear sequential networks B Elspas - IRE Transactions on Circuit Theory, 1959 High-Speed Microwave Switching of Semiconductors--II RV Garver - IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques, 1959 Measurement of one-photon and two-photon wave packets in spontaneous parametric downconversion YH Kim - JOSA B, 1959 Magnetic Form Factor of Cobalt R Nathans, A Paoletti - Physical Review Letters, 1959 Antiferromagnetic Magnon Dispersion Law and Bloch Wall Energies in Ferromagnets and Antiferromagnets R Orbach - Physical Review, 1959 Excitation of Spin Waves in an Antiferromagnet by a Uniform rf Field R Orbach, P Pincus - Physical Review, 1959 Neutron Study of the Crystal and Magnetic Structures of MnFe_{2-t} Cr_{t} O_{4} SJ Pickart, R Nathans - Physical Review, 1959 Temperature Dependence of Anisotropy Energy in Antiferromagnets P Pincus - Physical Review, 1959 Relaxation Effects in a Maser Material, K_{3}(CoCr)(CN)_{6} S Shapiro, N Bloembergen - Physical Review, 1959 Low-Temperature Impurity Conduction in n-Type Silicon KR Atkins, R Donovan, RH Walmsley - Physical Review, 1960 Nuclear Spin-Lattice Relaxation Caused by Paramagnetic Impurities WE Blumberg - Physical Review, 1960 Spin Relaxation of F-Center Electrons WE Blumberg - Physical Review, 1960 Pulsed Nuclear Resonance Spectroscopy M Emshwiller, EL Hahn, D Kaplan - Physical Review, 1960 Thermoelectricity and Thermal Conductivity in the Lead Sulfide Group of Semiconductors D Greig - Physical Review, 1960 Electric Field Distributions in an Ionized Gas. II B Mozer, M Baranger - Physical Review, 1960 Selective Spin Excitation and Relaxation in Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance MJ Weber, EL Hahn - Physical Review, 1960 Nuclear Quadrupole Spin-Lattice Relaxation in Alkali Halides EG Wikner, WE Blumberg, EL Hahn - Physical Review, 1960 Role of Double Exchange in the Magnetic Structure of Li x Mn Se RR Heikes, TR McGuire, RJ Happel Jr - Phys Rev, 1961 Magnetic Structure Transitions in Li x Mn Se SJ Pickart, R Nathans, G Shirane - Phys Rev, 1961 Diagnostic experiments in a magnetically driven shock tube. JB Heywood, T REPORT - 1964 [CITATION] The invisible government D Wise, TB Ross - 1964 - New York, Random House The force density in polarizable and magnetizable fluids LJ Chu, HA Haus, P Penfield - 1965 Algorithm 287: matrix triangulation with integer arithmetic[F 1] WA Blankinship - Communications of the ACM, 1966 Algorithm 288: solution of simultaneous linear Diophantine equations[F 4] WA Blankinship - Communications of the ACM, 1966 Word-recognition computer program. B Gold, T REPORT - 1966 Experimental studies of handwriting signals JS MacDonald, T REPORT - 1966 [CITATION] The ARPA network L ROBERTS, B WESSLER - ... Networks of Computers Proceedings National Security Agency, 1968 [CITATION] The ARPA Computer Network. Networks of Computers Symposium NOC-68 L Roberts - ... Workshop, Ft. Meade, Md., National Security Agency, Sept, 1969 An alternative approach to macro processing M Hammer - Proceedings of the international symposium on Extensible ..., 1971 Brief survey of languages used for systems implementation JE Sammet - ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 1971 Cited by 3 A system for interprocess communication in a resource sharing computer network DC Walden - Communications of the ACM, 1972 Micromodules: Microprogrammable Building Blocks for Hardware Development R Cooper - ISCA, 1973 A loop network for general purpose data communications in a heterogeneous world TE Hassing, RM Hampton, GW Bailey, RS Gardella - Proceedings of the third ACM symposium on Data ..., 1973 Proving the adequacy of protection in an operating system TA Linden - Architectural Support for Programming Languages and ..., 1973 Note on computing autocorrelations W Blankinship - Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing [see also IEEE ..., 1974 Processing Times for Segmented Jobs with I/O Compute Overlap LW Cotten, AM Abd-Alla - Journal of the ACM, 1974 Real-time recognition of ten vowel-like sounds in continuous speech H Drucker, J Preusse - IEEE Transactions on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing, 1974 An artwork design verification system HS Baird, YE Cho - Proceedings of the 12th conference on Design automation, 1975 Computer aided LSI circuit design: A relationship between topology and performance P Losleben - Proceedings of the 12th conference on Design automation, Design validation in hierarchical systems P Losleben - Proceedings of the 12th design automation conference, 1975

Comments

[Robert]

Your list of papers is, not surprisingly, dominated by superconductivity - the BCS theory had just been published in 1957, and it took the world of physics by storm.

Late 1950's is IMO too early for NSA to be thinking about "entanglement" - that concept finds its natural foundation in Bell's 1964 paper, which did not get a whole lot of attention at first. To be sure, the basic idea is implicit in Bohm's 1950's work, not to mention EPR 1935, but these earlier works have a very different emphasis. It's a subjective judgement, but my gut tells me that a brilliant NSA mathematician with some background in quantum theory might have been able to discern cryptographic applications in Bell 1964, but not in Bohm or EPR.

[Carlos]

There's a fair amount of electron spin and nuclear magnetic resonance research as well, which piqued my interest. Related to BCS theory, but indirectly.

My hypothetical NSA researcher in 1956 probably wouldn't be thinking quantum cryptography or computation, but he (almost assuredly 'he', dammit) might be thinking "untappable/perfectly secure communication" or even "superluminal communication", depending on his take on Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen and Bohm. So I guess I am wondering if someone at or through the NSA had prefigured Bell by a few years, or even Aspect.

[Will Baird]

Y'know, this almost sounds like a pulpish sfnal book, blended with a bit of Clancy and alternate history, waiting to be written, Carlos. Perhaps you and the Muirs ought to get into the fictional writing arena. Certainly wouldn't hurt the genre to get an AH spy novel.

ObWI: NSA develops an /perfectly/ secure telecom system circa 1960. How do the Soviets react?

[Bernard Guerrero]

"Anyway, here's the list of papers for (strike)my readers(/strike) Bernard"

Should I consider this an honor or have your daily hits just gotten really attenuated? I can't believe folks don't eat this stuff up.

Anyway, "untappable/perfectly secure communication or even superluminal communication" is the first thing I thought of when you said entanglement. Most likely the former, unless NSA has been keeping some _really_ cool secrets besides. (On an HDTD side-note, I seem to recall that one of Anderson's recurring motifs was Flandry's constant lookout for some means of direct supraluminal communication, as opposed to via the FTL equivalent of a packet-steamer.)

Possibly of interest: http://colossalstorage.net/home_entangled.htm

http://qist.lanl.gov/pdfs/rm_intro.pdf

and

http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~crepeau/CRYPTO/Biblio-QC.html

Of particular note in that last, "1. Wiesner, S., "Conjugate coding", Sigact News, vol. 15, no. 1, 1983, pp. 78 - 88; original manuscript written circa 1970."

Will, "ObWI: NSA develops an /perfectly/ secure telecom system circa 1960. How do the Soviets react?" How would they find out? ;^)

[Bernard Guerrero]

Different topic:

Take a look at: http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2005/08/talk_of_recessi.html#more

The first comment is interesting, too. Something there, but then he screws it up later when comparing the energy _remuneration_ of a boyscout and a neurosurgeon. Price levels can fall without the overall level of activity dropping.

[Robert]

Hmm - my previous comment provides an interesting illustration of the "blink" phenomenon. Looking at your titles again, while superconductivity is prominent, it in no way "dominates" the list. I subconsciously (and with the help of two glasses of Ravenswood Sonoma Zinfandel) aggregated a whole lot of papers dealing with the general subject of "collective phenomena in solid state physics" - ferrromagnetism, antiferromagnetism, and so forth - with superconductivity - the most spectacular example of such a phenomenon, which served as a paradigm for research into all of those other phenomena.

I agree that the amount of attention devoted to paramagnetic resonance (only loosely connected to that Paradigm, via spin waves) is curious and worthy of further investigation.

As for EPR/Bohm/entanglement, a provocative WI comes to mind. David Bohm was an interesting character. He was one of the few physicists of his generation who really paid attention to EPR and related philosophical issues - first of all in his Quantum Theory textbook, which is one of the few from that period that pay any attention at all to the Problem of Measurement, and then a few years later in his Hidden Variables papers. He also made profound contributions to solid-state physics - the Bohm-Pines treatment of collective coordinates is one of the seminal papers on the quantum many body problem (and via Pines, who went on to work for Bardeen, there is a direct link from Bohm to BCS. The Bardeen-Pines Hamiltonian for electrons interacting with phonons eventually became BCS after Cooper discovered the pairing phenomenon. Schrieffer was the grad student who put all the pieces together.)

However, Bohm's career in physics was ruined by his past Communist associations. Princeton fired him, and he was unable to get a position in the U.S. during the early 1950's. Eventually he got a position in Britain, but in the meantime he had lost touch with mainstream physics and devoted most of the rest of his career to quasi-mystical pursuits.

So: WI Bohm with different politics ? Specifically, a *Bohm who can be hired by the NSA ? There you go, you don't need to posit a mathematician who appreciates the implication of what Bohm was doing in the mid 1950's, all you need is to get Bohm himself into the NSA !

[Doug M.]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you have FTL communication, then you also have (potentially causality violating) communication through time. No?

Just take two entangled particles, dump one into the linac, and accelerate it at very close to lightspeed for (say) a month. The accelerated particle "thinks" that no time has passed, and is still entangled with its counterpart of a month ago. Voila, you now have a "time radio" that can transmit a single bit from one month in the future.

Working out what the NSA might do with this is left as an exercise for the student.

Doug M.

[Carlos]

I ain't getting you. Quantum entanglement is thought to be instantaneous. So causality violations would have to arise from the spacelike intervals between the two particles, not the past history of reference frames of one particle vis-a-vis the other, which shouldn't make any difference.

[Bernard Guerrero]

Another way of saying what Carlos is saying (I think) would be that an effect, under special relativity, must be part of its cause's future light-cone. It is this property that supra-luminal communications would violate.

[Doug M.]

I guess I'm confusing them with wormholes. Okay.

But then, how /would/ you use an ansible to violate causality?

Doug M.

[Carlos]

Attain enlightenment.

[Robert]

Umm - you guys _do_ realize that "entanglement" does not allow for any sort of meaningful superluminal communication, right? Whatever it is that gets "transferred" in an EPR type of setup, it can't be use used to communicate a causal signal. (Google "Eberhard's Theorem". On second thought, don't - that particular google string pulls up a lot of crap from the lunatic fringe of quantum theory. On third thought, go ahead - most of that stuff is at least amusing, and some of it is instructive. Oh, John G. Cramer isn't crap, not by a long stretch, but it's fair to say that he's pretty far out there - perhaps not onn the fringe, but well out in the penumbra. I think Cramer would agree with that characterization - he's nothing if not bold.)

[Carlos]

Yeah, I know; but there's a set of e-mails not on this this comment thread on how to use this in an SFnal setting with some fancy handwaving.

(Why does everyone want me to write a Cold War AH story about the NSA and their sekrit FTL communication device? Do I look like Charlie Stross?)

Paul Park's latest book, A Princess of Roumania (review forthcoming), has an ansible in it, but it's used to talk with the dead, which leads to a very funny line in a rather somber book. ("What are you wearing?")