Beaming boffins feel the rhythm as neutrinos oscillate over 500 miles Scientists working on the NOvA experiment have spotted what they say is evidence of oscillating neutrinos for the first time in the lab's particle accelerator. Since February 2014, boffins have been stashing data and recording interaction of the abundant, yet elusive, subatomic particles as they interacted in the specially- …
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From the point of view of physics, ice melting in a bucket is just as interesting as neutrinos changing type during flight; it's just that we happen to be in a situation where observing ice melting is much easier than observing neutrinos.
Clock! You were lucky! We 'ad ter walk barefoot fourteen miles into town to note down t' time from t' town hall clock, walk all the way back whilst keeping count wi' a chant of one-alligator, two-alligator...
Then we 'ad t' time paint drying fer two days before walking back into town to compare the time elapsed wi' town hall clock!
An' if, when we got back, we were more than a second out o' sync wi' town hall clock, our teacher would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
specially-built Fermilab ... based in Ash River, Minnesota.
That would probably be "an annex of Fermilab", as Fermilab is known to have high probability of being found in Batavia, Illinois.
Plus:
The neutrino event had an energy of more than 2000 trillion electronvolts
Okay, that's like a chiuaua morphing into tibetan mastiff. How does one pump that much energy into a neutrino?
that will claim neutrinos have been detected beneath the Earth's crust
Naturally occurring neutrino emissions from radioactive decay? Yes we detect!
"Okay, that's like a chiuaua morphing into tibetan mastiff."
It's a neutrino, so it's more like a Cerberus with chihuahua, Alsatian, and mastiff heads being shot out of a railgun.
"How does one pump that much energy into a neutrino?"
Ask your friendly neighborhood hypernova or gamma ray burster.
Ask your friendly neighborhood hypernova or gamma ray burster.
By definition, neither of those things can be both friendly and in your neighborhood. Those are mutually exclusive attributes.
They're pretty much the unfriendliest things known to exist. You think Donald Trump is bad? Next to a GRB, he's ... well, actually, let's put him next to a GRB and find out.
Worse than that; it's like being hit by an invisibly small Tibetan mastiff that usually travels through whole planets as if they weren't there, but that causes an enormous explosion on impact.
People who doubt dark matter should remember that the neutrino was only postulated because there was an unexplained energy and momentum deficit in beta decay (and some people thought it would be better just to toss conservation of energy out of the window), it was years before it was identified, and it then turned out to be one of the most common constituents of the universe. And unlike the comparatively simple electron or photon, it turns out to have weird properties.
I have a feeling that neutrinos are much more central to how the universe actually works than is "normal" matter.
"People who doubt dark matter..."
But Pauli didn't have an LHC. Which is not to say there aren't gaps, but they are getting ever smaller. And Pauli didn't ask you to believe that neutrinos compose 85% of all matter or buy into Dark Energy. And come to that, it only took 14 years from proposing a neutrino to detecting it; whereas we've known about Dark Matter for, say, 35 years. Against that background, I think its right to start to be sceptical, particular as modifications to gravity are known to be necessary and have form.
Bayonets are still necessary today; once you get to the last few yards stage, firing an assault rifle while everyone else is hand to hand is going to be killing your mates as much as the enemy, at nearly 2000 joules of energy moving close to 1000m/sec the rounds will go straight throught your enemy and carry on doing damage for quite a while.
Huns, Taliban or anyone else ' don't like it up 'em'
What's wrong with the European kind?
A slashing blade like a katana ( or officers' sabre for that matter) would do you little good against modern combat armor ( and preciously little against even 13th C european armor, let alone the later periods..).. A Langmesser or backsword would both give you impact and stabbing options, and the styles associated with those weapons would simply be an extension of the current training in knife/bajonet fighting.
The spatial accuracy required for this experiment boggles my mind. With the interactions being so rare, it must be a bugger to calibrate the equipment so that the beam is correctly aimed at the receiver 500 miles away. Or is there sufficient beam spread that it doesn't need to be as accurate as I'm envisioning?
The NuMI beamline then continues about 450 miles through Earth on toward the MINOS far detector in the Soudan mine in Minnesota. By the time the beam reaches the far detector, it is about 20 miles in diameter!
So .. atan(20/450) / (2*Pi) * 360 or about 2.6° of spread.
That's pretty shotgun!
Reminder that future muon colliders will blast out neutrino beams that will be a radiological hazard. I can't wait!
There is some other amateur stuff about.. Bussard reactor and that other bloke. Knowing nothing I have no idea how people might 'collimate' the 'beams' beyond suggesting that they do not. Having blurted as much there may be some thing whereby you can line up the incoming such that the outgoing goes in more or less the right direction.
That sort of shit is beyond me but interests me because if you were to go for fusion and pick a reaction that gives you 'charged' particles and the result could be directed then you could modulate the rate of production and blast said modulated charged particles down the centre of a coil of wire and generate AC electricity. IIRC it's called a transformer.
I would wave a smelly purple bell end about the place and suggest that one has to be more efficient than trying to boil kettles.
My Physics teacher at Skool was a cool 'old' dude with a passion for his art, both Physics and Teaching. Popped his clogs but not forgotten. I wish my mind would have been in tune... It could have been but the rest of the teachers were a bunch of fail and, of course, my head is not right.
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"I thought all Physics teachers were like that? At least in the old days? And all Geography teachers wore tweed jackets?"
My physics teacher was brilliant...which is why I did science at university instead of becoming a lawyer and making lots of money, so my views on the subject are mixed.
Geography teachers - I knew someone who went into teaching geography with a good degree in the subject. A year later he went off to work for Shell when he realised that everybody regarded geography teachers stereotypically and nobody would take him seriously. I am told the stereotype arose because there was always a shortage of geography teachers and so at training college PE teachers used to be pushed to do geography as their "academic" subject because, of course, they couldn't be let loose on science, maths, English, history or languages, and drawing coloured pictures was considered to be within the capabilities of a PE teacher.
Wasn't there, contrariwise, a teacher who turned up at Manchester with a program he'd written, and was in short order offered a job?
Shaw's views on teaching and ability to do things were notoriously influenced by the truly awful Irish education system in which he grew up. A former colleague went on a commission sent to investigate the Irish education system post WW2, and concluded that nothing much had changed. So "those who can, do; those who can't, teach" should be interpreted in context.
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Do Neutrinos really oscillate, or is there just one type of Neutrino which then interacts differently, and somewhat randomly, with matter?
As for lawyers, which one is going to be the first to file a class action suit for exposing the residents to Neutrinos?
As for watching ice in a bucket, the real question is whether there were beers in the ice? Oh, sorry, chilled beer is an American thing. ;-)
Dave
P.S. I'll get my coat. It's the one with the pockets full of ice and beer.
My wife and I visited the MINOS detector a few years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINOS It's at the bottom of an old iron mine in Minnesota, and is in line of the beam path that continues on to the Ash River site. The Ash River site is further away, and at the surface, not underground like MINOS. http://www.particlecentral.com/neutrinos_page.html
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