6mo ago

Neutrinos: The inscrutable “ghost particles” driving scientists crazy

arstechnica.com Neutrinos: The inscrutable “ghost particles” driving scientists crazy

They hold the keys to new physics. If only we could understand them.

We haven’t pinned down the masses of any individual neutrino, and we don’t even know which ones are heavier than the others. When it comes to our ability to collect raw data, neutrinos present a triple threat: they’re incredibly lightweight (even the electron weighs over 5 million times more than all the neutrinos combined), they shift their identity as they travel (and their rate of flavor oscillation changes as they travel through different substances, so there’s no one-size-fits-all solution), and they barely interact with anything in the first place...

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Man, I love looking at pictures of neutron detectors. I’d love to go inside one sometime or dive inside some of them.
- Oh, totally!
  Maybe bring a bed, chill for a while, talk to neutrinos.
  The perfectly silent dream:
  
  Within cells interlinked.
- I have trouble comprehending the size of the IceCube detector in Antarctica, which is one cubic kilometer big.
- Bear in mind that the ultrapure water used in these things behave like an acid. There is a story of a dropped wrench, the remains of which were later found to have been completely dissolved.
  
  I don't think humans will suffer the same type of ion exchange that a wrench might from ultrapure water. Don't drink from the pool and I bet you'd be perfectly safe. Someone has to have an MSDS we can check to see if it's safe.

Scientist: Made up a particle.
Also scientist: Can't find that made up particle.

(This is not related to the post, it's just something that pops up in my mind that I think is funny).
- Scientist: Made up a particle
  Technically all particles are "made up", since the effects of the energy they carry can also be expressed as a waves too and altogether, indeed their nature in our current model is dual, see the utterly interesting double slit experiment.

The neutrinos are mutating!
- The reference if you haven't seen it.
  Dara Ó Briain is a legend!
- The electrons are angry!

This sounds exactly like the beginning of 3 body problem

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