Neutrino Oscillations Confirmed

mfg writes "The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory has found evidence that neutrinos can change type between the Sun and Earth. See the BBC news story for more details."

Comments

Re:Why are the neutrinos interesting?

[AngryAndDrunk]

It's not about prizes and awards, it's about furthering our understanding of the universe.

One of the most commonly repeated "geek tenets" is that coding scratches an itch. People write code because they enjoy it, it's a challenge, and hey, even if no one else ever finds the resulting code useful, it was fun, right?

Same thing here. People want to know stuff, they want to understand how the universe works. That's why people study things like this. Knowing how the sun is powered, and the details of the nuclear reactions that take place, may never lead to any practical application, but that doesn't matter. Humanity is enriched merely by possesing the knowledge. It's a bit like solving puzzles - you gain nothing by doing so but the satisfaction of doing it.

Besides, who knows what applications this sort of research could lead to? The laser was sat around in reasearch labs for years before anyone thought of anything to do with it. Now it's a central part of the entertainment and computing industries.

Still, I guess I'm biased - my degree is in Physics, and I've always been fascinated by astronomy.

Why this matters....

[ShakaGreyHat]

Here's a link to some background on neutrinos, and particle physics in general (from the American Institute of Physics).

The basic idea is this: neutrinos seem to be fundamental particles. The more we understand about them (properties, interactions, etc) and the other elementary particles, the more we understand about how the universe works. This usually has "practical" applications in fields like astronomy and cosmology first. But don't worry, eventually there will be nice day-to-day applications (neutrino toasters, etc :-)

Re:Why are the neutrinos interesting?

[ghostlibrary]

There is also direct application. Stars are one of the big testbeds for modern physics, because they are extreme cases of long-term high temperature high pressure activity. If our physics applies to stars, we can have confidence in them in general.

For example, right now there's this Dark Matter bit... we can use modern physics to explain everything except, oh, 99% of the universe. So clearly better understanding of the universe (on astronomical and sub-atomic) scales is needed.

Last time there was a major understanding of the sun, it was probably 'hey, stars are powered by hydrogen fusion'. Which helped nuclear research.

So think of sun/star research as 'really big remote lab work' and it makes sense. It's not just abstract, it's "applied, big scale".

Pure research always pays, you just can't tell in advance how, when, and to whom :)

1000 points of light

[wass]

That's like asking Faraday, Ampere, Maxwell, Tesla, and others why they were bothering to play around with these obscure facets of electricity 100-200 years ago. Sure, it's neat watching a giant lightning bolt jump across two electrodes, but what real purpose will it have for future research?

Hopefully you won't find it difficult to answer that question, as you power up your Pentium IV processor to hack some PERL code, crunch some numbers to decode your encrypted email, and look at the latest NASA gallery images represented on your monitor as a rasterized RGB image driven by an electron beam.

And as you insert a CD into the CD player which is read by a GaAs laser and decrypted by more microelectronics, so you can listen to the solid-state (or vacuum-tube if you prefer) amplifier drive a magnetic speaker coil for your listening pleasure.

And then as you get in your car, with the engine ignited by carefully-timed spark plug firings, where you turn on the radio and pick up frequency-modulated electromagnetic radiation and decode it into stereo sound, again sent to an amplifier and speakers for your listening pleasure.

So, you see, it's hard to determine, a priori, the benefits of certain scientific advances and the effects they'll have on civilization. Neutrino oscillations are important because they put another piece into the puzzle that high-energy physicists are trying to solve relating how all the elementary particles fit together.

Some potential uses for this might deal with gaining further insights into nuclear power and better ways to do it. Specifically, fusion power. The sun is a fusion reactor, but scientists haven't been able to efficiently harness fusion power here on earth yet. This neutrino puzzle helps verify some of the hypotheses scientists had about nuclear processes in the sun that weren't fully understood or adequately measured with older neutrino counters.

It might also help long-range communication. Neutrinos can pass through the earth without being affected, and scientists had once tried to use this method for talking to submarines on the other side of the planet. The obvious problem is how do you detect said neutrons. I think I heard something that they were able to make a receiver that could receive data at a rate of a few bits per day. Not very efficient. Well, learning more about neutrons and their oscillations might give insight into ways to improve neutrino communications.

There are most likely many other things too, that we just don't know about or don't have use for. Maybe they'll prove efficient for long-range communications to other planets, and possibly for quantum encryption during these communications. We just don't know yet, but if we don't try we'll never know.