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The Search For The 'Body' Of The Neutrino
An anonymous reader writes: "CNN has an interesting story about the scientists who are searching for proof that neutrinos have mass a half mile below Minnesota. Not alot of scientific theory but a good overall perspective on what is taking place. One of the more interesting quotes: "We're going to take a sawed-off shotgun and blast a bunch of neutrinos toward Minnesota and measure what sticks," said Marvin Marshak, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota."
There's been a lot of research going on about neutrinos in the recent years. I still recall the big recent newsbreak when they discovered that they can spontaneously change to another form. The Ultimate Neutrino Page and Neutrino History have some good news.
The thing I've been thinking is... what they really need is another somewhat-close supernova to occur. That should give scientists even more data to digest.
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Ha! The article gives it all away! This isn't about some sort of scientific research! This is just the first field-test of the latest insidious high-tech military hardware...on the innocent people of Canada!
It's plain to me that the US has developed a highly sophisticated Neutrino Ray Cannon(tm) that can be fired THROUGH THE EARTH and still hit targets in other countries! The article plainly describes that the beam will be fired through the earth, past the detectors, and INTO CANADA. Naturally, the US has chosen a nearby country to test it on, so that the results can be assessed quickly.
I'm willing to bet it'll be a successful test, too. Being a Neutrino-based Ray Gun(tm), we'll know it works if the characteristic effects of Neutrino Bombardment (that is to say, "Nothing") are seen among the Canadian populace after the test! Previous tests were less successful, though they are rumored to have caused speech alterations described as a very mild form of Tourette's Syndrome, wherein the victims add an extra syllable (described as "Eh") to their sentences...though one heavily affected region is rumored to have had their language altered so severely that they now speak FRENCH instead of Canadian! [Probably just a rumor, I don't believe it myself. Nor do I believe the rumors that the US Government experimented on its own citizens similarly, resulting in the "y'know" at the end of victim's sentences, and inability to spell "lose" with less than 2 "O's" in it.]
In the interests of World Peace(tm), I feel compelled to warn the People of Canada now - PROTECT YOURSELF WITH ALUMINUM FOIL DEFLECTOR BEANIES NOW! Before it's TOO LATE!
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
To brighten up the often dreary working conditions, Minneapolis artist Joseph Giannetti painted a 25- by 60-foot mural in the laboratory. It depicts his interpretation of the project with a blazing sun at the epicenter with rings of scientific symbols and physicists expanding outward.
What kind of sick bastard makes a mural of physicists being blasted out of a sun and then expanding in the vacuum of space? That's disgusting.
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
If you shoot neutrinos, which travel in straight lines at nearly the speed of light, from Chicago to Minnesota, they will not pass through Canada! They will, in fact, pass well above Canada, since the Earth is not flat and the ground will fall away under the poor neutrinos as they travel away from Soudan, MN. Since Soudan is so far North, though, maybe some of them will fly through Canadian airspace -- I hope they get clearance from ATC.
String theory demands a minimum non-zero size for all of it's constituents (except for 0-branes, which are point particles and are part of M-theory).
Physics: Making the universe open source.
You're right that even massless things are deflected by curved spacetime, so it's a bad definition of mass. Neutrino mass is just like the mass of an electron -- or the mass of a brick. You can think of it as the resistance to acceleration by an outside force. The difference is that neutrino masses are inferred without seeing the neutrino accelerate. The process in question is neutrino oscillation; basically, the neutrino changes flavors from, say, a muon neutrino to a tau neutrino. This oscillation phenomenon comes from a weird mismatch between how the neutrino behaves under different conditions -- and one of those conditions requires mass. So seeing neutrino oscillations implies that neutrinos have mass.