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Neutrino Mass Confirmed

biohack writes "BBC News reports that results from the MINOS experiment have confirmed that neutrinos have mass. To look for neutrino oscillations, scientists created muon neutrinos in a particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). After passing through a particle detector at Fermilab, a high intensity beam of neutrinos travelled to another particle detector 724km (450 miles) away in a disused mine in Soudan, US. The set up established that fewer particles were being detected at the Soudan site than had been sent from Fermilab, which confirmed that some neutrinos changed their flavor on the way - an effect called neutrino flavor oscillation, which requires them to have mass. 'To put it simply, if they are heavy, it means that there is a lot more mass in the Universe than we thought there was,' said Professor Jenny Thomas from University College London."

318 comments

  1. bragging time by phlegmofdiscontent · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've actually seen the detector at the Soudan Mine. Pretty impressive. Kinda hard to get to (300 mile drive into the middle of nowhere followed by a half mile trip underground).

    1. Re:bragging time by Tyball · · Score: 2, Informative

      How did you like the elevator ride down? Dark and kinda clanky. I worked on this project when I was in school--good to see some results already!

    2. Re:bragging time by metamatic · · Score: 1

      The bats are cool.

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    3. Re:bragging time by theneutralnewt · · Score: 1

      I saw the tunnel for the detector at Fermilab. A little easier to get to than the mine was for you, I think (about 4 miles from my house).

    4. Re:bragging time by LiMikeTnux · · Score: 0

      woo, you rule! i live in Roselle, i make the trip to Fermi every now and then...one of those being for the severe weather seminar april 8th, but they have a really cool intro peice about fermi, and about the neutrino studies.

      --
      yap
    5. Re:bragging time by Xzzy · · Score: 1

      I toured it too. I think the more interesting part is that this experiment has only been running for a year, when they started it up they were predicting it could take years to get enough data to make conclusions.

      They only expected to see one or two neutrinos hit the targets per day, out of billions of particles being shot.

    6. Re:bragging time by Guppy06 · · Score: 1

      "Kinda hard to get to"

      I am not a physicist, but it's my understanding that that's kind of the point. Neutrinos are finicky enough and rather difficult to detect that I doubt you'd want lots of people and civilzation around to screw anything up.

    7. Re:bragging time by Lord_Dweomer · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Also bragging time...while in college at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design a couple years ago I had the pleasure of working with a member of the Minos team...Pete Borland (sorry if I spelled wrong!), a genius and a hilarious fellow geek.

      We created a piece of educational software that I believe is currently in use at the University of Minnesota in their physics class to explain Neutrino Oscillation. Very cool to find out that our project finally saw this kind of resolution, not just for the cool factor, but also because of the significant implications this could have in the world of physics.

      BTW, Pete if you're reading this, its Mike from Lester's class, I was on Mitch's team. Hi and congrats!

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    8. Re:bragging time by node+3 · · Score: 1

      Are you trying to tell us you've changed "flavors"?

      Not that there's anything wrong with that.

    9. Re:bragging time by cayenne8 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Hmm...time to throw on that old, old song Little Neutrino

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    10. Re:bragging time by cayenne8 · · Score: 1
      Actually...the song in question has lyrics HERE, last song on the first album. For those of you too young...back in the mid 70's, this group was very secretive, and a rumour went around that this was a 'Beatles' ablbum put out incognito...

      Great tunes to listen to if you're in an 'altered state'.....especially this one.

      If you've never heard of them...give them a try....1st 2 albums are very interesting....

      --
      Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
    11. Re:bragging time by MarkRose · · Score: 1

      Are you trying to tell us you've changed "flavors"?

      Yeah, the universe ran out of vanilla, so it's substituting a rich, creamy chocolate. Unfortunately, since neutrinos rarely interact with matter, of which women are made, this will little positive impact upon your life.

      --
      Be relentless!
    12. Re:bragging time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That rumor was started by a DJ at WICC in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I was listening the morning they inadvertantly started it.

    13. Re:bragging time by askadog · · Score: 1, Informative

      I was working at Fermilab when they made the Main Injector, a new ring whose job is to feed the Tevatron to improve it's luminosity. In part of the main injector (opposite the point where the protons are shaved off and sent across to the Tevatron if I remember correctly) they take some of the protons onto another path that dives down into the earth, hits a target to create nutrinos... just an huge tunnel heading down at a few degrees, aimed at the detector. It was very strange to think that those could go through the earth and show up at a mine so far away. There was a bit of a race with other detectors to be the first to detect nutrino mass... good to see that those guys have accomplished this.

    14. Re:bragging time by Trelane · · Score: 4, Funny
      Yeah, the universe ran out of vanilla, so it's substituting a rich, creamy chocolate.
      Yeah, but they both have up- and downsides. While the vanilla is extremely common and thus is not as strange as the chocolate flavour, it still has its charm. But the chocolate is packed with more calories (being more fudge than chocolate) and hence will pack on pounds to your top and bottom.

      But the staunch advocates of vanilla aren't at all mute. They've been quite vocal in support of their flavour of choice and have even proposed creating a new sub-flavour, the electric vanilla. Unfortunately for them, however, due to the long legacy of having only vanilla, people have been taught to expect vanilla to be boring. Therefore, the electric vanilla is expected to flop.

      Temporarily relieving the boring-vanilla problem, however, someone long ago discovered vanilla in red, green, and blue colours (as well as in cyan, magenta, and yellow, but those are really just the opposite of the other colours). One would hope that the new chocolate flavour would also come in similar colours and--thus far--this seems to be the case.

      My humblest apologies for this post; I've been learning particle physics by grading homework in it, and I suspect it's driven me quite mad.

      --

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    15. Re:bragging time by Petersson · · Score: 1

      This is heavy.

      --
      I'm not insane. My mother had me tested.
    16. Re:bragging time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I wouldn't call the Boundary Waters Canoe Area nowhere.
      Seriously if anyone is going canoe-camping in the BWCA
      some summer Soudan is just 1/2 hour down the road from
      Ely and most of the park's entry points.

      I didn't think the detector was as neat as the iron ore
      in the mine - its so rich in iron two pieces can be welded
      together.

    17. Re:bragging time by zopf · · Score: 1

      My humblest apologies for this post; I've been learning particle physics by grading homework in it, and I suspect it's driven me quite mad.

      Your students might be a little upset about that...

      --
      Did you see the pool? They flipped the bitch!
    18. Re:bragging time by uvajed_ekil · · Score: 1
      Are you trying to tell us you've changed "flavors"? Not that there's anything wrong with that.

      No, of course not.

      But there's no switching teams.

      --
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    19. Re:bragging time by ccarson · · Score: 1

      Old is right. This is old news. We've known that neutrinos change between 3 states for decades.

  2. Soudan, US by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 3, Informative

    Thats is sloppy on the BBC's part, they should have put the State in there. In this case it is Minnesota.

    http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_parks/soudan_unde rground_mine/physicslab.html

    1. Re:Soudan, US by aktzin · · Score: 1, Offtopic

      That kind of sloppiness is rare for the BBC, but typical for US media. It's probably because so many USians don't know or care about world geography. It would sound weird/inaccurate to hear news about "San Francisco, USA" without mentioning California. But this is exactly how it sounds when US news mention a city in another country and ignore the state/province/region/department where it's located. Here's a good example of a double-whammy courtesy of CNN:

      http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/03/30/bush.cancun /index.html

      "CANCUN, Mexico (CNN) --" (Cancún is in the state of Quintana Roo)

      "Mexico's Vicente Fox, a conservative in the final months of his presidency, is host to Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the Yucatan resort."

      They didn't do their homework here. Yucatán is the state NW of Quintana Roo. The Yucatán Peninsula contains these two states plus Campeche:

      http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/americas/mexico_pol 97.jpg
      --
      Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
    2. Re:Soudan, US by lahvak · · Score: 1

      Thats is sloppy on the BBC's part, they should have put the State in there. In this case it is Minnesota.

      I don't think it's sloppy. That's not like anybody really cares. When you read news from Germany, they usually don't tell you whether it is Saxony or Bavaria or whatnot.

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    3. Re:Soudan, US by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Actually, when you hear "Yucatan" in the US, it usually refers to the Yucatan peninsula, and not the Mexican state.

    4. Re:Soudan, US by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      That's because the US is many times the size of Germany, and has many more cities. In this case the article mentioned a small obscure town in the US, and yes, people would like to know where it is. I'm *from* Minnesota, and I didn't know that the town mentioned in the story existed...

    5. Re:Soudan, US by j.+andrew+rogers · · Score: 0, Troll
      It's probably because so many USians don't know or care about world geography. It would sound weird/inaccurate to hear news about "San Francisco, USA" without mentioning California. But this is exactly how it sounds when US news mention a city in another country and ignore the state/province/region/department where it's located.

      The US is a federation of 50 sovereign states (each with the size and economy to match), and saying "Foo City, US" would be like saying "Foo City, EU" (though Europe has the advantage of many languages to broaden the name space). Geographical namespaces in the US are only unique at the State level, just like in Europe, and there are many, many naming collisions between cities, towns, and other geographical identifiers in the US across states. There are a few city names in the US that seem to be used in a significant fraction of all the States, so specifying which State things are in is useful. I do not think EU-ians would be happy if we used the naming convention for the EU that you are suggesting is a good idea for the US. Apparently you don't know or care about world geography.

    6. Re:Soudan, US by Hao+Wu · · Score: 1
      Thats is sloppy on the BBC's part, they should have put the State in there. In this case it is Minnesota.

      Minnesota

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    7. Re:Soudan, US by Bonker · · Score: 5, Informative

      The US is a federation of 50 sovereign states (each with the size and economy to match), and saying "Foo City, US" would be like saying "Foo City, EU" (though Europe has the advantage of many languages to broaden the name space).

      While this is true, it's somewhat misleading, especially to those will limited knowledge of U.S. history or government. Even many Americans don't understand the difference between as state and a province.

      State governments in the U.S. function approximately equally to provincial governments in countries that are not federations. Most of them were not originally independant countries, but were instead provinces and territories that were sponsored into statehood.

      A significant fraction of the United States were indeed independant countries at one point. ALL U.S. states have significantly more rights than any given province. Each has its own constitution and government, and, contrary to popular opinion, the states elect the President and Senators. The U.S. president is *not* elected by a popular vote. (Although there have been calls to change this.) A few, most notably Texas, still claim the right to secede from the Union, although no state has really had this right since the end of the American Civil War in the late 1800s.

      The U.S. constitution sets up the states as individual entities, unlike provinces. They can each impose their own taxes and own laws. In fact, this is one of the major contentions in our government to this day. States can theoretically impose any law that the constitution doesn't reserve for the Federal government. This causes a lot of conflict and consternation since States are also required to respect contracts formed in other states, frequently under a different set of laws and regulations.

      The conflict over gay marriage contracts is one of the more recent flaps this has caused.

      States can also each maintain their own militias. Many states have 'State Troopers', who usually do the same kind of jobs as normal policemen, albeit with greatly expanded jurisdiction. A few states have 'State Guards', although they usually don't server a military purpose. They usually come to the fore during natural disasters and the like.

      While the U.S. is an extremely tight federation-- the word 'Union' is very accurate-- it is still a federation. Each state is indeed its own nation.

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    8. Re:Soudan, US by Guppy06 · · Score: 2, Informative

      We're talking about trying to give the reader a rough idea of where a story comes from, not what belongs on a properly-addressed envelope.

      "That kind of sloppiness is rare for the BBC"

      The US is the country where 100 years is a long time. The UK is where 100 miles is a long distance. Even the British can be guilty of the ol' "Oh, you're from the US? Do you know $PERSON from $SIX_STATES_AWAY?"

      The only countries bigger than the US are Russia and Canada, and I don't believe either has anywhere near the number of individual, named communities. And while it's rare for a story coming from Russia to mention what constituant part of the Russian Federation a particular town is in (forgivable, as the system of oblast, okrugs, etc. is truly byzantine), stories from Canada and China consistently mention what province the news come from. As for mentioning "department," most countries that subdivide themselves that way (e. g. France) are comparable in size to a single US state, so mentioning the department would make as much sense as mentioning what county in a state a city was in.

      "It would sound weird/inaccurate to hear news about "San Francisco, USA" without mentioning California."

      It would be ambiguous. There's a San Francisco in California, New Mexico and Texas. Depending who you talk to, "San Francisco, USA" may also refer to a city in Puerto Rico.

      ""CANCUN, Mexico (CNN) --" (Cancún is in the state of Quintana Roo)"

      There is only one Cancun; the place isn't named after something so convenient as a Catholic saint. Besides, the typical Mexican state is considerably smaller than the typical US state: Quinas Roo is about the median for the area of a Mexican state at 19th, but it would fall between West Virginia (41) and Maryland (42) in the US. Chihuahua, the largest Mexican state, is a little smaller than Michigan.

      "They didn't do their homework here. Yucatán is the state NW of Quintana Roo."

      "Yucatan" refers to both a state and a geographical region. "St. Louis is a major Mississippi port" doesn't mean I believe that the city of St. Louis is in the State of Mississippi, and "Honolulu is a Hawaiian city" doesn't mean I believe Honolulu is on the same island as Hilo.

    9. Re:Soudan, US by Guppy06 · · Score: 1

      "The US is a federation of 50 sovereign states"

      And Mexico is a federation of 31 sovereign states, what's your point?

      The concept of federation is neither an American invention (at best, we invented the hybrid of the "federal republic") nor unique in modern times to the United States.

    10. Re:Soudan, US by techno-vampire · · Score: 1
      A significant fraction of the United States were indeed independant countries at one point.

      Very true. However, only one was an independant kingdom.

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    11. Re:Soudan, US by Guppy06 · · Score: 1

      It had brushes with republicanism decades before the haole coup, apparently oscillating between being run by amerigophiles and anglophiles.

    12. Re:Soudan, US by techno-vampire · · Score: 1

      So it did. The last reigning monarch of the kingdom also wrote a song in prison after being deposed that's still considered a "standard."

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    13. Re:Soudan, US by KilBee · · Score: 1

      That kind of sloppiness is rare for the BBC, but typical for US media.
      Here's a good example of a double-whammy courtesy of CNN

      It's not more typical for U.S. media than for any other country's media.

      Yes, the BBC is a very respected news source, probably moreso than CNN, but your statement is completely unfair to U.S. media in general.

      The AP stylebook contains specific rules for naming cities, and it's not as simple as "City, State" in domestic cases and "City, Country" in international cases. This is why you'll see "CANCUN, Mexico" in one dateline and "MEXICO CITY" (rather than "MEXICO CITY, Mexico") in another. In the interest of conciseness, news outlets also have to consider their audience, and make certain assumptions about how the the reader will receive the information. But generally, most U.S. media follow AP style.

      Out of curiosity, I did a search for "Quintana Roo" on the BBC Web site and found no uses in this context, so your criticism of CNN for that omission (compared to non-U.S. media) is unfair. And as you yourself stated, Quintana Roo is on the Yucatan Peninsula, making Cancun a Yucatan resort.

      Sorry, but you're stretching. Yes, the BBC article could have done better to place Soudan, but the CNN article is fine (not that it's Shakespeare either).

    14. Re:Soudan, US by nmb3000 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      When you read news from Germany, they usually don't tell you whether it is Saxony or Bavaria or whatnot.

      Come on. If you're discussing a specific event in a specific location they are going to list the location. Location-based new reporting is hardly uniquely American. Besides, if nobody cares why even list the location at all? Just say "some guys figured out some physics thing in this test someplace".

      State names can be important when there is a good chance that there may be 3-5 (or more) states containing cities of the same name. Unless it's obvious ("the" New York, or "the" London) it's dumb not to include the state/province.

      --
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      /)
    15. Re:Soudan, US by kayditty · · Score: 0
      only countries bigger than the US are Russia and Canada
      And China. He forgot China.
    16. Re:Soudan, US by woolio · · Score: 1

      Is it correct to say the US has 50 states????

      After all, some like to call themselves by the name "commonwealth".

    17. Re:Soudan, US by Guppy06 · · Score: 1

      "States" is the generic term not only used in the name of the union (United States), but also used in the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Treaty of Paris and the United States Constitution. The term was pretty much used as a synonym for the modern term "nation-state" and "commonwealth" (at least as MA, PA and VA go, PR and MP are something completely different) was simply a sub-classification of state (as one might say "facist state," "communist state," "police state," etc).

    18. Re:Soudan, US by node+3 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Thats is sloppy on the BBC's part, they should have put the State in there.

      Why? They don't care anymore than we (Americans) care that Tijuana, Mexico is more appropriately, "Tijuana, BC, Mexico".

      To us, the state is important, but to the British, it's really not that pertinent. The point is that the detector is in the US, not what particular state it's in.

      Given how awful most Americans are at geography, your complaint comes off trite and arrogant, sort of like you require people to call you by your full name and title, yet you don't really care whether you get anyone else's name right at all.

    19. Re:Soudan, US by DraconPern · · Score: 1

      In Texas, we also have the Texas Rangers who can lay down the law if the local law enforcement is not doing their duty.

    20. Re:Soudan, US by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      minnesota's a state?

    21. Re:Soudan, US by Guppy06 · · Score: 1

      "And China. He forgot China."

      No, I didn't. China is only bigger if you include Taiwan.

    22. Re:Soudan, US by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      Except that stories mentioning Canadian cities very often place them in Ontario. Yes, Ontario has lots of cities, but it DOESN'T HAVE THEM ALL.

    23. Re:Soudan, US by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      Canadian provinces are similar. Each has it's own taxes, enacts laws that are not reserved for federal jurisdiction. Several provinces maintain their own police forces. Some provinces even run international trade missions of their own.

    24. Re:Soudan, US by zpok · · Score: 1

      Nice to know. But are differences between states relevant for outsiders in science related articles?
      Slightly unrelated: I've heard it said that Belgium is the capital of Holland, Holland is somewhere around Amsterdam (which is of course essentially correct) and that Brussels is too small a country to be the capital of Europe. Mostly by people who lament the fact that we can't speak English like everybody else (conveniently forgetting they have this conversation over and over with the natives who in fact do speak English). Ahem, not to polarize this, just to make an OT post a bit more fun. The most telling experience was a conversation with an Atlanta Lawyer (quick, for ten points, what state?) who told us she pittied everyone living outside the US, that we had it so bad. That we essentially were waiting to be Americanized, that that was the best thing we could aspire to. This was in a French bar in Manhattan. Two elderly New Yorkers told the slightly drunk girl that she definitely had to travel a bit more. To which the lawyer confessed she'd never been outside the States.
      To which the french owner and me and my wife opened another bottle, expressing opinions on the futility of fighting against stupidity.

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    25. Re:Soudan, US by gronofer · · Score: 1
      The US is a federation of 50 sovereign states

      Haven't they ceded sovereignty by joining or becoming assimilated by the USA?

      For that matter I don't think any state has successfully withdrawn from USA, suggesting that it's not exactly a voluntary union.

    26. Re:Soudan, US by ultranova · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      The US is a federation of 50 sovereign states

      No, it isn't. From Wikipedia: "Sovereignty is the exclusive right to exercise supreme political (legislative, judicial and/or executive) authority over a geographic region, group of people or oneself." US federal government wields the ultimate power in the US, which means that the states are not sovereign. The last time some states began thinking themselves sovereign, and tried to use sovereign powers to secede from the union, they were forcibly reintegrated - I'm referring, of course, to the US Civil War.

      US is a nation in which the political subunits - called "states" - are given a large amount of autonomy. That, however, doesn't make them sovereign, since the federal government still holds The Real Ultimate Power over them.

      As a practical test, tell me: if one of the states would decide to convert to Soviet-style communism, or to nazism, or to hereditary aristocratic rule, would the federal government allow it ? If it wouldn't, then the state is not sovereign. And don't talk about Constitution, since not only does that only apply to the laws made by the federal government, but also, being sovereign means being able to nullify such agreements at will.

      That said, in such a large country, it indeed makes sense to name the state when referring to places.

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    27. Re:Soudan, US by Paua+Fritter · · Score: 1
      "And China. He forgot China."
      No, I didn't. China is only bigger if you include Taiwan.
      So you did remember that China is bigger, you just want to take the opportunity to promote the cause of Taiwan independence?
      In any case, the USA is only bigger if you include California, Nevada, and Utah :-)
    28. Re:Soudan, US by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      But Brazil is bigger than continental USA. :p

    29. Re:Soudan, US by Bonker · · Score: 1

      Hmm... My post was in a thread complaining that the article didn't mention the fact that Soudan was in Minnesota. Most of the thread was modded down a bit. The general gist of it was that if you say 'Soudan, USA', there's an awful lot of USA for Soudan to be in, and that it could be confusing, even for people who live in the U.S.

      In the context of the article, Soudan MN, corresponds to this site outside Soudan, maintained by the UMN.

      I know for a fact that there's a Sudan, TX, however.

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    30. Re:Soudan, US by Guppy06 · · Score: 1

      Which is why, as I mentioned, stories out of Canada consistently mention what province it comes from. Read what I say before you try to chastise me.

    31. Re:Soudan, US by ChildeRoland · · Score: 1

      "While the U.S. is an extremely tight federation-- the word 'Union' is very accurate-- it is still a federation. Each state is indeed its own nation."

      This is sad as it was originally founded as a confederation.

      --
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    32. Re:Soudan, US by AgentSmit · · Score: 1

      The US is a federation of 50 sovereign states (each with the size and economy to match), and saying "Foo City, US" would be like saying "Foo City, EU (...)"

      That may be the idea in the States, not at all in Europe! Here few people would ever say they are from "Foo City, Country, EU" as they would leave out the EU part. As many Americans are very aware of being a member of the USA, in Europe almost nobody claims to be a European member. Not that they are unaware of the world geography (I even think this awareness is much higher on average than in the States!), they just don't think of Europe as a coutry. And they are right, since it is mostly an economic union with 'some' political additions.

      Each country within the EU still has its full sovereignty, whereas the entire USA is regarded as a sovereign country with largely but not entirely independent member states. The EU doesn't even have a constitution! Hopefully this also underlines the difference between states and countries. The EU is made up of 25 countries, each with their own federal government, the USA is one country with 50 member states, all under the same federal government. And when it comes to most Europeans this will never change. They would rather see the EU disappear entirely than make it their new federal government. Nobody wants to give up their current sovereignty. Also the cultural differences can be huge somtimes, too big to weld the EU together permanently. It is like trying to make one country of let's say the USA and Mexico.

    33. Re:Soudan, US by JahToasted · · Score: 2, Insightful
      ... it is still a federation. Each state is indeed its own nation.

      And Canada is a confederation and our Head of State is Queen Elizabeth II. There's also no such thing as a Prime Minister according to our constitution.

      There's a big difference between official status and what's reality. If states can't secede from a "Union" then they aren't soveriegn nations then are they? You may say they technically are, but the day tot da reality is that right now they aren't.

      If France just up and said it wanted out of the EU it would be out of the EU. No problem, France is a nation and the EU is a union of nations. They want out, they're out. France has an army and the EU doesn't. If Oregon said it wanted out of the US, too bad, you can't leave. The US is the Nation and Oregon is a province of that nation. You can call it a state (wink wink, nudge, nudge) but we all know its a province.

      Also Germany has "states" too, don't they? I don't think anyone considers them to be nations even though they are called states.

    34. Re:Soudan, US by Courageous · · Score: 1

      And don't talk about Constitution, since not only does that only apply to the laws made by the federal government,...

      While you are of course correct on your comments regarding sovereignty, you are not correct in your assertion that the Constitution only applies to the federal government.

      C//

    35. Re:Soudan, US by kilodelta · · Score: 1

      Maybe it would be interesting if a state, instead of seceding were to simply withdraw support of the federal government and re-direct the tax revenue inwards.

      I would dearly love to see the northeast split off. There are actually people that would like to unite Massachusetts and Rhode Island. I'm not so sure that would work but it'd bring us that much close to becoming an independent nation.

      As to the honoring of contracts, that's called the Uniform Commercial Code. And we in Rhode Island have both the State Police and the Rhode Island Army National Guard. But try telling the guardsmen shipped to Iraq that they're only for duties in the state.

    36. Re:Soudan, US by smallpaul · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Everything in your post makes sense until the last sentence. You say that every state is a nation without giving any definition for nation. If you look at dictionary.com, you'll see that none of the definitions applies. You won't convince me that Minnesota "independent" or "sovereign" or that its people share "common customers and origin". In addition, the United States has a single representative at the United Nations.

    37. Re:Soudan, US by ceoyoyo · · Score: 1

      Um, ready my post again. I agreed that US stories covering Canadian events often include the province, but that they often get it wrong. Province included, but province incorrect.

      I suppose your post could be interpreted as meaning that stories written by Canadians include the province in self defense so that Americans don't tack on an incorrect province, but you'd have to squint really hard, have had half an hour of sleep in the last fortnight and have drunk a large amount of green tea.

      I don't recall any chastising of you either. Perhaps you should reread my post. It wasn't very long.

    38. Re:Soudan, US by susano_otter · · Score: 1

      So you did remember that China is bigger, you just want to take the opportunity to promote the cause of Taiwan independence?

      Another possibility is that he sincerely thinks China is smaller, as a logical consequence of sincerely thinking that Taiwan is not a part of China.

      In any case, the USA is only bigger if you include California, Nevada, and Utah

      In what way is Taiwan like these three states? It's a relatively recent entity. It's never been a part of the pretender parent nation. Its citizens never approved any union with the pretender. Indeed, it was formed explicitly to not be part of a union with the pretender. It's not even a part of the pretender's contiguous landmass. All of these are points of unlikeness. Did you have any points of likeness in mind?

      Are you sure you wouldn't be happier just making a straightforward case for Chinese sovreignty over Taiwan?

      --

      Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.

    39. Re:Soudan, US by lordholm · · Score: 1

      Well, I just tried to my put Gothenburg, EU at my M.Sc. thesis' front page. My supervisor war kinda picky about it, but I did manage to sneak Stockholm, EU past at the legal disclaimer part on the second page.

      And, you shouldn't call us EU-ians, we are simply Europeans. The people from the continent of Europe that are not from the EU can be called north-europeans, eastern-europeans or something there about. Of course, this also include "EU-ians", compare this to north-americans and Americans, where the later refers to "USA-ians", and the former also include Canadians.

      --
      "Civis Europaeus sum!"
    40. Re:Soudan, US by lordholm · · Score: 1

      >>Here few people would ever say they are from "Foo City, Country, EU" as they would leave out the EU part.

      I would, but I try to leave out the state part.

      >>they just don't think of Europe as a coutry

      Well, that certainly doesn't include me.

      >>Each country within the EU still has its full sovereignty.

      Hardly, are you aware what the Union did after Jorg Heider was elected in Austria.

      >> The EU doesn't even have a constitution!

      Not yet, but soon we will have.

      >> Also the cultural differences can be huge somtimes

      I have friends in SE, DK, UK, GR, NL, HU, IT, DE, ES, PL, PT, AT and CZ. I can not agree with that statement, the cultural differences aren't overly big, they are actually quite small. Would not the cultural differences between New York and Utah be greater in some aspects?

      --
      "Civis Europaeus sum!"
    41. Re:Soudan, US by AgentSmit · · Score: 1

      You honoustly call the EU a country?? Literally nobody I know (also from multiple European countries) ever called it that, even those from more liberal countries like The Netherlands (thus not more conservative countries like France who still value their own borders a bit too much in the practical sense).

      Of course, the EU has quite a lot of political and economic influence. But that does not undermine a country's sovereignty at all! About the Jorg Heider case: a more extreme but comparable situation is the threat of economic sanctions against Iran, opposed by the UN. That doesn't mean the UN itself has direct political influence, it still fully depends on its members for that.

      You are one of the optimists that still believe in a European Constitution in the short term. Be my guest, but this is quite unrealistic. (I voted in favor of it though, but was part of a small minority in The Netherlands and France, and it wasn't even a real constitution) Besides, before even considering a constitution let's first make Brussels more transparent, more efficient and, above all, more democratic. Priorities!

      Maybe the cultural differences aren't much or any bigger than those in the US. But I do believe they are more profound, with the language barriers (in most countries the penetration of English is still very poor) to underline that. Of course, younger people feel a lot less distance than their parents towards foreigners, but it is still the older generation that rules the EU. This is clearly reflected in the way Brussels is organized. Thus it will, unfortunately, still take quite a lot of time for Europe to not only become an economic union, but also a real union in the heads of the people.

    42. Re:Soudan, US by lysergic.acid · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      States in the U.S. are not what are commonly referred to in the rest of the world as 'nation-states.' A nation-state is defined as an autonomous political entity which governs over a particular geographic area where its population (citizens) are unified, usually through culture, language, common origin, or heritage. In other words, a state, or nation-state, is essentially a country, or nation (as in the United 'Nations'). U.S. states are basically just provinces. We are not a loose federation of nation-states. Each state is not autonomous, as demonstrated by the Civil War and the existence of a federal government which presides over national issues and policy making.

      We have 3 main levels of government:

      1. the local level: mayors, municipal courts, city council, etc.
      2. the state level: governors, state legislatures, state courts, state agencies (dmv, education department, food and agriculture department, ...), etc.
      3. the federal, or national, level: Congress, the president, SCOTUS (Supreme Court), federal court, cabinet (defense secretary, secretary of state, ...), treasury department, state department, defense department, etc.

      Hence, our national elections are for all 50 states, not for each individual state. Each state doesn't have its own seat in the U.N., or its own embassadors or embassies in foregin countries. Interstate commerce is not classified as international trade, and you don't need a passport to travel from one state to another since citizenship status is the same regardless of which state you're a resident of.

      U.S. states are subnational states, which is not what people mean by 'state' when they are referring to nation-states (such as in the 'State' Department). This is why most people (within the U.S. and abroad) regard states in the U.S. to be provinces of the U.S. rather than nation-states. All U.S. foreign policy is made by the federal government, and foreign affairs are genrally conducted through the Washington, so state governments can't really be considered autonomous political entities. Now, the European Union could be considered a federation of nation-states where each member is an autonomous nation, but the U.S. is not.

    43. Re:Soudan, US by Paua+Fritter · · Score: 1

      My point was that the GP merely asserts that Taiwan is not part of China and expects others to believe it, without any evidence. My citing of various US states annexed from Mexico was a satire on this, to illustrate the silliness of making voluntarist judgements like this, on the basis of what people would like to believe, or what they think should be the case, rather than what actually is the case. I can assert that New Mexico is part of Mexico, but that doesn't make it so, and I'd be expected to present some evidence for this, given how plainly it flies in the face of the facts.

      Actually, legally, the two territories of the two states (ROC and PRC) are both part of China, the country. You may be surprised to learn that this is recognised by the constitutions of BOTH those states, and incidentally, by all (I think) the other states in the world, including the US, as well as by the UN. "China" is simply a country which includes territory which is in actual fact controlled by two distinct governments. The same could be said for several other countries, such as Colombia, of course, but since Colombia isn't a large country, its size doesn't offend against the national pride of US citizens. :-)

      You have a mistaken view of the formation of Taiwan (I realise you are really referring to the "Republic of China", the state, not "Taiwan" which is an island and was not of course formed by humans at all). Actually the ROC has always asserted sovereignty over all of China (and Mongolia I believe). The ROC was not formed by separatists, Taiwanese nationalists, or pro-independence forces at all. Please check your facts.

      The current president of Taiwan is a supporter of Taiwan independence, but that's neither here nor there. Maybe the government in Taiwan will amend the constitution to make Taiwan an independent country distinct from the rest of China, but that's not the case at present.

    44. Re:Soudan, US by lysergic.acid · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      I think you're both a little confused here. A state outside of its usage in reference to the 50 states in the U.S. means a nation-state--an autonomous self-governing political entity. U.S. states are subnational states--essentially provinces. You can't equivocate the two. The U.S. is a nation, whereas its states are provinces. The EU is a federation of autonomous nation-states, each with their own respective provinces. Just because the EU's members are autonomous states doesn't mean that they can't benefit from mutual cooperation and form an international alliance to pursue common interests. The EU is more akin to the U.N. than to the U.S. There just seems to be a mix-up of definitions here. I don't think anyone ever proposed that the EU should be setup as a nation with its members as provinces.

    45. Re:Soudan, US by atrizzah · · Score: 1

      Well, if it were a story about Britain, I'd like to know what part of the UK it took place in. Sure it's just a detail, but isn't that what reporting is about?

    46. Re:Soudan, US by Guppy06 · · Score: 1

      "States in the U.S. are not what are commonly referred to in the rest of the world as 'nation-states.'"

      First off, you missed my use of the past tense, but since you kept going...

      "U.S. states are basically just provinces."

      Depends on what country you have in mind when you use the word "province." The term is used in Canada, but that does not change the fact that Canada is a federation.

      "We are not a loose federation of nation-states. Each state is not autonomous, as demonstrated by the Civil War"

      States are admitted by acts of Congress. The Constitution prohibits individual state legislatures from overturning acts of Congress, but that does not mean a state could leave the union either with the consent of Congress, by law or by treaty.

      "Hence, our national elections are for all 50 states, not for each individual state. "

      Part of that is because we are a hybrid of a federation and a republic (hence "federal republic"), but the fact you mentioned "all 50 states" and not "all US citizens" should tip you off that there are hundreds of thousands of US citizens and nationals from Puerto Rico to Guam that have zero participation in federal elections, for no other reason than because where they live is not considered to have the sovereignty of a state.

      "and the existence of a federal government which presides over national issues and policy making."

      The constitution and the federal government which it creates are ultimately the creations of the state legislatures, and the constitution continues in its current state by the grace of those legislatures. If enough of the states agreed, a convention could be called to alter or abolish the constitution outright and there is nothing the federal government can (constitutionally) do about it.

      "Each state doesn't have its own seat in the U.N., or its own embassadors or embassies in foregin countries."

      True, but only because those powers were bestowed by the states upon the federal government. Those powers, however, were still theirs to grant, and did not belong to the federal government of its own right.

      "Interstate commerce is not classified as international trade,"

      No text in the federal constitution expressly prohibits all state regulation of either.

      "and you don't need a passport to travel from one state to another"

      Nothing in the constitution prevents the states from restricting travel across its borders. Simply because no state opts to do so these days does not mean a state cannot require such an interstate passport or visa.

      And even then, if a person suspected of a crime in one state happens to be in another, the accusing state must request extradition from the courts of the other.

      "since citizenship status is the same regardless of which state you're a resident of."

      If you look at the Fourteenth Amendment (at least), you'll note that all residents in the 50 states have dual citizenship, both of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. I am afforded priveleges and immunities in other states when I travel not because of my federal citizenship, but because of my state citizenship and the requirement in the constitution for states to grant such privileges and immunities to citizens of other states as it would its own (Article IV, Section 2).

      In many ways, it functions like a treaty of reciprocity.

      "U.S. states are subnational states, which is not what people mean by 'state' when they are referring to nation-states (such as in the 'State' Department)."

      Try to find a US state that doesn't have its own state department. Who do you think sends the electoral votes to Congress? Heck, most states even have a military department.

      "This is why most people (within the U.S. and abroad) regard states in the U.S. to be provinces of the U.S. rather than nation-states"

      The only things that makes people think like that is custom, tradition, an

    47. Re:Soudan, US by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, and the confederation DIDN'T WORK. That's why we have the Constitution now instead of the Articles of Confederation.

    48. Re:Soudan, US by tartley · · Score: 1

      Not really. Off the top of my head, my country (the UK) is about the same population as ten average US states. I'm not sure that the size of a state's economy has much bearing on this - and maybe that's a telling distinction between our two viewpoints. Those with wealth will always think that wealth is important.

    49. Re:Soudan, US by tartley · · Score: 1

      >> The only countries bigger than the US are Russia and Canada Except if you rank 'bigger' by population (which seems more meaningful to me than land area), in which case it's China and India.

    50. Re:Soudan, US by lysergic.acid · · Score: 1

      Depends on what country you have in mind when you use the word "province." The term is used in Canada, but that does not change the fact that Canada is a federation.

      See:

      From the Wikipedia entry on 'Federal':

      The word federal in a general sense refers to the nature of an agreement between or among two or more states, nations, or other groups to merge into a union in which control of common affairs is held by a central authority created by and with the consent of the members.

      and also:

      From the Wikipedia entry on 'Federation':

      A federation (Latin: foedus, covenant) is a state comprised of a number of partially self-governing regions (often themselves referred to as "states") united by a central ("federal") government.

      So, technically, a federation can be a group of autonomous nation-states--such as with the EU--or a collective of partially self-governing provinces/subnational states--such as is the case with Canada and the U.S. But generally speaking, the EU is considered to have too weak a central government to be considered a federation.

      So you've only proved my point that U.S. states are essentially provinces, not nation-states.

      States are admitted by acts of Congress. The Constitution prohibits individual state legislatures from overturning acts of Congress, but that does not mean a state could leave the union either with the consent of Congress, by law or by treaty.

      Like I said, the South tried to do this during the Civil War, and they failed. Unless the Federal government decides to allow a particular state to secede from the union, any such attempts would likely be met with military resistance.

      Part of that is because we are a hybrid of a federation and a republic (hence "federal republic"), but the fact you mentioned "all 50 states" and not "all US citizens" should tip you off that there are hundreds of thousands of US citizens and nationals from Puerto Rico to Guam that have zero participation in federal elections, for no other reason than because where they live is not considered to have the sovereignty of a state.

      How does participation in national elections show that the U.S. states are each autonomous nations? I believe that's a non-sequitur. Each state doesn't get to elect its own president; national elections are determined by votes from every state--that means that the states are not self-governing in matters of national government. If each state were a sovreign nation-state as you say, then each individual state would conduct its own national elections without the involvement of other states, such as is the case with France, or Germany, or England, and other sovreignties. Guam and Puerto Rico don't participate in national elections because they are unincorporated territories--they don't have statehood. Statehood within the U.S. does not mean that one is autonomous or a sovereign political entity:

      From the Wikipedia entry on 'State':

      The term state is also used to describe subnational territorial divisions within a federal system, as in the case of the United States of America. See state (law) and state (non-sovereign), federalism.

      Clearly, U.S. states are not nations. Get it through your head. No one, except perhaps you, would consider interstate commerce to be international commerce, or consider interstate travel to be international travel. U.S. states do not issue their own passports because passports are issued by national governments; it has nothing to do with whether states have the right to control their borders or regulate international trade. There

    51. Re:Soudan, US by jonbritton · · Score: 1

      Stories always say "Manchester" or "Belfast" or "Edinburgh." When was the last time you saw "Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK, Europe?"

      Unless it's Rome, NY or Paris, TX, it is considered correct to leave out the details that should be reasonably assumed. It's certainly alright to get to the fsking point in an article, and skip the irrelevant cultural details for the finer points of the article's subject. It's the rule of writing: if the article still has full meaning after X is omitted, omit X.

    52. Re:Soudan, US by ChildeRoland · · Score: 1

      If you ever read the constitution you would see that the form of government IT sets up is also a confederation, rather than a federal government. It wasn't untill much later that the government started turning into a federal one.

      --
      The mark of a mature person is not creating arbitrary criteria for considering others mature.
    53. Re:Soudan, US by Guppy06 · · Score: 1

      "Except if you rank 'bigger' by population"

      Which would be missing the point, since we're talking about geography and how news reports say where XYZ city is.

    54. Re:Soudan, US by Guppy06 · · Score: 1
      "So, technically, a federation can be a group of autonomous nation-states--such as with the EU--or a collective of partially self-governing provinces/subnational states"

      You missed the second paragraph under "Federation:"
      Federations are often founded on an original agreement between a number of sovereign states, sometimes after an intermediate period of confederation.
      "Like I said, the South tried to do this during the Civil War, and they failed. Unless the Federal government decides to allow a particular state to secede from the union, any such attempts would likely be met with military resistance."

      Partners in a marriage tend not to have the right to divorce unilaterally, either. Does that mean that married couples lose their rights as individuals and should only be treated as one person?

      "Get it through your head. No one, except perhaps you, would consider interstate commerce to be international commerce, or consider interstate travel to be international travel. U.S. states do not issue their own passports because passports are issued by national governments; it has nothing to do with whether states have the right to control their borders or regulate international trade. There is a clear distinction between interstate and international affairs--this is an a priori truth."

      You've made a lot of statements here, claims about what a state can and cannot do, but the only sources you reference are Wikipedia. If states are not allowed to control traffic across their own borders, are not allowed to regulate either interstate or international commerce, then there should be clauses in the (remarkably short and easy to read) United States Constitution. All I'm seeing on your part are assumptions on your part that boil down to the phrase "They don't because they can't," and all your links to Wikipedia end up doing is supporting my claim that it's all a matter of public perception rather than constitutional law.

      "Also, each state does NOT have its own State Department."

      As I said before, name one that doesn't. Here's one that does. I'll leave checking the other 49 as an exercise for the reader. While the states have agreed to present a single face to the rest of the world (through the federal government), the state departments of several states still exist for official communications with the federal government (among other things).

      "They do not mean semi-autonomous or partially self-governing."

      I never said that states were not semi-autonomous. I'm saying that they are because they choose to be and need not be.

      "All provinces are partially self-governing just as cities and townships are."

      Just the opposite. Cities and townships are granted self-government by the state government (read any random state constitution) and continue to exist by the grace of the state government, but the state governments created the federal government, not the other way around.

      "Your confusion over the issue and the tenuous arguments you've supplied seem to demonstrate that you have difficulties grasping how our political system works."

      Then it should be a simple matter for you to find the relevant passages.
    55. Re:Soudan, US by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To us, the state is important, but to the British, it's really not that pertinent.

      Well in that case, we should probably just start calling it "London, EU" then.

    56. Re:Soudan, US by tartley · · Score: 1

      Hey Guppo06. I'm not sure I agree. I want to know the location for the social/political implications, so for me, geographical units consisting of large collections of people seem to be significant. If a small region with a high people density does lots of interesting stuff, it makes sense to break it down into smaller areas. It does seem useful to subdivide California or the UK into smaller portions, with meaningful cultural disparities, not so much for Alaska or Antarctica, which may be larger, but have less population.

    57. Re:Soudan, US by japhmi · · Score: 1

      Stories always say "Manchester" or "Belfast" or "Edinburgh." When was the last time you saw "Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK, Europe?"

      I guess the main difference is that Minnesota is 225,365 km and the UK is 244,820 km. So, if you simply said Edinburgh, UK then you would have the same general area to go and look on a map as if you were told Minnesota. Besides, the smaller the town the more information you should provide. Especially if the article talks about path of travel (even if it's the path of a Neutrino).

      --
      "Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys" P. J. O'Rourke
    58. Re:Soudan, US by lysergic.acid · · Score: 1

      So let me ask you this, are U.S. states nations (autonomous self-governing sovreignties) or are they subnational states (partially self-governing provinces subject to the governance of a federal government)? If it's the former, why do people only refer to the union as the nation, and why don't the states conduct their own national elections?

    59. Re:Soudan, US by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 1
      Why? They don't care anymore than we (Americans) care that Tijuana, Mexico is more appropriately, "Tijuana, BC, Mexico".

      If there were as many Tijuanas as there are certain popular city names in the US, then you'd almost have a point. However, it's normal to have similarly named places here that have little in common with each other save for the fact that they're on the same continent.

      Given that the US is vastly larger than the UK in population and land size, it makes sense to specify geographical regions there when it wouldn't elsewhere. Same goes for ex-USSR; there's a lot of difference between Siberia and the Ukraine, and I'd expect an article about a city there to give at least the ballpark region where it was located.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    60. Re:Soudan, US by Guppy06 · · Score: 1

      "So let me ask you this, are U.S. states nations (autonomous self-governing sovreignties) or are they subnational states (partially self-governing provinces subject to the governance of a federal government)?"

      The answer is "yes." The states are the source of all sovereignty within the United States, and have opted to grant them to a new construct, the federal government, through a constitution. The federal government acts in the name of the states (if only in name nowadays), much as how Parliament acts in the name of the British monarch.

      "If it's the former, why do people only refer to the union as the nation"

      "Nation" can have different meanings. For example, when Thomas Paine wrote about the French "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Nation," he seemed to be of the opinion that the French people used the word "nation" not to refer to the government or to a piece of real estate, but to the body of the French people. The people of the United States are (for better or for worse) rather homogeneous throughout, so it is proper to refer to the "American people" as a singular.

      "and why don't the states conduct their own national elections?"

      The states conduct all elections in the United States. They even decide who gets to vote.

    61. Re:Soudan, US by lysergic.acid · · Score: 1
      "The answer is "yes." The states are the source of all sovereignty within the United States, and have opted to grant them to a new construct, the federal government, through a constitution. The federal government acts in the name of the states (if only in name nowadays), much as how Parliament acts in the name of the British monarch."

      It's one or the other, not both. The states may have been considered autonomous political entities initially, but today they are the same as provinces in other nations. When a shared constitution was adopted by all the states, they ceased being a confederation of sovereign states, and entered into a new political arrangement wherein the individual states could no longer act autonomously, but were inextricably bound to the federation of states by necessity. This arranegment was entered into voluntarily because the ex-colonies knew that without political unity realized through a central national government, they were weak and vulnerable, and would be unable to fend for themselves against the european imperialist nations.

      "Nation" can have different meanings. For example, when Thomas Paine wrote about the French "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Nation," he seemed to be of the opinion that the French people used the word "nation" not to refer to the government or to a piece of real estate, but to the body of the French people. The people of the United States are (for better or for worse) rather homogeneous throughout, so it is proper to refer to the "American people" as a singular.

      You're going off on a tangent again. In common usage, atleast in the context of political science, 'nation' means a nation-state; a sovereign state--such as the U.S. If people really consider the U.S. a nation simply because it has a homogeneous population, not because of its political structure, then why do people not consider Canada part of the U.S.? Your arguments keep getting more and more ridiculous. And the U.S. is far from homogeneous, both ethnically and culturally. I'm guessing you haven't travelled in the U.S. much have you?

      The states conduct all elections in the United States. They even decide who gets to vote.

      I asked why don't the states conduct their own national elections. You seem to like ignoring crucial words to change the question when you can't find an adequate answer. The states participate in a national election, but California itself doesn't get to decide who the president is. Florida doesn't get to vote for its own president. The states don't hold separate elections. If each state is its own sovereign nation, then why are national elections held across all states? Let me spell it out in even simpler terms for you: why would a sovereign nation conduct a national election outside of its own nation? unless ofcourse, the states consider themselves merely subnational political entities part of a greater nation, namely, the U.S. That would seem to be the most obvious and logical explaination. Which might be why most everyone in the world agree that the U.S. is a single nation, not 50 independent ones.

    62. Re:Soudan, US by Guppy06 · · Score: 1
      "It's one or the other, not both."

      Because I'm too lazy to rehash what Madison has said, here. His summary:
      The proposed Constitution, therefore, is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both. In its foundation it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of the government are drawn, it is partly federal and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal; in the extent of them, again, it is federal, not national; and, finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.
      "and entered into a new political arrangement wherein the individual states could no longer act autonomously,"

      Their autonomy was voluntarily restricted, but was not eliminated. The states (collectively, at least) still have the power to alter the nature of the union (or even abolish it) with no involvement of the government you seem to believe is their superior.

      "In common usage, atleast in the context of political science"

      And you're accusing me of being indecisive? Wiktionary lists both definitions, and apparently lists the "people" definition first.

      "If people really consider the U.S. a nation simply because it has a homogeneous population, not because of its political structure, then why do people not consider Canada part of the U.S.?"

      Have you spoken to a Canadian recently? Canada exists because its people do not consider themselves to be the same as those south of the border. However, there are parts of the world that consider both the US and Canada to simply fall under the general category of "norteamericanos"

      "I asked why don't the states conduct their own national elections."

      And you seem to be unable to define the word "national." If you are referring to "nation" as either "people" or "sovereign." then the states do conduct them as they do all other elections in the United States. However, if you are trying to use "nation" as a synonym for "government of the United States," then you are using it improperly, as they are federal elections, and are described as such by both the state and federal governments.

      "The states participate in a national election, but California itself doesn't get to decide who the president is."

      And the United States itself doesn't get to pick who the UN Secretary-General is (at least not officially). Does that mean that there is only one country on this planet now?

      "If each state is its own sovereign nation, then why are national elections held across all states?"

      Because the states have agreed to.

      "Let me spell it out in even simpler terms for you: why would a sovereign nation conduct a national election outside of its own nation?"

      Why not? If they are sovereign, they can choose what to do with their sovereingty, just as an individual can choose to sign a binding contract.

      "the states consider themselves"

      What the states consider themselves to be and what they are can be two different things. Again, I'm not talking about public perception (which has a history of being wrong), I'm talking about the constitution itself, that document you continue to refuse to cite to back up any of your assertions.
    63. Re:Soudan, US by lysergic.acid · · Score: 1

      The UN is not a nation. UN affairs are not national affairs to the U.S. or any other nation. UN affairs are international affairs.

      I've lost my interest in this discussion as it has not been the least bit productive. You can continue to believe that Florida is a country if you want, but the rest of the world disagrees with you.

    64. Re:Soudan, US by feronti · · Score: 1

      To be perfectly honest, I would say that the lack of productivity has come from your failure to listen to Guppy. Every single one of his statements can be backed up directly in the Constitution itself. It's not even necessary to go into case law for the basics. You, on the other hand have changed definitions when convenient to fit your argument, and failed to cite anything other than Wikipedia, which great as it is, is not a primary source.

      It seems the US educators truly are failing to teach political science properly. I would certainly agree that at this point withdrawal from the union would be suicide for any state, since there is no way they could possibly win against the federal army and (unless it was New Jersey;) the other 49 states wouldn't allow them to just slink away. However, that does not mean that the individual states do not have that right. The states do conduct foreign diplomacy, certainly not with the effectiveness of the nation as a whole (since they have ceded the power to negotiate binding treaties to the federal government), but it does happen. Recently, Jennifer Granholm, the governor of Michigan visited Japan as part of a bid to bring more Japanese investment (specifically a new Toyota plant) to the state. California's Proposition 187 could also be construed (though arguably not as clearly) as foreign diplomacy, in that the majority of its impact falls upon foreign nationals.

      You also claim that the states don't get to pick the president. Actually, they do. Each state holds its own separate election, according to its own separate election standards. Each candidate is required to file the necessary paperwork and petitions in every single state to appear on the ballot. The individual states have agreed to hold their general elections on the same date so as to make it easier to administer the election, but I believe some have begun to allow early voting, which again is in their power. If you are unable to vote in your state, you are not allowed to simply cast your vote in another state; you must fill out an absentee ballot and send it to your state's Department of State (or equivalent). When the votes have been tabulated in a state, that state declares the number of electors for each candidate (each state may nominate one elector for each representative it sends to the House of Representatives, and one for each Senator). At this time, in all 50 states, the winner of the popular vote receives all of the electors for that state, though there is nothing in the Constitution to require it.

      Certainly, for not being independent, the states of the US wield a considerable amount of power, more than the provinces in more unitary governments such as France or the UK. While they do not fully fit the definition of a nation-state, they surely are more than just provinces.

    65. Re:Soudan, US by Burb · · Score: 1
      If France just up and said it wanted out of the EU it would be out of the EU...

      As I understand it, the Treaty of Rome has no such clause.

      --

    66. Re:Soudan, US by dacaldar · · Score: 1
      That's simply an Ameri-centric view.

      As a Canadian exposed to lots of American TV and culture, I can tell you I notice that it's always US-city, US-state, but Toronto, Canada, and Foreign-city,Foreign-country.

      Watch when they introduce the golfers at the Masters, tomorrow. It will be "Tiger Woods from Windermere, Florida" and "Mike Weir from... Canada!"

    67. Re:Soudan, US by hr+raattgift · · Score: 1
      And Canada is a confederation and our Head of State is Queen Elizabeth II. There's also no such thing as a Prime Minister according to our constitution.


      Well, no, the Prime Minister is mentioned and given a legal basis in the consolidated parts of the Constitution.

      See ss. 35.1 and 49 of The Constitution Act, 1982, and ss. 130-131 of The Constitution Act, 1867.

      Moreover, the constitutional role and office of the Prime Minister is well established (i.e., given a definition and legal basis) part of the governance of Canada through other statutes, proclamations, orders and traditions which are legally part of the (unconsolidated) Constitution of Canada.

      Section III of The Constitution Act, 1867, describing the Executive, establishes the Queen's Privy Council for Canada. The Governor-General acts for the Queen on advice of this Council. Traditionally, the Council recommends the appointment of Ministers, including the Prime Minister. It is tradition which drives the composition of the Privy Council and its deference to the Prime Minister. This is fundamentally Responsible Government, which requires the Government to be responsible to the House of Commons.

      The Privy Council itself has two traditions. Firstly, the Cabinet is a committee of the Privy Council. All Cabinet Ministers are Privy Councillors. Secondly, ordinary quorum for Orders-in-Council include the Governor General or her Deputy, the President of the Privy Council, another Cabinet Minister -- often the Prime Minister -- and the Clerk of the Privy Council (who may act as the Prime Minister's Deputy). Thus the full Privy Council will not "gang up" on the Government of the Day.

      These traditions are part of the greater Constitution, which includes not only the statutory instruments listed in s 52(2) of the Constitution Act (1982), including all the acts listed in the Schedule, but also statutes, rulings, orders, proclamations and traditions "of Constitutional weight", such as the Royal Marriages Act (1772) or the fate of governments which cannot secure the confidence of the House of Commons. The fact that extant itemizations have always been non-exhaustive lists of items of Constitutional weight is made explicit by the Supreme Court in Reference re Secession of Quebec, (1998) 2 S.C.R. 217. This requires one of the Amendment procedures in the Constitution Act (1982) to be used to change important aspects of Canadian governance, and (maybe amusingly, in the case of keeping the monarchy Protestant) protects related pre-Confederation British Legislation from being challenged by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

      Incidentally, this follows the pattern of the British Constitution, which is largely unconsolidated (and not entirely "codified" in the sense of being written down). The Acquis Communitaire is similarly mainly unconsolidated, although the European Union is considering a proposed "clean-up" of the Acquis and consolidation into a single Constitution most of the treaties, directives, orders and rulings of the European Union to date that are obviously of constitutional weight.

  3. *shakes head* by Monkeys!!! · · Score: 5, Funny

    You know you are a serious geek when you read the headline and say 'YES!' out loud.

    1. Re:*shakes head* by MeanMF · · Score: 3, Funny

      You're ok as long as you didn't have that reaction to the "OMG BARBIE LINUX LOL!!1!!!!" headline...

    2. Re:*shakes head* by blueZhift · · Score: 1

      You know you are a serious geek when you read the headline and say 'YES!' out loud.

      Absolutely! This is the kind of stuff that made me go into physics in college. I've been waiting for some resolution of the neutrino mass issue for the last 20 years or so. This is the cool stuff! w00t!

    3. Re:*shakes head* by Draveed · · Score: 1
      What a relief to know I'm not the only one to do that.

      --
      Oh, Edmund, can it be true? that I hold here, in my mortal hand, a nugget of purest green?
    4. Re:*shakes head* by barefootgenius · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And you know you are a sceptic when your next thought is,"hold on, they sent these particle's through an object they know next to nothing about and then use the fact that some of them didn't turn up as proof".
      Then you read more and you get,"Of course, most of them travel right through our detectors as well, but once in a blue moon one of them will interact - about one or so per day."

      I suppose I am being pedantic, but can anybody explain to me why I should believe their explanation that their not turning up in such large numbers is proof?

      --
      /. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
    5. Re:*shakes head* by Easy2RememberNick · · Score: 1

      Or you read a website that has one story about the new Simpson's movie and then the next story is about Neutrinos. ...and OMG Ponies!

    6. Re:*shakes head* by honkycat · · Score: 5, Informative

      They have two detectors. One very near to the source, one very far away. The near source measures many more hits than the far source does. Thus, they know they're being produced in larger quantities than they're being received in. Compared to a model of the test configuration assuming no oscillation, there are about 33% too few hits on the far detector as compared to the near. This amounts to a 4 or 5 sigma detection of the missing neutrinos (in other words, there is approximtely a 0.7%-1.8% chance that this is due to a statistical coincidence). It's typically at 2 or 3 sigma that you start making a confident announcement of a discovery, so a 4 or 5 sigma confirmation of an already reported result is very, very strong evidence.

      They don't yet have enough data to rule out some alternative explanations. At this point, though, neutrino oscillation (and mass) would really be the simplest, least "out there" explanation. These experimenters would like nothing more than to find that even the oscillation theories don't explain the data. That would open a whole new field of inquiry and possibly lead to Nobel Prizes.

      If you're techincally inclined, read about the Minos results straight from the horses' mouths.

      The seminar talks go into a fair bit of detail about their data analysis, which included "blind analysis." In other words, they kept a significant (and unknown until the end) fraction of their data secret from those doing the analysis. Using the other fraction, they went through their testing procedures -- figuring out how to detect false events, how to deal with various , etc -- using a limited piece of the data. Once they were confident that they had done everything correctly, they opened the whole data set and ran their procedure without changing it.

      This protected them from tainting their data by, e.g., throwing out data points that didn't match expectations. That is a common problem, even among good scientists. It's very easy to subconsciously make decisions that bias your results toward the expected answer.

      Anyway, I am a physicist, and I think you should believe these guys. Everything I've seen indicates they've done a good, careful job with the experiment.

    7. Re:*shakes head* by barefootgenius · · Score: 1

      Thank you. I may not watch T.V. but you have just given me about two hundred hours viewing, by the looks of things. You might like these.

      --
      /. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
    8. Re:*shakes head* by honkycat · · Score: 1

      Thanks, those look interesting.

    9. Re:*shakes head* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      of course, a real geek would be teaching their daughters how to write ASM code for their Barbie B-book. Because 80K of ram outght to be enough for any real programmer!

    10. Re:*shakes head* by jproffer · · Score: 1

      Hmm, Call me Particle Physics-inclined, but doesnt the nature of detectors require collision, or other interference between the detector and the target particle? If this is true, then coupled with the fact that Neutrinos are hard to detect in the first place, wouldn't that mean that the first detector is actually reducing the amount of particles we might detect on the second detector?

    11. Re:*shakes head* by Chirs · · Score: 1

      Assuming the neutrino flow is constant (easily verified), this is simple to work around--simply insert the local detector, take measurements, then remove it and measure at the far detector.

    12. Re:*shakes head* by honkycat · · Score: 1

      Yes -- you can only detect each neutrino once. After that, it ain't a neutrino no more.

      However, these neutrinos are passing through 735 kilometers of solid earth between the two detectors with a negligble loss of beam intensity. Compared with the loss rate through the earth, the loss due to detections at the near detector is negligble.

      Or, to put it in terms of numbers, imagine that there are 10^10 neutrinos produced in the beam. These pass through the near detector and, if you're lucky, *one* of them is detected. Now there are 10^10 - 1 which is still 10^10 neutrinos left.

      So, precisely because they are hard to detect, you can put multiple detectors in the beam line without needing much of a correction. It takes longer to build up a large number in any one detector, but they'll all see very nearly the same intensity.

      I'm not familiar enough with the details of neutrino physics or this project to know how much, if any, correction they do to account for scattering losses in the detector or the earth in the beam path. My instincts tell me they probably do correct for very small losses through the earth, but don't need to bother with the detector itself.

  4. Already Known by physicsphairy · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Neutrino mass has been an established fact since 1998 (courtesy work at the Super-Kamiokande).

    Would slashdot also be interested in posting my own confirmations that light has a finite speed?

    1. Re:Already Known by rewinn · · Score: 4, Informative
    2. Re:Already Known by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      "Confirmed" in this case should be taken to mean "Already known because Super-Kamiokande convinced us it was true in 1998, followed by more evidence from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and the K2K expeirment, and then also KamLand, but isn't it nice that this newer experiment sees (confirms) the same thing."

      The experiment in this article has been designed to improve on these previous measurements, and as a first step there, they have presented initial results after only 8 months of operation.

      (Didn't read the BBC article, but I do work in a mine.)

    3. Re:Already Known by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Would slashdot also be interested in posting my own confirmations that light has a finite speed?"

      Actually light has an infinite velocity "speed" in it's own reference frame, as dose any thing traveling at C with respect to a stationary object.

    4. Re:Already Known by qbwiz · · Score: 2, Interesting

      AFAIK, light doesn't have a reference frame. Likewise, nothing can travel at a velocity of light and have a reference frame.

      By relativity, the velocity of light in all reference frames is equal/constant. Therefore, if you were in light's reference frame, then light would be moving past you at c. However, you are in light's reference frame, so you are moving with the light and the light is not moving past you. Contradiction.

      Of course, I'm not an actual physicist, so take this with a grain of salt.

      --
      Ewige Blumenkraft.
    5. Re:Already Known by n0mad6 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Perhaps simply reading the title would give a hint as to why this is important (i.e., note the word "confirmed"). Experimental results aren't really useful unless its a result that can be reproduced. The MINOS result is simply the first confirmation of the earlier Super-K result.

    6. Re:Already Known by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      By relativity, the velocity of light in all reference frames is equal/constant. Therefore, if you were in light's reference frame, then light would be moving past you at c. However, you are in light's reference frame, so you are moving with the light and the light is not moving past you. Contradiction.

      Not really. If you're moving at the speed of light your time scales to nothing and all velocities are equivalent, including 0 and c.

      But maybe that's saying the same thing as that there is no reference frame.

      Of course, I'm not an actual physicist, so take this with a grain of salt.

      Same here, I'm probably more full of it that you are.

    7. Re:Already Known by Firehed · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Actually, I think it's been an established fact since the beginning of universal existance (quite possibly predating the Big Bang, if possible, and assuming that it did actually occur). It's been a known fact since 1998.

      --
      How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
    8. Re:Already Known by Tom+Veil · · Score: 1
      Not really. If you're moving at the speed of light your time scales to nothing and all velocities are equivalent, including 0 and c.

      My understanding has always been that the basic principle to relativity is that all frames of reference are equally valid, regardless of velocity. If you're in a spaceship then that is your frame of reference and from your perspective moving at 0 velocity. Light moves at velocity c from your frame of reference. However, to an observer that sees you moving at the speed of light, the photon on your ship sees it travelling at W = (v + w) / (1 + vw/c^2) where v is your velocity (c) and w is the photon's velocity (also c) meaning W = (c + c) / (1 + cc/c^2) = 2c/(1 + 1) = 2c/2 = c. In other words, even if you appear to be moving at the speed of light to an observer, your frame of reference is still valid, and you still see light moving at the speed of light compared to you. Of course, the time dilation is so severe (t' = t/(1-v^2/c^2)^0.5 = t/(1-c^2/c^2)^0.5 = t/(1-1)^0.5 = t/0 = undefined or infinite) that you appear not to be experiencing time to your observer. Of course, this is only fair since he appears to be moving at the speed of light from your perspective and does not appear to be experiencing time either.

      Of course, I'm not an actual physicist, so take this with a grain of salt.
      Same here, I'm probably more full of it that you are.

      I'm not a physicist either, but I did stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night.

      --

      There's nothing you have that they can't take away: Absolute zero, Gentle Jack, bottom line.

    9. Re:Already Known by DMiax · · Score: 2, Informative

      Super-KamioKande didn't establish that neutrinos had mass directly. For that it needed the neutrinos from the nova to arrive spread over a time greater than that in which they departed. The duration of the beam on the nova was estimated about ten seconds, which is almost the same time spread of the revealed neutrinos.

      For the oscillations, they are long known, and one of the most simple and exact explainations is that their eigenstate of mass are not the eigenstates of flavour, which in turn means that they have different mass, and at least one is different from zero. Neutrino Oscillation is not a proof for neutrino to have mass. Just a strong hint that they may have

    10. Re:Already Known by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For the oscillations, they are long known, and one of the most simple and exact explainations is that their eigenstate of mass are not the eigenstates of flavour, which in turn means that they have different mass, and at least one is different from zero. Neutrino Oscillation is not a proof for neutrino to have mass. Just a strong hint that they may have

      Well, Minos did nothing else than measuring neutrino oscillations. They basically are repeating the principle of the Super-Kamiokande experiment - but with a better neutrino beam and a longer baseline.

    11. Re:Already Known by Matt+Edd · · Score: 1

      Simply put... anything with no mass does not have a reference frame. And I am an actual physicist.

    12. Re:Already Known by GMontag451 · · Score: 1

      The only valid Lorentzian reference frames are ones you can transform to from another valid reference frame. Since the transformation equations don't work at v=c, there is no valid reference frame that has a velocity of c relative to another valid frame, or in other words, light has no reference frame.

    13. Re:Already Known by rob_squared · · Score: 1

      The way I understand it is that light does not experience time. So if you were in light's frame, you wouldn't experience anything.

      --
      I don't get it.
    14. Re:Already Known by habig · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not quite - the SK result has been confirmed several times (to less precision) by other atmospheric neutrino experiments.

      And once before by the K2K accelerator experiment, which was (like MINOS) a controlled, make-your-own-neutrinos, measured-before-and-after sort of experiment. Although one might argue since that used SK as a far detector that it might not be as independant a confirmation as you might like.

      The MINOS result is nice because in the first 6 months of a multi-year run, we already have the precision of the K2K results, and that all the experiments point to a similar number. Which makes us feel good that after a few more years work we'll have accomplished the goal of measuring these oscillations way more precisely than ever before, and will have a shot at uncovering more subtle things going on with the neutrinos.

      But, that doesn't make good headlines, so you won't read that take on things in the popular press. Same reason as we get a rash of "black holes finally discovered" articles every six months when someone presents some new black hole observations at an AAS meeting.

      Fox News had a fun headline though, something like "Feds lose neutrinos, gain knowledge".

      PS - note that I'm on both Super-K and MINOS, in fact I created my slashdot account in 1998 to respond to comments about that first SK result. It's pretty neat that doing the experiment a completely different way still shows the same thing happening - so Mother Nature must be up to something real here.

      PPS - if you're up in Northern MN for some reason (likely canoeing or fishing) do stop by the Soudan Underground State Park on your way to Ely to take a tour of our lab (and the historic mine). Add a proper geeky component to your otherwise dangerously outdoorsy vacation.

    15. Re:Already Known by jstott · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Neutrino mass has been an established fact since 1998 (courtesy work at the Super-Kamiokande).

      Super-Kamiokande showed that neutrinos have mass if our models about solar neutrino production are correct. (There was a slight day/night shift observed too, but that's statistically weaker). SNO-ball provided strong supporting evidence too, by which point pretty much everyone agreed neutrino mass was right theory, but there's still the question of exactly what the solar neutrino flux is made up of.

      MINOS showed the same thing (neutrion oscillations), but this time with a direct measurement of the source neutrino flux and not a model-dependent estimate of the flux. There's really no way to argue with this result, only with the exact mechanism for neutrino oscillation.

      -JS

      --
      Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
    16. Re:Already Known by Goldsmith · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Which is why Slashdot for once had the right headline:

      Neutrino Mass Confirmed

      I know plenty of people who work on Super-K and I'm sure they're as glad as anyone their work has been found accurate. The fact that it took almost a decade to confirm this shows how amazing that first measurement is.

    17. Re:Already Known by pclminion · · Score: 1

      One way to think about it is that in the light's reference frame, there is no time.

  5. April Fools! by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 2, Funny

    Minos? Muons? Soudan? They're just making stuff up! This article just reeks of April Fools!! /Peter Griffin Voice

    --

    "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

  6. Pardon me, but. . . by kimvette · · Score: 1

    . . . if it's matter, isn't it required by definition to have mass?

    --
    The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
    1. Re:Pardon me, but. . . by syntaxglitch · · Score: 1

      Not really; consider a photon. Just because something is a particle does not mean it's necessarily what you think of as "matter".

    2. Re:Pardon me, but. . . by onx · · Score: 1

      The thing is, it is possible for things to have mass, but have a mass equal to zero. An example of this is the photon which has zero mass (zero rest mass).

    3. Re:Pardon me, but. . . by bcrowell · · Score: 5, Informative
      A hundred years ago, physicists generally classified things like this:
      • Matter has mass and is made of particles.
      • Light has no mass and is made of waves.
      Nowadays it's more like this:
      • Fermions are wave-particles that have half-integer spin. Atoms are made of fermions.
      • Bosons are wave-particles that have integer spins. Bosons are the things that carry forces.
      All the familiar, everyday fermions have nonzero rest mass, and the only familiar, everyday boson -- the photon -- has zero rest mass. However, there are bosons that have nonzero rest mass (e.g., gluons), and it's also possible that there are fermions that have zero rest mass. (Experiments so far only measure the differences between masses of different types of neutrinos, so it's still possible that the electron's neutrino has zero mass.)
    4. Re:Pardon me, but. . . by Guy+Harris · · Score: 1
      However, there are bosons that have nonzero rest mass (e.g., gluons)

      So color symmetry is broken?

    5. Re:Pardon me, but. . . by bcrowell · · Score: 1

      Oops, you're right -- a better example would have been the W and Z bosons.

    6. Re:Pardon me, but. . . by modecx · · Score: 1

      Gluons? Are those like pasties?

      --
      Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
    7. Re:Pardon me, but. . . by Ruie · · Score: 1
      Another interesting point is that what we think of "mass" in matter is mostly (>95%) just bound energy - it comes about from kinetic energy of quarks comprising protons and neutrons via E=mc^2

      Weird, ha ?

    8. Re:Pardon me, but. . . by xPsi · · Score: 1
      You raise a very good point here. How protons and neutrons (and hadrons in general) get their mass from quark binding is quite non-intuitive.

      For example, let's compare the situation to a hydrogen atom. If you take a free proton and an electron, the total mass will be M=me+mp. Let them bind into hydrogen in the ground state and they LOSE mass; some of that mass is reallocated into the potential energy. The mass of a hydrogen atom is then Mh=M-binding (binding=13.6 eV).

      However, for quarks in a proton, it goes the "other way." Bare quarks have a very small mass, but when bound in a proton, the proton become very heavy compared to the sum of the quark masses! Indeed, the quarks themselves seem to gain mass. This is all the result of what is called chiral symmetry breaking. The mass imparted to hadrons by the breaking of this symmetry is far larger than that of the Higgs mechanism. For example, see Frank Wilczek's fun article on the topic.

      --
      i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
    9. Re:Pardon me, but. . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > there are bosons that have nonzero rest mass (e.g., gluons)

      Actually gluons are likely to have zero rest mass though their interaction with quarks does increase mass of the nucleai.

      W & Z and most likely Higgs bosons have nonzero rest mass.

      Also one can understand that matter is what can be only one "thing" in given place/state as it is for half-spin particles.

      You can have infinetly many bosons at the exactly same place and state so they are not matter.

    10. Re:Pardon me, but. . . by gronofer · · Score: 1
      Is the speed of light not somehow involved with this? I.e., a particle with zero rest mass must travel at the speed of light, and a particle with non-zero rest mass must travel at less than the speed of light? Otherwise the equations explode?.

      So is saying that neutrinos have non-zero rest mass the same as saying they travel slower than the speed of light?

    11. Re:Pardon me, but. . . by Ruie · · Score: 1

      Wonderful article, thank you very much !

    12. Re:Pardon me, but. . . by Guy+Harris · · Score: 1
      So is saying that neutrinos have non-zero rest mass the same as saying they travel slower than the speed of light?

      Yes. (Well, modulo tachyons, which would have a non-zero but imaginary rest mass.)

  7. Creighton Mine by pipingguy · · Score: 2, Informative
  8. This is new? by fatduck · · Score: 2, Informative

    This was proven in the late 90's in a Japanese lab. The experiment was similar and involved muon neutrinos changing flavors to electron neutrinos in a large particle accelerator. The real question is how many eV are the combined masses of the three flavors? The answer to that question portends much for the state of the universe.

    --
    Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
    1. Re:This is new? by MustardMan · · Score: 1

      Got a link? The only Japanese neutrino experiment from the late 90s that I can recall is super-K, which was most certainly NOT a particle accelerator. Super K is just a massive cherenkov radiation detector - an empty mine that was meticulously cleaned and filled with very pure water, and contained a whole bunch of PMTs to detect single photons given off by cosmic particle interactions.

    2. Re:This is new? by bcrowell · · Score: 4, Informative
      Yes, this is a confirmation of something that had already been shown by one experiment.

      The experiment was similar and involved muon neutrinos changing flavors to electron neutrinos in a large particle accelerator.
      No, it wasn't an accelerator, and the experiment wasn't similar.

      The real question is how many eV are the combined masses of the three flavors? The answer to that question portends much for the state of the universe.
      No, not really. Not unless the mass of the electron's neutrino is surprisingly large compared to the mass differences among the different types of neutrinos.

    3. Re:This is new? by Joiseybill · · Score: 1

      The FermiLab press release speaks about this new experiment being much more precise in measuring the number of Neutrinos and the energies expended in their oscillations.

      They also refer to the earlier experiments, "Our first result corroborates earlier observations of muon neutrino disappearance, made by the Japanese Super-Kamiokande and K2K experiments. Over the next few years, we will collect about fifteen times more data, yielding more results with higher precision, paving the way to better understanding this phenomenon. Our current results already rival the Super-Kamiokande and K2K results in precision."
      http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/m inos_3-30-06.html

    4. Re:This is new? by ahillen · · Score: 1

      No, it wasn't an accelerator, and the experiment wasn't similar.

      He/she was talking about the K2K experiment, which involved the Super-Kamiokande detector and a neutrino beam produced at the KEK facility.

  9. In other news today by edwardpickman · · Score: 3, Funny

    New evidence has confirmed that the Universe does in fact have mass. Science advisor for the Bush administration was quick to point out that this is a theory and there was still no hard evidence. "The Bible makes no mention of the Universe having mass so we'll have to wait until a method is devised for weighing the Universe. We don't want any more psedoscience like that Darwin character was spreading."

    1. Re:In other news today by fatduck · · Score: 1

      A republican-backed appropriations bill was signed by President Bush today amidst much controversy over an "11th hour" rider attached which allocated up to 186 billion dollars by 2009 to a multinational project to "drastically improve the 'scales of justice'"

      --
      Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
    2. Re:In other news today by David+Horn · · Score: 1

      "wait until a method is devised for weighing the Universe."

      Don't worry, we're hard at work on some really big weighing scales. Actually, anything suitable for the average American should do nicely...

      Woah, I'm gonna get flamed for that. ;)

      --
      PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
  10. significance by bcrowell · · Score: 1
    The quote from Thomas seems odd to me. Although massive neutrinos do add to the mass of the universe, I don't think their contribution is really all that important cosmologically. My understanding is that we're currently in an era dominated by the cosmological constant, with second place occupied by some unknown exotic form of matter (not baryons or neutrinos), third occupied by baryonic matter, and neutrinos a distant fourth. Although neutrinos are numerically very common (more than atoms, I think), their mass just isn't all that big.

    To me, what seems more significant about it is that knowing about neutrino masses and oscillations makes neutrino astronomy viable. For instance, we can find out directly about the interior of the sun, which is something we just can't do with electromagnetic or gravitational fields.

    1. Re:significance by biohack · · Score: 1

      I'm sure that BBC picked the Thomas quote for the same reason that I chose to include it in the post - it provides a reasonably concise answer to the "why do I care about this?" question for most people. And I haven't seen anybody yet describe the various caveats of the Standard Model and its extensions in one sentence.

      Perhaps the closest is a recent Why Files story, which gives a good summary of Big Bang cosmology, updated from the recent microwave background measurements. You're right, that up to 3/4 of the mass is in dark energy, whatever that might be. You're also correct that there are a lot more neutrinos (and photons) than atoms (or protons). And apparently, because of the large numbers of neutrinos, their masses could matter if they were heavy enough. According to Wikipedia, for example, "If the total energy of all three types of neutrinos exceeded an average of 50 electron volts per neutrino, there would be so much mass in the universe that it would collapse." The fact the Universe does not collapse is actually used to determine limits on possible neutrino masses (0.3 eV).

      Neutrino masses also affect the fine-tuning of the Standard Model (SM), so any new experimental results will make a generation of graduate students and theorists happy, as the current problem is finding significant enough discrepancies in the SM to provide direction for fixing it in the future. Having results from several different experiments, which effectively look for oscillations on different length-scales (Earth-to-Sun vs. 10s or 100s of miles), provides additional constraints in that search.

      Neutrino astronomy is something that requires much larger detectors, such as Ice Cube. At the moment, the models of neutrino production in the Sun were actually used to look for flavor oscillations, not the other way around, so neutrino astronomy is primarily intended for cosmological measurements. And hard as it is to detect neutrinos, we still have not been able to detect any gravitational waves, so the two are not competitors as astronomy methods, and won't be for a while. Perhaps you were thinking of solar quakes being used to probe the interior of the Sun?

    2. Re:significance by bcrowell · · Score: 1
      According to Wikipedia, for example, "If the total energy of all three types of neutrinos exceeded an average of 50 electron volts per neutrino, there would be so much mass in the universe that it would collapse." The fact the Universe does not collapse is actually used to determine limits on possible neutrino masses (0.3 eV).
      Hmm...actually what the WP article says right now (could be different from what it said when you read it) is:
      A much more stringent constraint comes from a careful analysis of cosmological data, such as the cosmic microwave background, galaxy surveys and the Lyman-alpha forest. These indicate that the sum of the neutrino masses must be less than 0.3 electron volts (Goobar, 2006).
      So AFAICT it had already been established, regardless of this measurement, that the neutrino masses can't be big enough to have a big cosmological effect.

      Neutrino astronomy is something that requires much larger detectors, such as Ice Cube. At the moment, the models of neutrino production in the Sun were actually used to look for flavor oscillations, not the other way around, so neutrino astronomy is primarily intended for cosmological measurements. And hard as it is to detect neutrinos, we still have not been able to detect any gravitational waves, so the two are not competitors as astronomy methods, and won't be for a while.
      I didn't say anything about gravitational waves, just gravitational fields (e.g., you can measure a star's mass, and the other multipole moments of its mass distribution). I also didn't say that neutrino detectors currently in operation were already telling us anything new about astronomy.

      It will be cool if we can eventually measure the energy spectrum of the solar neutrinos (or at least put constraints on it).

    3. Re:significance by biohack · · Score: 1

      For the last few years my interest in high-energy physics has been rather casual, so I'm not going to pretend to know the most widely accepted numbers for things like dark energy fractions and neutrino masses. In fact, if MINOS data have only been recently released, some of the numbers might change, since they usually result from global fits to all available data, so we might have to wait a few months to see what effect, if any, this has on predominant models.

      As for the Sun measurements - the first spectrum measured probably will be for Solar neutrinos, since besides nuclear reactors and thermonuclear explosions, that is our most intense neutrino source. Do you know of some serious uncertainties in solar nuclear physics, so that you would expect major surprises in that spectrum?

      From what my grad school friends, who worked on the IceCube project, told me, the exiting type of events they look in neutrino astronomy are the very energetic ones - basically those that can only be produced by a handful of exotic processes. For such high-energy neutrinos, their incoming direction can be determined precisely enough to follow up with other types of telescopes in hopes of determining the actual source. It's a game of very small numbers, but the idea is that these events should easily stand out from any background.

      Your mention of multipole moments of solar mass distribution again does remind me of sun-quake measurements, but I'm not sure how sensitive they actually are.

    4. Re:significance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      >My understanding is that we're currently in an era dominated by the cosmological constant

      ... which Einstein regretted as a kludge, and many physicists feel is the hallmark of an incomplete theory. When I was going to school this was called a 'Tedford', after a student in our engineering courses. A Tedford is the number that you must (add to / subtract from / multiply by /divide by / integrate with respect to) the answer you got in order to get the real answer. Since it does have *some* relation to the real answer (it's the amount/factor by which the answer you get is separated from the real answer), it's not a *completely* fanciful idea. Let's assume it is caused by elves.

      >with second place occupied by some unknown exotic form of matter

      Fairies, perhaps? Fanning their wings in the ether?

      >third occupied by baryonic matter

      Woohoo! At least something real made it into the top three

      >and neutrinos a distant fourth. Although neutrinos are numerically very common (more than atoms, I think), their mass just isn't all that big.

      So smaller than fairies, you're saying. Imps? Sprites? Elokim Shaer?

    5. Re:significance by cowboy76Spain · · Score: 1

      According to Asimov's "Counting the eons" (a little outdated, but easy to read), the proportion is of 3+E9 neutrinos for each nucleons. The neutrinos are uniformily distributed, where nucleons are mainly in space. This number made him calculate that, if they had a mass of 40eV (as some experiments at his time did show), neutrinos would be the 99% of mass of the universe, and will make the difference between it ending in a "big crunch" or expanding infinitely.

      --
      Why can't /. have a rich-text editor? Editing your own HTML is so XXth century.
  11. If they are heavy they have more mass? by tetrahedrassface · · Score: 1
    okay. Well maybe the universe is heavier than we thought.. I know my own mass is quite larger than it should be. ;)

    I have something kinda off topic but its "heavy" as well. Ever seen a pepsi with a wire in it?

    Thats right! A stainless steel wire in an old unopened pepsi. Can we find out how that happened? If you want to see it here it is.. http://www.regardingspace.com.wireinpepsi.jpg/ Happy April 1. The image is legit though.

    1. Re:If they are heavy they have more mass? by tetrahedrassface · · Score: 1
    2. Re:If they are heavy they have more mass? by Barlo_Mung_42 · · Score: 1

      What makes you think the bottle was not opened? It's not like a cap can't be put back on or anything.

    3. Re:If they are heavy they have more mass? by tetrahedrassface · · Score: 1
      Well, first of all it was shipped from Pepsi to my families business about 40 years ago.

      My families business is still in business and the bottle sat with a lot of others in a disused attic storeroom. Sure someone could have opened it, but no one did, becuase it came from pepsi that way. Also, its been sitting in a hot attic for 40 years. If had been opened all the Pepsi would be gone and/or full of growth?

  12. Dark Matter by ruiner13 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Could these particles having mass explain the "missing matter" that scientists formerly attributed to dark matter? I wonder what other particles are there taking up space that we never thought had mass, either.

    --

    today is spelling optional day.

    1. Re:Dark Matter by syntaxglitch · · Score: 4, Informative

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Matter#Compositi on
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_dark_matter

      ...short answer is: yes it has been considered, but current models of neutrino formation suggest they can't account for all dark matter (or even a significant component of it).

    2. Re:Dark Matter by mrpeebles · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Another problem is that at least some of the dark matter needs to "clump" together, and there is no way to imagine neutrinos clumping. Or so the astronomers and astrophysicists tell me. Incidentally, fundamental particles of matter, like electrons and neutrinos, aren't thought to take up space, exactly.

    3. Re:Dark Matter by brian0918 · · Score: 2, Informative

      They aren't really "point particles"; it's just mathematically easier to consider them such, for most problems.

    4. Re:Dark Matter by mrpeebles · · Score: 1

      What examples are you thinking of where they aren't treated as point particles?

    5. Re:Dark Matter by kryten_nl · · Score: 1

      Calculation of viscosity of a disassociated medium.

      --
      For the perfect anti-Unix, write an OS that thinks it knows what you're doing better than you do and let it be wrong.
    6. Re:Dark Matter by jpflip · · Score: 1
    7. Re:Dark Matter by tankefugl · · Score: 1

      Most of quantum mechanics.

    8. Re:Dark Matter by mrpeebles · · Score: 1

      Most of the quantum mechanics that I know, at least, treats, eg, electrons as point particles with an uncertain position. However, thinking about this more, I have decided: 1) it is kind of a loaded question, since we can be talking about either the physical electron, which I don't think anybody is exactly sure how to define, or the mathematical electron, which no one is sure is actually real and in any case can be different in different mathematical models, and 2) I confess, I need to go back and look at what the typical quantum field theory (which I know only in bits and pieces) interpretation is on all this.

  13. That is nice and all by linzeal · · Score: 1

    But what inquiring minds want to know is what does it taste like?

    1. Re:That is nice and all by thomasa · · Score: 1

      Being as some are probably passing through your body right now, you should be able to answer that question for yourself.

    2. Re:That is nice and all by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It tastes like... burning.

    3. Re:That is nice and all by zpok · · Score: 1

      "But what inquiring minds want to know is what does it taste like?"

      IANAP but I thought that depended on the flavor?

      --
      I think, therefore I am...I think.
    4. Re:That is nice and all by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Chicken.

  14. Soudan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Growning up in Minnesota, we always passed the soudan mine on the way to our cabin and would stop there now and then to go on the tours they have of the mine. I remember years ago wondering why in the hell there were books in the gift shop on neutrinos. It wasen't untill much later I learned of the detector and the scientific work going on at the mine. I've really wanted to go back since then, because i hear they have tours of the scientific area now. Ignoring the particle detection work there, i would still suggest anyone passing by there to take the tour of mine itself, its quite incredible when you're half a mile below the ground and they shut off all the lights...

  15. AND I CARE, BECAUSE?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    this is so old. I read this on digg in 1998

  16. That's not nice! by brian0918 · · Score: 1

    You know how impressionable neutrinos are.. always changing their flavor to match the latest fads.. and now call them massive?!

    They'll decay in no time...

    1. Re:That's not nice! by Duhavid · · Score: 1

      Maybe if they got outside and played instead of playing nintendo.

      --
      emt 377 emt 4
  17. Meet the new boss by pdq332 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Although the article implies that the Standard Model will have to be revised as a result of this experiment, this result does not really change the Standard Model all that much. The theoretical method used to establish neutrino mass, ie- that neutrino oscillations imply neutrino mass, is itself a Standard Model prediction. Rather the results fixes some of the unbound parameters of the theory. In other words, the arguments are better known now, but the method signatures remian the same.

    1. Re:Meet the new boss by lukesl · · Score: 1

      Were the Super-K results also an indirect observation that invoked the Standard Model to imply neutrino mass?

  18. OMG PONIES!!!! by vishbar · · Score: 1

    OMG PO...damn. I'm too late.

    --
    Ride the skies
  19. 31derful Flavors? by X1088LoD · · Score: 1

    Can I get my ice cream with neutrino flavor oscillations?

    Isnt that like chocolate with gummi bears?

  20. Implications regarding the Standard Model? by TechnoGuyRob · · Score: 4, Informative
    This is a very interesting conclusion. I am currently taking a modern physics II class at a college in my town, and I live 15 minutes away from Fermilab. In fact, our professor is a scientist at Fermilab that only comes in this term to teach our class. The interesting question, though, is (and I know it's small), what is the exact mass that they obtained (if any so far)? Of course, this would have to be given in eV (electron volts), but assuming it's very small (~E-3 eV) (EDIT: I just looked at the press release linked to at the end of this post, and indeed, it is on that scale!), this could prove to have some interesting conclusions. I actually found this passage in the article that explains it better than I could:
    "In particle physics there is the Standard Model which describes how the fundamental building blocks of matter behave and interact with each other," explained Dr Falk Harris.

    "And this model tells us that neutrinos should have no mass. So the fact that we have now got independent measurements of neutrinos saying that they must have mass, means that this Standard Model is going to have be revised or superseded by something else."
    This is very interesting because of its possible re-affirmation of Wikipedia. I'm not going to take out my string theory book right now to see if calculations of a positive neutrino mass correspond to any viable conception in string theory, but a re-affirmation and eventual proof of string theory could spur as great of an innovation as the concept of an atom.

    We'll have to wait and see, but for anyone who would like more information, Fermilab's website has an article about the discovery.
    1. Re:Implications regarding the Standard Model? by eternal_drake · · Score: 0

      tl;dr

    2. Re:Implications regarding the Standard Model? by TechnoGuyRob · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I mean, String Theory, not Wikipedia, sorry about that (forgot to include the title of the article, silly me).

    3. Re:Implications regarding the Standard Model? by honkycat · · Score: 3, Informative

      Basically, at this point, they've got measurements of the difference between the masses of the three flavors of neutrinos. They also have an upper bound of, IIRC, around 0.7eV (not from this experiment) for the absolute value of the neutrino mass. The delta sets the lower bound (if one flavor were at zero mass, the heavier ones must be at least the delta heavier).

      The mass deltas are known as squared values -- the sign is unknown, so there's the question of overall mass scale plus the ordering of the various flavors.

  21. explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by SetupWeasel · · Score: 2, Informative

    There is a large bit of hand waving here. Why are neutrino oscillations and neutrino mass inseparable?

    I hate when people act as if a complicated issue is simply true. So, as a public service to the Slashdot community:

    Here is a site that attempts to explain it.

    My quantum physics knowledge isn't teriffic. Any particle physicists know of a better source?

    1. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Okay, as a particle physicist, I learned about this in terms of the Hamiltonian evolution of a wavefunction, and some analogy to neutral kaons, and a page of math. But thats not what you wanted to hear.

      A physicist on the recent Nova special "The Ghost Particle" (Maybe it was Boris Kayser) had a nice explanation. If neutrinos have no mass, then they travel at the speed of light. If they travel at the speed of light, then they would not experience "time". Since changing flavor is a process that takes time, or duration, or something like that (this previous clause is maybe a non-trivial thing to say), then if neutrinos change flavor, they must experience time, so they must travel slower than the speed of light, so they must have some mass.

    2. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by SetupWeasel · · Score: 1

      I really should have payed more attention in Quantum class. What you said makes sense. Is the explanation and mathematical proof in that site accurate?

    3. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by bcrowell · · Score: 1

      Hmm...interesting argument. The only thing that makes me a little uneasy about it is that it would seem to imply that a photon can't oscillate either, and yet I'm convinced that the photons I see oscillate at a certain frequency, ~10^15 Hz. Probably there's a correct argument hidden in there, but I think there's some more justification needed.

    4. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by Vilim · · Score: 1

      I first learned of the neutrino oscillation through a profs class notes. Since I respect the guy too much to actually put up his PDF (it was an example in the application of matrix diagonalisation) the best I can do is give the reference he used at the end. It looks like it has alot of detail (51 pages) but apparently it is suitable for an introductory quantum course (I haven't read it so I cannot attest).

      You can do a google search for arXiv:hep-ph/9905257 or the URL for the PDF is http://www.int.washington.edu/PHYS554/2005/neutrin o1.pdf (the first link in the google search)

      --
      History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
    5. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by plantguy001 · · Score: 1

      One of my professors was part of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/) and wrote a "Neutrino Oscillations for Dummies" (http://www.physics.ubc.ca/~waltham/sno_talks/dumm y.htm)

    6. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by Ruie · · Score: 1
      Not a particle physicist, but here is my take on it:

      As you know mass enters equations through kinetic energy - mv^2/2

      If you have several particles then their kinetic terms add up - and you get a diagonal matrix for mass.

      A question comes up though is why are we sure that particle 1 is really particle 1 and not 99% particle 1 and 1% particle 2 ?

      Mixtures can happen and do happen very often. Consider a photon and an electron - two particles we can usually separate pretty easily. However, if a photon travels inside transparent but weakly conductive medium then it will interact with electrons there.

      In fact, if one writes out equations it would turn out that the solutions that are preserved by time evolution are a combination of photons and electrons - a plasmon. So if we fire a photon into the medium with time it will turn into electron movement which will after some time emit a photon again and so on. One of the effects of this is that speed of light in the medium becomes smaller than in vacuum.

      Back to neutrinos - we have a diagonal mass matrix, but we are not sure that particles we formed it from are really preserved by time evolution and they don't turn into each other - i.e. oscillate.

      What we do know is that if all the masses are the same then there is no way to tell one particle from another - and thus there is no oscillation.

      In particular, if neutrino masses are 0 they are, obviously, identical and thus no oscillation can occur.

      Hope this made some sense.

    7. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by insignificant1 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      My understanding: The oscillation talked about with neutrinos is a back-and-forth changing of a neutrino's state. The state of a photon, on the other hand, is -represented by- its frequency of oscillation (and polarization, I believe... anything else?). There is no way to change the photon's state, however, and the oscillation of a photon does NOT represent a periodic changing of the photon's state. In other words, if you give me a vertically-polarized photon at 500 kHz, I have no physical means to make that same photon horizontally polarized or oscillate at 2.4 GHz.

    8. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by xPsi · · Score: 2, Interesting
      You may have to dust off some of your quantum knoweldge here: States of definite energy/mass are stationary *by definition* in quantum mechanics. They don't change in time. States of definite flavor (electron-ness, muon-ness, tau-ness) for a long time were assumed to be also states of definite energy for the neutrino.

      But it is natural to ask: what if states of definite flavor and states of definite mass are NOT the same? And which are we measuring in the lab? If they are not the same state, then flavor (the thing we apparently measure in the lab) will change in time and you get "flavor oscillations".

      You might ask why normal electrons don't change into muons. This is because for electrons and muons, it appears that states of definite flavor and states of definite mass ARE the same. Not true for neutrinos.

      --
      i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
    9. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by alexander+m · · Score: 1

      actually the argument is correct -- it's about the oscillation between flavour states, not the oscillation of the particle itself (eg: electron -> muon -> tau, not Hz)

    10. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by Chrispy1000000+the+2 · · Score: 1

      Er that's not *quite* true. If you take a nice swack of polarized like, and put it at a filter to about a 45 degree rotation, and then another filter a little further on with another 45 degree polarization, you will have about a quarter(IIRC) of your origial light intensity being polarized in the new direction.

      --
      Sig
    11. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by franl · · Score: 1
      Er that's not *quite* true. If you take a nice swack of polarized like, and put it at a filter to about a 45 degree rotation, and then another filter a little further on with another 45 degree polarization, you will have about a quarter(IIRC) of your origial light intensity being polarized in the new direction.
      But then it's not the same photon. In passing through the polarizing filter, the photon is absorbed and remitted many times by the filter's electons.
    12. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by Tim+C · · Score: 1

      the photon is absorbed and remitted many times

      As you yourself allude to, strictly speaking the incident photon is absorbed, and then a different photon is emitted; they are not the same photon. "Absorbed and re-emitted" gives the impression of the photon being captured, then released, which isn't what's happening.

    13. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by jtpalinmajere · · Score: 1

      The only gripe I have with the argument is that traveling at the speed of light does not alter time, only the perception of time.

      Lets assume you had eyes that had the focusing power of an extremely powerful telescope. Now assume you are at the sun (your origin), and looking down on earth you are able to see the daily happenings of a local mall parking lot (your destination). Now assume that you have no mass and begin traveling at the speed of light.

      The first thing you would notice is that it still takes some small amount of time to reach your destination (rougly 8 minutes). During the trip if you looked back at the place on the sun where you originated, time will have seemed to stop, suggesting time itself has stopped. However, since you're traveling at the speed of light the reason is actually just because you are absorbing the same light particle/wave that you did in the beginning (if that's possible, otherwise you're just looking at a black blob of nothingness i'd imagine), the others particles/waves just behind it just can't catch up to your eyes to be absorbed into perception. Looking to your destination now, you would perceive time has actually accelerated to double-time, but this is just because you are now absorbing twice the amount of light reflecting off your destination as you were before you started the trip.

      These two perceptions are enough to invalidate the statement "time stops when travelling at the speed of light" because time can not stand still (0t) when it is simultaneously moving double-time (2t) unless time itself does not exist (t=0).

      (0t=2t iff t=0)

      And now we're faced with the problem that it took us 8 minutes to get from the sun to the mall parking lot. According to the last equation, time doesn't exist and therefore the 8 minutes must have simply been a figment of our imagination (8m!=0). From this we can conclude that we are in fact insane and that our observations have questionable authority, and the parking lot security will subsequently beat you to death when they can't stop you from flailing at them from your speed of light induced insanity.

      Back to the land of reality, time is a constant and only the perception of time can be altered. Therefore, whether or not the neutrino experiences time does not dictate its ability to change flavor. I'd still agree that it determines whether it has mass or not, but the injection of perception of time is a bit beyond weird and probably inserted into that show to "wow" the uninformed masses (pun intended) into accepting something they still don't understand.

    14. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You forgot about time dilation.

    15. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by logpoacher · · Score: 1

      Thanks for saying that. It saved me writing a long explanation about why the GP's post was all wrong :-)

    16. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by meringuoid · · Score: 1
      The first thing you would notice is that it still takes some small amount of time to reach your destination (rougly 8 minutes).

      Nope. For an external observer, your journey would take 8 minutes. For you, it would take no time at all.

      And, for that matter, it would cover no distance at all. Length contraction, y'see. The distance between Earth and Sun, if you're travelling at lightspeed, is exactly zero metres.

      --
      Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
    17. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by Thing+1 · · Score: 1
      In deference to the responder to the AC response, I will make the AC's response only slightly longer:

      The error in your logic is that time does not exist outside of reference points in general relativity. So there is no "absolute time" you can refer to.

      From the Earth's reference point, the light left the sun at t=0 and arrived at t=8 minutes.

      From the light's point of view, no time passed during the journey; it was dilated down to nothing due to c/c (I think, I don't recall the entire equation).

      This is really difficult to wrap my head around. It leads to the thought that light is constantly traveling around experiencing timelessness. No light ever experiences time. That's dangerous thinking, there.

      --
      I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
    18. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by merlin_jim · · Score: 1

      lol all right except the time dilation: the formula is (c - v) ^ 2 / c

      so if v==c you get 0

      And yes, photons do not experience the passage of time. It's one of the reasons (the others being prevalance and interactivity) for our mastery over the electromagnetic force; particles that carry the EM force don't degrade or change while moving from point a to point b... imagine trying to build a working radio out of neutron technology! Your batteries would be 1/3 drained by the time you put them in!!!

      lol j/k with that last analogy. I know some slashdot troll is going to respond and tell me how silly the idea of a neutron battery is.

      You won't be laughing when I welcome our new neutron battery overlords!

      --
      I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
    19. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by Thing+1 · · Score: 1
      The part that blows me away is this:

      1. Light does not experience time.
      2. We (visually) perceive the world through incoming photons.
      3. Using this building block which does not experience time (photons), we can achieve a "time sense."

      I think that's so cool; it's like coding an algorithm for multiplication when all you have is addition.

      --
      I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
    20. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by merlin_jim · · Score: 1

      It's because of light's speed that it behaves in such a wavelike manner too...

      Imagine spreading waves of electromagnetic force, frozen in step, rippling along the lattice of spacetime - superimposing, reinforcing, cancelling, moving on, all without experience a single instance of time.

      Try doing that with particles Mother Nature and Father Time!

      Oh? You already did?

      nevermind then

      --
      I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
    21. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by Thing+1 · · Score: 1
      So... If we could some how figure a way to translate our consciousnesses into photons, then if we transmit ourselves (and, why not, multiple copies as well) in directions in which there's empty sky, the chances that we'll live longer than the universe are very high.

      Of course, with us not experiencing time due to traveling at c, I guess it's difficult to imagine what existence would be like.

      --
      I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
    22. Re:explanation about oscillation/mass relationship by merlin_jim · · Score: 1

      Just because the particles don't experience time doesn't mean that the pattern is similarily deprived. Remember mind is form and function, not matter - as long as the pattern evolves and interacts with itself, mind can exist.

      Of course there *is* Ober's paradox and its relatives... which all state that basically empty sky doesn't necessarily exist.

      Ober's paradox is that he proved in an infinite universe with a statistically even distribution of stars, the night sky should be blazing white.

      Then there's Maxwell's conjecture - that stars are not distributed evenly, the universe is unbound but finite, and the missing mass happens to push the universe's mass above 1. In this case, he said, the sky could be dark.

      Unless every Big Crunch is followed by another Big Bang, and in an unbound universe at least some amount of matter or energy is left out of the crunch, in which case you get the white sky phenomenon again.

      ok I'm basically rambling now lol

      If you're going to transform your consciousness into particles why not use Tachyons? They're faster than light, have negative mass making time travel wormhole experiments possible, and gain energy from speeding up and/or doubling - giving you plenty of surplus to try to learn telekinesis on normal matter... and no worries of getting absorbed in some tenuous intergalactic dust cloud!

      --
      I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
  22. Explains the physicist... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Of course, most of them travel right through our detectors as well, but once in a blue moon one of them will interact

    To give you a feeling for how much this represents, it's about the same as the hit rate of April Fools joke on slashdot. So it's pretty small, but you got to have faith people!

    ... continues the savant: - about one or so per day.

    No explanations needed here, you all now how long a day can be by now.

  23. It depends. by jd · · Score: 1, Informative
    We already know that some "dark matter" calculations were thrown off by using Newtonian mechanics and not Relativistic ones. Any failure to account for the mass of neutrinos may also have created an illusion of more "dark matter" than actually exists. Now, I agree that it is possible that the correction is very small. However, alterations in the modelling may result in a significantly different understanding of the role of the Cosmological Constant (if one exists) and "dark matter" (if any is needed) and therefore may result in a very different theory of what these actually consist of - or even alter the requirement for them to exist at all.


    Yes, neutrinos are important in understanding the interior of the sun. They are not the only method, however, as "holes" do occur through which we can see very limited snapshots of segments of the interior. They are also not perfect, as less than half of the expected number of neutrinos ever reach the Earth, presumably through changes in flavour or through being absorbed.


    Neutrinos are also very important in understanding the mechanics of radioactive decay. Remember, the entire premise from which neutrinos came from was that decay needed a massless particle that could carry with it rotational momentum. Since neutrinos have M amount of mass, then the sum of all other actual and effective masses being emitted must be reduced by M, for the calculations to still balance out.


    (You're also much more restricted in the energy a neutrino can have, as you must now not only balance momentum but also kinetic energy. For things to equal out, this will place significant constraints on the state of a neutrino.)


    All in all, this sort of work generally has massive repercussions and it will only be truly known what significance the mass has when ALL physical systems involving neutrinos have been adjusted accordingly. Again, the magnitude of the mass is totally unimportant. What matters is whether it breaks an existing model (eg: by violating the requirement for quantized states) or whether it eliminates any variables or constants (because they are no longer needed).


    I am a great proponent of science, but I am getting tired of the complacency that has slowly been creeping in - the Victorian illusion that we are approaching the end of knowledge. If neutrinos having mass throws huge chunks of the physics community into disarray, I believe it will be a Good Thing and about time. We need something that will cause a major headache and a revolution in thinking.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    1. Re:It depends. by bcrowell · · Score: 2, Informative
      Yes, neutrinos are important in understanding the interior of the sun. They are not the only method, however, as "holes" do occur through which we can see very limited snapshots of segments of the interior.
      Um, no, you're just completely wrong here.

      Neutrinos are also very important in understanding the mechanics of radioactive decay. Remember, the entire premise from which neutrinos came from was that decay needed a massless particle that could carry with it rotational momentum. Since neutrinos have M amount of mass, then the sum of all other actual and effective masses being emitted must be reduced by M, for the calculations to still balance out.
      No, the mass/energy scale -- eV -- is wrong for it to have any significant effect on nuclear beta decay, where the mass/energy scale is MeV.

    2. Re:It depends. by deglr6328 · · Score: 1

      Sigh... where is the -1 clueless mod when you need it?

      --
      - "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
    3. Re:It depends. by Hank+the+Lion · · Score: 1

      Sigh... where is the -1 clueless mod when you need it?
      That is what I have asked myself many times.
      Once a post has acquired a few 'Informative' moderations by moderators who don't know the subject themselves, it is very difficult to get it modded down.
      After all, 'Troll' or 'Flamebait' will not describe the post properly, and 'Overrated' will only remove one moderation point, and not be visible otherwise.
      Meanwhile, the post will remain highly ranked, and thus be very visible.

      So, I think the only solution will be a caution to the moderators:
      Do not mod up as 'Informative' or 'Insightful' those posts which you do not know to be true with certainty yourself.

  24. ponies, straight, gay? by Devistater · · Score: 1

    How is this physics story about gay ponies? (tags)

    1. Re:ponies, straight, gay? by Stephen+Samuel · · Score: 1

      Because It's still April Fools day, and some people don't follow the noon limitation???

      --
      Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
    2. Re:ponies, straight, gay? by Devistater · · Score: 1

      Which would be fine, IF this were an april fools story.

    3. Re:ponies, straight, gay? by Stephen+Samuel · · Score: 1

      It's the gay pony tagging that's the April Fools joke, not the story.

      --
      Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
    4. Re:ponies, straight, gay? by Devistater · · Score: 1

      Hahhahhahhahahah. nice. If I could mod that comment I would.

  25. Ouch! by paiute · · Score: 1

    Calculations of the flux due to the sun shows that 60 billion neutrinos pass thru your thumbnail every second. So that's the tingling sensation.

    --
    If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
  26. You're making that UP! by MickLinux · · Score: 1

    We need to put you in for a job at the NYTimes.

    --
    Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
  27. AHHH by balsy2001 · · Score: 1

    I can feel myself becoming swiss cheese as the nutrinos zoom through me. I felt so much better before they had mass.

    --
    GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
  28. Another assumption: They stopped for lunch. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 1

    Quote from the Slashdot story: "The set up established that fewer particles were being detected at the Soudan site than had been sent from Fermilab, which confirmed that some neutrinos changed their flavor on the way ..."

    Or, some of the neutrinos stopped along the way to have a beer.

    Actually, it confirmed nothing except that fewer neutrinos were detected. It is utterly foolish to think that particle physics is enough understood that accurate guesses can be made.

    Another topic, but still about this Slashdot story: How is this slashdot story about "[+] ponies, straight, gay, science, physics (tagging beta)".

    How do Slashdot editors make connections between April Fool's Day and being gay? Is that an indication of poor social skills?

    --
    Before, Saddam got Iraq oil profits & paid part to kill Iraqis. Now a few Americans share Iraq oil profits, & U.S. citizens pay to kill Iraqis. Improvement?

    1. Re:Another assumption: They stopped for lunch. by tftp · · Score: 1
      How do Slashdot editors make connections between April Fool's Day and being gay? Is that an indication of poor social skills?

      It is at least an indication that you are unaware of all the meanings of the word 'gay':

      Main Entry: gay
      Pronunciation: 'gA
      Function: adjective
      Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French gai
      1 a : happily excited : MERRY b : keenly alive and exuberant : having or inducing high spirits
      2 a : BRIGHT, LIVELY <gay sunny meadows> b : brilliant in color
      3 : given to social pleasures; also : LICENTIOUS
      4 a : HOMOSEXUAL b : of, relating to, or used by homosexuals

      The #4 is quite a recent addition.

    2. Re:Another assumption: They stopped for lunch. by barefootgenius · · Score: 1

      #4 shouldn't even be in there as I understood G.A.Y. originally stood for "Good As You".
      Do you think I should tell him what a faggot is?

      --
      /. bug #926803 - Why I can post.
    3. Re:Another assumption: They stopped for lunch. by be-fan · · Score: 1

      Actually, it confirmed nothing except that fewer neutrinos were detected. It is utterly foolish to think that particle physics is enough understood that accurate guesses can be made.

      Actually, particle physics is very well understood.

      --
      A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
    4. Re:Another assumption: They stopped for lunch. by The+Master+Control+P · · Score: 1

      You seem to be saying that we should stop investigating neutrinos because we don't know enough about neutrinos. More broadly, should we should give up investigating any field we don't completely understand because we don't completely understand it? The entire basis of science is using what we do know to learn more about what we don't. If pursuing explanations for things in the absence of a Grand Unified Theory is utterly foolish, call me the village idiot.

    5. Re:Another assumption: They stopped for lunch. by chawly · · Score: 1

      Probably not. Information overload, you know.

      --
      How many beans make five, anyhow ? ... Charles Walmsley
  29. MOD UP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Not sure that parent's explanation is free from logical fallacies, but it's an interesting post...

  30. Re: open house by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The MINOS experiment will have its annual open house on May 6th 2006. Don't remember if it is free -- maybe it is. But tour only of the physics lab.

    The summer tourist season starts after labor day, and some, but not all, tours include the physics tour in addition to the historical mining tour.

  31. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy by Expert+Determination · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    Would slashdot also be interested in posting my own confirmations that light has a finite speed?
    Um...given how easy this is nowadays why would anyone want to publish your confirmations?
    --
    "The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
    1. Re:Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy by Expert+Determination · · Score: 1

      Offtopic? How is that offtopic? Mod me troll, or flamebait, or even overrated. But certainly not 'offtopic'.

      --
      "The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
  32. More attention required by Expert+Determination · · Score: 1

    I really should have payed more attention in Quantum class And English.

    --
    "The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
    1. Re:More attention required by SetupWeasel · · Score: 1

      I'm sure your spelling and grammar are always perfect when posting in a forum. This does not make you any less of a tool.

  33. It was a long haul .... by rhatcher · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Boy, was it great to see our result presented on Thursday. Though I'm a little disappointed that the story here didn't link to, say, our press release or even to the Fermilab or MINOS experiment home pages.

    I joined the experiment in 1995 soon after the collaboration came together and created the proposal. In that time I've written simulation ("Monte Carlo"), reconstruction and framework code for the experiment. It's been a pretty exciting 10 years. The push to get everything together this last month has been exhausting. But after presenting the results on Thursday do we physicists take a well deserved break and party like 1999? Well, noooo. We spend Friday, Saturday and Sunday IN MEETINGS! Today (Saturday) we were there from 8:30am to 7:00pm discussing how further to proceed. We've got 50% more data "in the can" that we didn't yet present (cross checks to perform, fits to perform). Plus plans for more data taking after the accelerator comes up again in June. Plus other physics results we're still trying to extract. Plus more improved simulations to do in order to yield improved limits. Such is the life of a physicist.

    1. Re:It was a long haul .... by rhatcher · · Score: 2, Informative
      Oh, yes, and the distance from Fermilab to Soudan is 735 km. Converting to miles, rounding and then converting back to km is presumably how the value given in the story came about ... but really ... quoting it as 724km (450 miles) is just silly.

      I haven't seen mentioned any of the news reports point out the, ah, irony [no pun intended, well, okay, yes it was] of the "coal to Newcastle" aspect of transporting 5.4 kilotons of steel into an iron mine. I just like to point that out..

    2. Re:It was a long haul .... by biohack · · Score: 1

      Sorry about the missing links - I barely got the story in on Friday before the Pink Ponies invasion began! I picked the BBC story as a compromise between a general level write-up and some science content (although it still beats me what did "shedding light" have to do with anything).

      Anyway, thanks for posting the extra links, hopefully your post gets modded up so that people can follow-up the story. I have been in your shoes a few years back, when I watched Slashdot discuss my work on atomic memory, and it was both an exciting and humbling experience.

    3. Re:It was a long haul .... by forkazoo · · Score: 1
      Boy, was it great to see our result presented on Thursday. Though I'm a little disappointed that the story here didn't link to, say, our press release or even to the Fermilab or MINOS experiment home pages.
      I joined the experiment in 1995 soon after the collaboration came together and created the proposal. In that time I've written simulation ("Monte Carlo"), reconstruction and framework code for the experiment. It's been a pretty exciting 10 years. The push to get everything together this last month has been exhausting. But after presenting the results on Thursday do we physicists take a well deserved break and party like 1999? Well, noooo. We spend Friday, Saturday and Sunday IN MEETINGS! Today (Saturday) we were there from 8:30am to 7:00pm discussing how further to proceed. We've got 50% more data "in the can" that we didn't yet present (cross checks to perform, fits to perform). Plus plans for more data taking after the accelerator comes up again in June. Plus other physics results we're still trying to extract. Plus more improved simulations to do in order to yield improved limits. Such is the life of a physicist.


      Is there anything for a very interested layperson to see at FermiLab? I am in Chicago this week visiting family, but from what I remember of my visits years ago, a lot of what was publicly available was pretty basic there. Do they still do the movie nights? That was always a hoot. It's been years since I was back in this region, so I'd love to poke my head in, if there is anything to see.

      I'd love to learn more about the Monte Carlo reconstruction code, etc. But all the exibits I ever see at places like that tend to "teach" that the atom is made up of three types of little styrofoam balls. The electrons orbit the nucleus in perfect circles, etc...

      So, any slashdotter exclusive inside tours, or anything?

      I think I have slashdot set to display my email address.
    4. Re:It was a long haul .... by spaceman375 · · Score: 1

      Since your target is ~450 miles away, do you know for a fact that every neutrino that you shoot is aimed well enough that it necessarily must pass through the second detector? Could it be that your aim is just ever so slightly off? The explanation may be well over my head, but it seems to me that we haven't got the technology to aim a neutrino, and the creation process itself must produce variations in the initial trajectories. Since the Earth is spinning, orbiting, and otherwise experiencing accellerations that the neutrinos are supposedly not, does the neutrino beam drift?
      Just wondering...

      --
      On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
    5. Re:It was a long haul .... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      maybe you lose a few km by tunneling directly through the earth?

    6. Re:It was a long haul .... by Fuzzy_The_Quantum_Du · · Score: 1
      They were on target...

      I worked as a summer intern at Fermilab a few years ago. It was my job to do some dose rate estimations for NUMI project, which was the sister project to MINOS. NUMI (Neutrinos for the Main Injector), was tasked with delivering the neutrino beam which would be used by MINOS.

      To answer your concerns about beam divergence, and initial trajectories here is a quick overview, from the abstract of my FINAL PAPER , of how the Neutrino beam is created. The jist of it is that the beam was not steered and focused as a beam of Neutrinos. Initially the beam, consists of very short lived particals called Pions and Kaons. The Pions and Kaons resulted from a proton beam coliding with a carbon target. The Pions and Kaons were directed and focused by 2 electro-magnetic focusing horns. The Pions and Kaons, then rapidly decay into Muons and Muon Neutrinos. The net result is a very tight beam of Muon Nutrinos.

      In an effort to verify the Japanese Super-K (Super-Kamiokande) experiment's conclusion that neutrinos have mass Fermilab's MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search) experiment will attempt to find oscillations in neutrino flavors (muon, electron, & tau). Such oscillations would be definitive proof that neutrinos have mass. NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) is the Fermilab project that is responsible for providing the beam of muon neutrinos to be used by the MINOS experiment.

      A beam of 120 GeV protons will be extracted from Fermilab's "Main Injector" where it will pass through a target hall. In the target hall the beam of protons will collide with a Carbon Target producing a scatter of charged pions and kaons. An electromagnetic horn will re-culminate this beam and a second horn will focus the energy of this beam, which will then pass through a decay pipe where the pion/kaon beam will decay into muons and muon neutrinos. The beam will then pass through an absorber and about 50 ft of rock that will remove unwanted particles still in the beam such as the muons. This leaves a beam of pure muon neutrinos to pass through the MINOS near detector, which will verify the composition of the beam. The beam then passes underground 730 km to the MINOS far detector located half a mile underground in the Soudan mine in Minnesota, which will again look at the composition of the beam.
      The data at the far detector will be compared to the data at the near detector, and if electron or tau neutrinos are found in the beam at the MINOS far detector then two things will happen. First there will be a large celebration at Fermilab, and second the NuMI target hall will be reconfigured to deliver a different energy level focus by moving the second horn into a different position along the beam-line. The MINOS experiment will then go on to try to answer other important neutrino questions such as what is the difference in the square of the masses of the oscillating neutrinos ("delta mass squared").

      So Aparently I was wrong about the party at Fermilab. I can't see as how a weekend full of meetings is any substitute. ;0)


      Cheers, Fuzzy the Quantum Duck.

      =0)
  34. umm.. by ShaunC1000 · · Score: 2, Funny

    is this an April fools joke I'm too dumb to understand?

    1. Re:umm.. by Locus+Mote · · Score: 1

      I's think soh. Me not understand to good too. May be I watch to much teveee, uh... OMG Ponies!!! LOL LOL!!!

    2. Re:umm.. by chawly · · Score: 1

      Yes. And when did you last attend mass ?

      --
      How many beans make five, anyhow ? ... Charles Walmsley
  35. Further links by rhatcher · · Score: 1

    Search for links in the news. Though I hate Fox News in general, I have to say they have the best title for their copy: Physicists Lose Some Neutrinos, Gain Some Information.

    1. Re:Further links by mbius · · Score: 1

      would you be upset to discover they don't actually have mass, they just forgot to adjust for daylight savings time?

      --
      you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
      Prime UID Club
  36. Oblig. Stargate by Kredal · · Score: 1

    If you had been paying attention, you'd know that Nintendos pass through everything!

    --
    Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
  37. Oh Derr! by Whiteox · · Score: 1

    "....it means that there is a lot more mass in the Universe than we thought there was,'

    Isn't that some kind of tautology? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology

    I mean how can you determine a finite quantity in an infinite universe?
    The collective mass of an infinite universe cannot be known.

    --
    Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
    1. Re:Oh Derr! by anothy · · Score: 1

      while it's still early to know for sure (and may always be so), the universe is not generally understood to be infinite by physicists or cosmologists; rather, as einstein described it, the universe is most likely "finite yet boundless", in much the same way the 2-d surface of a balloon is finite - having a definite area of measurable size - yet boundless - having no edges nor limit to the distance you can travel in a given direction.

      in the end, einstein was right to only be sure about one thing being infinite.

      --

      i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
    2. Re:Oh Derr! by lobotomir · · Score: 1

      The way I understand it, the universe is an "island" of matter contained in an infinite "ocean" of space. The matter created in the Big Bang is a constant, though the galaxies are constatly flying outwards into the, well, nothing. I am sure there is some mythical quantum elaboration on this simplistic worldview (universview?), but that is how I imagine the current state of affairs :).

    3. Re:Oh Derr! by xtieburn · · Score: 1

      The universe isnt infinite.

      Shoot off from Earth at physically impossible speeds and youll end up crashing in to the other side of Earth a while later. Which is where the 4 dimensional space time wrapped around the surface of an ever expanding balloon idea comes from.

      We can also tell that the universe is fairly consistent take a few million light years cubed of space in one part and compare it to another and itll have fairly similar characteristics. So we can make some fairly well educated guesses at how much mass there is.

      A figure I found puts it at roughly 25 billion galaxies the size of the milkyway worth of mass. We are not a particularly small galaxy so thats a fair bit.

    4. Re:Oh Derr! by franl · · Score: 1
      The universe isn't infinite.
      That is not known for certain. Spacetime could be flat, positively curved (i.e., a 4D hypersphere, which would be finite but unbounded), or negatively curved (i.e., a 4D saddle shape, which would be infinite and unbounded).
    5. Re:Oh Derr! by agentcdog · · Score: 1

      As only the response to a response to this was accurate let me splain:
      The reason we know the universe is more massive than we can account for is not because we summed it all up. It has to do with the speed at which galaxies spin. They spin faster than they otherwise would.
      The responder was right to point out that we do NOT know what shape the universe is, so it is incorrect to say it's a loop. Most of what I have read says it is pretty close to flat.
      String/M-theory does suggest that the universe MAY BE bounded, but that it is part of some higher dimensional cosmos.
      To sum up:
      We don't know its shape, but we're pretty sure it's more massive than we can account for.

      --
      If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet. -Pauli
  38. Obligatory- by capz+loc · · Score: 4, Funny

    Neutrinos have mass? I didn't even know they were Catholic!

    1. Re:Obligatory- by ConceptJunkie · · Score: 1

      They're not too devout about it. It's mostly an Easter and Christmas thing. Now the top quarks, on the other hand...

      --
      You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
    2. Re:Obligatory- by murray_420 · · Score: 1

      For once I'm actually glad I'm at work on a Sunday so it is their keyboard/monitor that has coffee/snot on it now!

    3. Re:Obligatory- by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Saw this one in a slashdot story about about photons two weeks ago. Just spent 5 minutes scrolling down the responses looking for it here.

      Expect to see it in every story about particle physics from now on.

    4. Re:Obligatory- by pNutz · · Score: 1

      You may be thinking of the Quarkers. They are firmly protestant if I'm not mistaken.

      --
      Death and danger are my various breads and various butters.
  39. Why are they always prattling about missing mass? by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 1

    One thing that drives me NUTS is that the physicists are always talking about neutrinos only being all or part of the explanation of the "dark matter" mass of the universe if they have rest mass - and this ends up in the media as if only the rest mass has gravitation.

    ALL mass has gravitation - both rest mass and the mass equivalent of all the other forms of energy (including momentum) that go into the creation of the particle. So neutrinos have the same damned mass and gravitation whether they have rest mass or not.

    Now if the issue is that they can't explain the galactic spin anomalies if they don't have rest mass because if they have none they fly away at the c and if they have some part of them get decellerated and stick around in clouds, somebody should bloody well SAY so.

    --
    Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
  40. A Sad note by stox · · Score: 4, Informative

    This may be one of the last discoveries at Fermilab. As it stands now, Fermilab, SLAC, and Brookhaven's future is in severe doubt.

    http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&arti cleID=00080A6A-C9C7-1419-89C783414B7F0101&colID=2

    --
    "To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
  41. TEACH THE CONTROVERSY!!! by rewinn · · Score: 1

    "Some people say the universe is governed by universal laws. Others say it is but a joke of the Elder Gods.

    "I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought." someone said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

  42. Dark Matter? by slashdotmsiriv · · Score: 1

    "'To put it simply, if they are heavy, it means that there is a lot more mass in the Universe than we thought there was,' said Professor Jenny Thomas from University College London." Could they be the ones responsible for the effects assumed to be caused by Dark matter?

  43. Re:Duh by DrMrLordX · · Score: 1

    I saw the Neutrinos years ago on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and there was ample evidence in the cartoon suggesting that they had mass.

  44. Neutrino by Bendejo · · Score: 2, Funny

    Neutrino? What, Is that like the new Pentium or something?

  45. OH Great!!! by rockwood · · Score: 2, Funny
    So by quoting the article

    "To put it simply, if they are heavy, it means that there is a lot more mass in the Universe than we thought there was..."

    So what this means is that people are really a lot fatter than what they think they are.

    How I am a going to explain to my wife tomorrow when I say "Yes" to her saying "Am I fatter today?" - I'll pack my bags now and save myself some time. ummm, I may want to book a room too!

    --
    Never try to beat a professional at his own game!
    1. Re:OH Great!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I realise this is the slashdot crowd, but when do you ever reply "yes" anyway? Even when its true, the answer is always "no". Never. Ever. Ever. Even if she argues with you over the fact she thinks she is. SHE IS NOT.

  46. Chalk one up for Heim Theory by TheNarrator · · Score: 1

    Heim came up with these predictions more than 20 years ago and up until recently there was mutch doubt whether Neutrinos even had mass...

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_theory#Matter_an d_forces


    There are some empirical predictions of Heim theory which can in principle be experimentally verified, but this has not been achieved to date. These include

    * Predictions for the masses of neutrinos, and ...

    The mass for the neutron has been predicted by the formula a decade before experimental data existed. ...


  47. Umm...a couple of corrections by kf6auf · · Score: 3, Informative

    Bosons don't necessarily carry forces; in fact not all atoms are fermions. For example, the Helium-4 and Carbon-12 nuclei is a boson. See wikipedia. Bosons are best defined as having integer spin and being capable of sharing the same quantum state while fermions have half-integer spin and obey the Pauil Exclusion Principle (cannot share the same quantum state). A composite particle of an even number of fermions (2 protons + 2 neutrons) is a boson (helium nucleus) but an odd number of fermions is always a fermion.

    I also believe that physicists have determined that the electron neutrino has a mass of about 1meV-1eV (from a slide I saw in lecture a couple days ago).

    In addition, physicists divide fermions into quarks and leptons, which are supersets of the elementary particles that make up nucleons and electrons.

    1. Re:Umm...a couple of corrections by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bosons are best defined as having integer spin and being capable of sharing the same quantum state while fermions have half-integer spin and obey the Pauil Exclusion Principle (cannot share the same quantum state). A composite particle of an even number of fermions (2 protons + 2 neutrons) is a boson (helium nucleus) but an odd number of fermions is always a fermion.

      Good -- but ultimately it's not exactly true that identical bosons in general can share the same state. The real story is that for identical particles of any kind the quantum state must be symmetric when exchanging any two identical bosons, and antisymmetric when exchanging any two identical fermions.

      One consequence is that fundamental particles that are identical bosons can share the same state. But if two identical bosons are not fundamental particles, and if they are made of identical fermions, then the quantum state must also obey restrictions on the interchange of the identical fermions.

      So if you have a Beryllium-8 nucleus (made of 4 neutrons and 4 protons), then it is not the same as 2 identical Helium-4 nuclei in the same state, even though the Helium-4 nucleus is a boson. The neutrons and protons must be antisymmetrized. So they obey the Pauli exclusion principle and fill orbitals, much like the electrons of an atom do.

    2. Re:Umm...a couple of corrections by agentcdog · · Score: 1

      I believe he stated that atoms are made of fermions, which is true. Electrons, protons, and nuetrons are all fermions. It is true that not all bosons carry forces directly, but the statement is consistant with the fact that force carrying particles (gluons, W and Z, photons) are bosons. What I don't get is the whole gluons being massive thing... when did this come about? I just checked the PDG book and it says they're massless.

      --
      If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet. -Pauli
  48. neutrinoless double beta decay by xPsi · · Score: 1
    As has been pointed out by other readers, the fact that neutrinos have mass has been established by previous neutrino oscillation experiments such as SuperK, SNO, and KamLAND. These experiment, however, are only sensitive to the difference of the squared masses between the different neutrino energy eigenstates (states of definite energy). They cannot tell us what the absolute mass is. MINOS is similar in that regard.

    A recent APS study (see the main report in particular) has tagged determining the absolute mass of the neutrino as amongst the highest priorities in the field. Another big mystery is to determine if the neutrino is it's own antiparticle (i.e. if it is of a Dirac or Majorana character). There is an interesting kind of decay known as "neutrinoless double beta decay" that only proceeds if the neutrino is its own antiparticle. This decay has never been observed (some members of the Heidelberg-Moscow experiment may disagree with me), but there is an active community currently looking for it in different candidate isotopes of Ge, Xe, Mo, and Te. The rate of this decay is directly proportional to the square of the effective neutrino mass. The lower limit on the lifetime of this decay in Tellurium is about 1E24 years, about ten orders of magnitude larger than the age of the universe. Not a trivial experiment to do.

    Hopefully, in the next few years, discovery of this decay (and a strong statement about the absolute neutrino mass from the decay rate) will be a big headline story on Slashdot (and perhaps the NY Times and Physical Review Letters too - hopefully not in that order; are you listening Mr. Fleischman?).

    --
    i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
  49. Neutrino mass is important by idkk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Not only is neutrino mass important, it will make (IMHO) a fundamental change to the way in which we analyse cosmology. Although IANAP (I Am Not A Physicist) I would be more that interested to learn how this affects the concepts of dark matter, gravitational irregularity (deviations from the inverse-square law that have been suggested), and the neccesity for the existence of Black Holes to explain invisible mass and the motion of galaxies. Does the non-zero mass of neutrinos wipe out all of these uncomfortable irregularities in physics? I don't know - but I do hope so!

    "Rafiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht."

    --
    Ian D. K. Kelly

    idkk Consultancy Ltd.

    "Quality through Thought"

  50. Nice, but offtopic by someone1234 · · Score: 1

    What does this have in common with neutrino mass???

    --
    Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
    1. Re:Nice, but offtopic by stunt_penguin · · Score: 1

      Probably something, but we don't really know anything about neutrinos exist, so we'll have to get back to you :o)

      --
      When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
  51. Star Trek by xamomike · · Score: 2, Funny

    That was discovered back in Stardate 43349.2 when Wesley was tinkering with his Neutrino pulse beacon. Don't you guys watch TV?

    --
    There are 10 types of people in the world; those who can read binary, and those who can't.
  52. Re:Already Known- it was on PBS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    aired in feb on Nova,
    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/neutrino/missing.html
    story of Ray Davis and John Bahcall.

  53. Big deal by Barlo_Mung_42 · · Score: 1

    If you've seen one neutrino detector in the middle of nowhere and half mile under ground, you've seen em all.

  54. Feynman by FrankDrebin · · Score: 1

    For one hell of an interesting introduction into the physics behind various particles, albeit from 1979, check out these lectures by the legendary Richard Feynman. Very informative for us without a quantum physics background.

    --
    Anybody want a peanut?
  55. I'm too lazy to read the article by Barlo_Mung_42 · · Score: 1

    Where do these neutrinos come from?

  56. simple explanation by alexander+m · · Score: 4, Informative

    have a look at this. it's the transcript from the BBC's recent "horizon" show, called "project poltergeist", which is on precisely this topic (neutrinos having mass). very neatly explains to a lay audience what the mystery is, and also answers exactly your specific question. it's not a long read, maybe 10mins max, and as it's the transcript to the show it leads you through the topic in a well thought out manner http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2004/polterge isttrans.shtml and the short answer to your question is as follows: in order to undergo neutrino oscillation, the neutrino must be capable of change. to be capable of change it must experience a personal sense of time. if it was travelling at the speed of light, it would have no sense of time. objects with mass cannot travel at the speed of light (infinite energy required for objects with mass to do this). therefore, as we experimentally can confirm neutrino oscillation, we are also confirming that neutrinos have a sense of time, which implies they are not travelling at the speed of light, which implies they have mass. hope that clears it up -- on a side-note my first degree was actually in astrophysics, at University College London (UCL), where the article's quoted scientist comes from... didn't have her for any of my lecures though ;)

  57. Neutrino's ARE quite religious afterall... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    as well as mass, I hear they celebrate lent.

    1. Re:Neutrino's ARE quite religious afterall... by chawly · · Score: 1

      And what do they give up ? For lent, I mean.

      --
      How many beans make five, anyhow ? ... Charles Walmsley
  58. 'Understood' != 'the math works' by ynotds · · Score: 1

    And I say that as somebody with a reasonably strong math backgound.

    What we are really saying is that we have been able to assign a bunch of attributes to some things which are at the lower limit for infered observation because ultimately all relevant observation is mediated by photons and they have their well known limits.

    From another perspective, we really haven't much of a clue about what a quark or an electron is, especially after you think about the fact that for some important purposes, the 'hole' left where an electron is 'missing' behaves almost indistinguishably from an electron (save for the charge reversal).

    So just how are we supposed to tell the difference between three kinds of neutrino which oscillate amongst themselves and one kind which oscillates between states where it can interact with electrons, muons or taus? Even the idea that they interact so rarely because they have such a small 'cross section' might be hard to distinguish from the idea that they undergo a long oscilation cycle through some state space that is impenetrable to photons, and that it is only at specific moments of that cycle that they can interact with ordinary matter at all.

    Particle physicists and cosmologists still don't seem to be able to get over their fetish for "too easy" answers.

    --
    -- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
    1. Re:'Understood' != 'the math works' by franl · · Score: 1
      Particle physicists and cosmologists still don't seem to be able to get over their fetish for "too easy" answers.
      Science doesn't seek answers that are "too easy" -- it seeks answers that are no more complex than necessary. It's called Occam's Razor.
    2. Re:'Understood' != 'the math works' by chawly · · Score: 1

      Yeah, sure. Now for the explanation about why Occam needs a shave.

      --
      How many beans make five, anyhow ? ... Charles Walmsley
  59. Dark Matter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Does this mean that the long hunted for "Dark Matter" could be accounted for with the extra mass from nutrinos?

  60. See: Understood' != 'the math works' by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 1

    See this excellent comment from someone else: Understood' != 'the math works'. That's what I'm saying.

    The investigations should continue. The over-interpreting of results should stop.

  61. Last discovery doesn't mean the end by jhines · · Score: 1

    My father kept the cyclotron at Argonne in use, doing heavy metal creation and production for research, in the 70's-80's, so there are uses for the facility beyond the primary machine functions.

    While Fermi may scale down, loose some prima donnas, change mission, it won't go away.

  62. re: Neutrino Mass by deanarue · · Score: 1

    I am definitely not a scientist of any kind, just an interested observer. But from everything I remember from science class, neutrinos travel at the speed of light or darn near. So , now if neutrinos have mass after all yet still have the these behaviors, does that mean that it is possible for light to have mass also?

  63. Flavored Neutrinos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I wonder if they come in strawberry, or if they can only make vanilla and chocolate neutrinos so far.

  64. Re:Soudan, US (Hawaii?) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I"m not sure Hawaii should appear in this list, as it appears to not so much be a state, but an illegally annexed sovereign nation.

    You can do a google for the details if you wish. But, basically the resident sugar barens/merchants wanted to be part of US, so they, with the help of a boatload of US marines, took control from the constitutional monarchy and declared themselves a provisional government. Two days later they set sail for the mainland, and twenty nine days after that, they were in Washington with a annexation treaty to become part of the US.

    The then president Cleveland saw through the whole thing. His rather long speech on the issue to the Senate and the House of Representatives goes into all the gory details. He also dispatched a fellow for further investigation who travelled back to the islands for a follow up report. the issue. The next president in office was unfortunately not so honourable and promptly approved the whole dirty deal.

    In 1959 there was an official US apology for the whole mess and held a vote was held to officiate everything. However, independence was not offered as an option (only remaining as a territory or becoming a state), and only those who had opted to become US citizens were allowed to vote (including all the US services men and their families currently residing on the islands). Not surprisingly, the vote from the occupied islands more then made up for the overwhelming NO from the mostly native islands.

    Except for another public apology in 1993, which acknowledged vote of the indigenous people in the following excerpt:

    Whereas, the indigenous Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people or over their national lands to the United States, either through their monarchy or through a plebiscite or referendum;
    that is pretty much the end of the story. While I have linked exclusively to hawaii-nation.org, it is mostly official government records, and googling will give you lots of other links. Strange how these things are not covered in school (or at least not in the history classes I took)...
  65. wikipedia article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Here is a wikipedia article with some details about the experiment:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINOS>

    MINOS experiment was designed and constructed to make a precision measurement of muon neutrino oscillations. This is a preliminary result with about 1/10 statistics of the projected final result, we expect to continue running for another 3-5 years with the higher beam intensity. Super-Kamiokande made its measurement using neutrinos from muon decays in the athmosphere so MINOS is an indepedent measurement using man made neutrinos.

  66. New discovery != string theory by jpflip · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm glad to see people excited about this result! Super-K and others had discovered neutrino masses first, but this was the most controlled experiment to date - they made the neutrinos, examined them when they left the accelerator, and examined them again 700 km away. Any modifications to the Standard Model are very exciting.

    One thing I feel obligated to point out, however: this has nothing to do with string theory. String theory is a framework for thinking about how to unify the known Standard Model with general relativity. It's incredibly interesting, both from a physics point of view and as a purely mathematical construct. However, it has no prediction about neutrino mass, or indeed about anything remotely accessible to experiment (except, perhaps, that supersymmetry should be true at some level), and has little prospect of making such predictions anytime soon.

    Many posters seem to jump to the conclusion that if something is new in physics (whether it be neutrino mass or supersolids) then it MUST somehow be confirming string theory. String theory is very pretty and I hope it's true, but not everything in physics points back to it.

    Sorry for the physicists' rant, no offense intended.

  67. Re: Neutrino Mass by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Nope, it means that a neutrino would be travelling slower than the speed of light.

  68. Kinds of dark matter by jpflip · · Score: 2, Informative

    Dark matter (mass we can't see) has several components: ordinary (protons, neutrons, electrons) matter we happen to be unable to see, exotic matter that we do understand, and exotic matter that we don't understand. You could go into a Rumsfeld-esque discussion of "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns" at this point.

    When people talk about dark matter, they usually mean the exotic stuff, since there is a lot of evidence that the bulk of the universe's matter is exotic (look up "big bang nucleosynthesis" for details).

    Neutrinos make up some of the exotic stuff, and how much depends on their mass. It turns out that they can't make up nearly enough of it, however. Furthermore, neutrinos are light particles which move at speeds near that of light. This means they don't clump together under their own gravity very easily, and tend to disrupt the formation of galaxy clusters. From looking at the distribution of galaxies in the universe, we can argue that most of the exotic dark matter must be slow-moving and "clumpable". The bulk of what people mean by dark matter is this stuff, which can't be neutrinos.

  69. Mass and the speed of light by jpflip · · Score: 2, Informative

    A massless particle (like the photon) should move at exactly the speed of light, while a massive particle should always move slower than light. We always used to say that neutrinos move at the speed of light because we assumed they had no mass. Now that we know they are massive, they must be moving slower. They are so incredibly light, however, that we expect them to be moving extremely close to that speed - it takes very little force to accelerate them, so anything energetic enough to make them would make them go very fast.

    If photons (quanta of light) had mass, the world around us would be very different. Photons mediate the electromagnetic force, which is responsible for light, the pull of magnets, the fact that electrons stay in their orbits, etc. If the photon were massive this force would become short-range - its strength would decay exponentially with distance (like the weak nuclear force), rather than as an inverse-square law. We have done ridiculously precise tests of the inverse-square law, which translates into very tight constraints on photon mass.

  70. Old news for yankees by paulatz · · Score: 0, Troll

    neutrinos mass have been confirmed twice in the last 5 years by an two experiments held in Italy an Japan. Still US won't believe that until they do it themselves, just the same, but better.

    --
    this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
  71. Re: Taiwan - OT by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    > So you did remember that China is bigger, you just want to take the opportunity to promote the cause of Taiwan independence?

    Depends on what you mean by "country."

    From Wikipedia: "The PRC government does not and has never exercised control over Taiwan."

    Leaving aside the issue of the reliability of Wikipedia, does that sound like the "same country" to you? Is Puerto Rico part of the U.S. total land mass? Why or why not?

  72. My God, doesn't anybody look at the calendar?!? by ArsenneLupin · · Score: 1

    I know, hindsight and all, but still!

  73. Re:Soudan, US (Hawaii?) by Guppy06 · · Score: 1

    "I"m not sure Hawaii should appear in this list, as it appears to not so much be a state, but an illegally annexed sovereign nation."

    If you're sending Representatives, Senators, and electoral votes to DC, you're a state.

    "You can do a google for the details if you wish."

    I'm already aware of most of the details.

    "But, basically the resident sugar barens/merchants wanted to be part of US, so they, with the help of a boatload of US marines,"

    It appears the overthrow would have happened anyway without the presence of a US warship, and if anything the rebels considered the presence of a warship as a hinderance to their cause. If nothing else, the debate over the nature of the overthrow slowed down annexation by years and statehood by decades.

    "He also dispatched a fellow for further investigation who travelled back to the islands for a follow up report. the issue."

    He then reversed his position and signed off on the conclusions of the afore-referenced Morgan Report a year later.

    "The next president in office was unfortunately not so honourable and promptly approved the whole dirty deal."

    McKinley didn't come into office until three years after the Morgan Report.

    "and only those who had opted to become US citizens were allowed to vote"

    "Opted to become?" Apparently you aren't familiar with the ramifications of the Fourteenth Amendment: as an incorporated territory, anybody born on the islands was a citizen of the United States, regardless of ethnic ancestry.

    "(including all the US services men and their families currently residing on the islands)"

    As residents of the islands they too had a stake in the islands' future political status. Allowing everybody to vote follows the precedent set and followed by the United States since at least the beginning of the Nineteenth Century (even after such a policy caused the disaster of "Bleeding Kansas"), these are exactly the same standards practiced today around the world, from Quebec to East Timor.

    (Not that any of this matters much; Congress and Congress alone decides what is and is not a state.)

    "Not surprisingly, the vote from the occupied islands more then made up for the overwhelming NO from the mostly native islands."

    With so many pro-sovereignty links sprinkled throughout your post, I'm surprised you don't reference a source for this statement. I've only seen mention of Ni'ihau and Lanai'i; I'd imagine the vote on O'ahu and Hawai'i were in favor of statehood, but that still leaves four more islands unaccounted for.

    "that is pretty much the end of the story."

    No, it isn't.

    "Strange how these things are not covered in school"

    And where did you go to school? In my own personal experience, my middle and high school teachers in far-off Maryland consistently taught about the matter from a pro-royalist stance.

    What I find most curious about the pro-sovereignty stance is that it assumes that, were it not for the overthrow of Lili'uokalani, Hawai'i would not be a state today. Aside from indications that the queen (among other things) would have relinquished all claims to sovereignty for $25,000, such an assumption would require that all future Hawaiian monarchs take an anti-American stance. But even the monarchy has had its share of amerigophiles, such as Kamehameha III, who negotiated a treaty of annexation and statehood with Franklin Pierce (the Senate sat on it until Kamehameha III died). The design of the flag itself shows the strong affinity of the royals to both the UK and the US, and it seems only a matter of time before one of them had the desire and the ability to successfully bring about US annexation. The islands have been subject to the predations of foreign powers pretty much since their discovery, and the "benefits of Union" (in the words of

  74. Re:Soudan, US (Hawaii?) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Reminds me of that headline from the Dec. 8, 1941 issue of The Onion:

    "Japanese Attack U.S. Colonial Non-State"

  75. Re:Duh by Eudial · · Score: 1

    Though, was they not two-dimensional?; since mass is volume * density, and volume requires three dimensions, the neutrinos would have no mass.

    --
    GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
  76. Re: Stainless steel wire in pepsi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Since it's in a refillable glass bottle, that's easy to explain.... Prior to the bottle being refilled in the instant case, it was refilled and purchased by someone.... That someone opened it, and drank the contents... Then they put the stainless steel wire in there - maybe as a storage container of some sort... or perhaps when the bottle was placed back into the 6-pack cardboard carrier, the wire fell into it...

    Whatever the case, the wire was in the bottle when it was returned to the store to recapture the bottle deposit. That 6pack was then put into a cart full of returned bottle packs, and eventually sorted out by some part-timer who could care less about what was in the bottle...

    That was then picked up by the pepsi guy and returned to the plant... Those bottles were then put on a washing line which BLASTS them with superheated steam and hotwater to clean out the old soda and junk from the bottle... In this case, it didn't get the wire out of the bottle, and some inspector missed it... It got put back into a 6pack carrier and returned to your local shelf... where you purchased the 6pack and then noticed the wire when you removed the bottle from the 6pack...

    clear?

  77. the age-old question finally answered by Tumbleweed · · Score: 1

    Catholic, after all. Good to know.

  78. Obligatory Simpsons reference by thoughtlover · · Score: 1

    Mmmm... Flavored neutrinos... Like sprinkles for a doughnut-shaped universe.

    Is that what I was supposed to say?

    --
    No sig for you! Come back one year!
  79. wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "neutrinos have mass"

    who knew they were Catholic?

    1. Re:wow by chawly · · Score: 1

      Tsk, tsk. Church of England - just like Doctor Jenny.

      --
      How many beans make five, anyhow ? ... Charles Walmsley
  80. If we lived in a perfect world by ynotds · · Score: 1

    But scientists are human and, unfortunately, cosmology and particle physics have proved particularly attractive to those who in another age would have wanted to start their own religions.

    Just like so many things in the world we find ourselves in, Occam's Razor is both used and abused.

    --
    -- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
  81. Neutrinos have mass? by Kaptain+Kruton · · Score: 1

    Neutrinos have mass? I didn't know they were Catholic.

  82. Re:Your sig shows a lack of understanding. by heinousjay · · Score: 1

    Keep the politics out of the tech discussions. It devolves into pointless flamewars nine times out of ten, and that's fucking annoying. It has no place here.

    --
    Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
  83. Already answered... by Roger+W+Moore · · Score: 1
    The real question is how many eV are the combined masses of the three flavours? The answer to that question portends much for the state of the universe.

    This has already been measured by the NASA WMAP probe. If I remember correctly (it's been a while since I read the paper) the limit is that the sum of all 3 neutrino masses is <3 eV/c2. There is a new paper out from WMAP that I have not yet read which may contain an update on this.

    In fact this is one of the big mysteries in particle physics at the moment because WMAP said that 23% of the mass of the Universe could not be made of atoms (non-baryonic). The Standard Model only has one possibility for this: the neutrino. However neutrinos are so light that the ones produced by the Big Bang are moving at close to the speed of light and the WMAP results show that this missing dark matter has to be very slow moving thus it cannot be neutrinos....and in fact we do not yet know what it is or whether our models of the Big Bang are somehow wrong.

  84. Congrats! by cuantar · · Score: 1

    I do work for MIPP, a sister project of MINOS whose responsibility it is to analyse the MINOS beam, among other things. I know several of the guys on MINOS, and there's a good chance I'll be doing analysis work for them in the near future. MINOS has had a handful of problems in the last year since they turned on, and I'd just like to say congrats! Awesome news to read while away from home. Odd, though, that I heard it on /. first :)

    --
    Legalize it.
  85. FLAMEBAIT??? MODS ON CRACK by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    How on earth can this be considered flamebait?

    Slashdot is a fucking joke these days. Whoever modded this down should have his privileges revoked!!!

  86. State!=nation by sita · · Score: 1

    Each state is indeed its own nation.

    I don't claim to be an expert on the USian demos, but it should be noted that nation is not a government, or a set of borders. Nation is a synonym of people, and they do not necessarily correspond one-to-one. Nations are often a bit difficult to define, may be there is more than one American nation (one blue and one red, maybe...), but there sure is not 50.

  87. A vote of thanks ..... by chawly · · Score: 1

    I think we should all join together and offer a vote of thanks to Dr. Jenny - she took the time to explain it to us simply (she obviously knows that this is the only way to have us understand it). So "there is a lot more mass in the universe than they thought there was" ach zo !

    I'm left wondering if all the possibilities have been considered here. After all, that is a long way for "neutrinos" to travel - more than 700 clicks. Could it be that some of them just laid down for a rest, and didn't arrive in time ? Could it be that some of them escaped ? (Careful - tinfoil hat required to handle those.) Any specimens found wandering (they are extremely small, but they can be heard crying for Doctor Jenny in their squeaky voices if you listen very, very carefully) are to be returned to the good Doctor by Fedex. Put them in a metal tobacco tin with a wisp of coton wool - for their comfort - and a small portion of your favorite cat food.

    I personally thought that a neutrino was I kind of sheep - and, since I'm partial to lamb cutlets ...

    --
    How many beans make five, anyhow ? ... Charles Walmsley
  88. Heim theory mass CALCULATOR by Zdzicho00 · · Score: 1
    Neutrino masses predicted by Heim's theory:

    • Ele-Neutrino mass: 0.381 × 10^-8 MeV/c^2
    • Mu-Neutrino mass: 0.00537 MeV/c^2
    • Tau-Neutrino mass: 0.010752 MeV/c^2

    According to this document:
    Heim-theory Group 2003

    Check that with Heim theory mass calculator (Java - runs in browser):
    Heim mass clculator

    Source is available here:
    Source code at Sourceforge

    Very extensive discussion related to Heim's theory.
    Several implementations in Java, C, C#, Pascal, Excel, Maxima and Mathematica have been developed:
    Physorg Forum

    /Z
  89. just wondering by PermanentMarker · · Score: 1

    Ok the particle has mass..
    might it be that having mass is also a side effect of having energy and speed?.

    E=Mc^2

    As we now have a mass (altough tiny) flying around at light speed. Isn't that verry much like the equation ?
    Just wondering between a link of mass and energy. Hmm how much energy does it require for a photon traveling at light speed. I tought einstein had some theories about that.

    --
    I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
  90. VS. Sudan, Africa? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I simply wish they'd said where it was because my mind confused Soudan with Sudan, the country in Africa ...

  91. You goofed badly ! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    > also Germany has "states" too, don't they? I don't think anyone considers them to be nations even though they are called states.

    Mostly correct.

    However, there are two states in the "Federal Republic of Germany" whose natives beg to differ.

    They call their respective states "Freistaat" ("free state").

    One is saxony ("Freistaat Sachsen"), which until the reunion of germany in 1989 belonged to the eastern part of germany.
    These guys are busy rebuilding their economy and coming along nicely (e.g. the most modern AMD fabs are located in Dresden, saxony). So they do not have enough time to complain too badly (even though complaining is their national pasttime, the hightest praise they could possibly muster runs somewhere along 'grumble, grumble, there's nothing to complain' ("Da jibt et nüscht zu meckern"). Besides, even if you talked german pretty well, you probably wouldn't understand them anyways - most other germans don't.

    The other "Freistaat", however, is an entirely different matter.
    It is the "Freistaat Bayern", Bavaria.

    These guys live in the southern part of germany, and constantly bicker and threaten to leave the Federal Republic of Germany. The rest of the germans, which do not properly understand them either, hope they eventually do, but so far to no avail.

    But if any of them listened in and noticed that you suggested their "Freistaat Bayern" was just another province, then you are in trouble.

    Right now, they are probably donning their traditional coart of arms ("Lederhosen"), grabbing sizeable Beersteins, and lurk around the entry of the "Hofbräuhaus" in Munich waiting for you come along unsuspecting.

    So watch out !

    If you still do not get the threat, imagine you had suggested selling Texas back to Mexico ;-)

  92. Re:Soudan, US (Hawaii?) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    As the original poster I must say thanks for your level response. The article you linked to on the wikipedia was quite interesting.

    I followed some of the links and also read some of "Hawaiian Sovereignty: Do the Facts Matter?" It makes an interesting comparison to "Hawaii's Story By Hawaii's Queen."

    As they say, if it seems clear cut, you probably do not have all the facts. : )