Neutrino Experiment Restores Standard Model Symmetry

perturbed1 writes "A Fermilab press release announced that MiniBooNE's latest results have salvaged the Standard Model of particle physics. The experiment ruled out the simple neutrino oscillation interpretation of the 1990s LSND experiment. Neutrinos have a tiny amount of mass, required by their oscillations, as observed in solar, atmospheric, and reactor neutrino experiments. Combining this mass with the LSND experiment's results required the presence of a fourth but 'sterile' neutrino, breaking the 3-fold symmetry of particle families in the standard model." Nice to see some good news out of Fermilab after the CERN debacle.

Comments

Processor speed?

[UbuntuDupe]

Space travel I can understand, but don't you dare try to pin processor speed limits on the speed of light. If you want a fast computer, you can do it just fine under the present model. Simply compress 1 kg of matter into a black hole of radius 1.485e-27 m. In the 1e-19 seconds before evaportion due to Hawking radiation, you can perform 5e50 operations per second. It only gets you 1e32 total operations on 1e16 total bits, but it's fast. If you can't do that, you only have yourself to blame.

(Yeah, yeah, borrowed from here.)

The Electric Universe Theorists Called This One

[pln2bz]

It appears that nobody seems to be asking the next logical question: if the neutrinos aren't there, then what about the Sun?

Neutrinos are the required result of nuclear fusion within the Sun. They are not charged particles and they will travel through a light-year of lead. Now that Sudbury has been scrapped, there remains a severe deficit of neutrinos coming from the Sun for the nuclear fusion model. We're only seeing about one-third of what should be there for that model. But what else do we know? To quote Wallace Thornhill in his upcoming book, "The Electric Universe":

The neutrino output varies inversely with the surface sunspot cycle. Were they produced in the nuclear 'furnace' at the center of the Sun, this relationship would be inconceivable, since solar physicists calculate that it takes about 200,000 years for the energy of internal fusion to affect the surface. In the electrical model, more and larger sunspots mean less 'lightning' at the surface, where the nuclear reactions occur. Thus, the decline in neutrinos with increasing sunspot number is expected.

And ...

Neutrino counts have been found to wax and wane with the flux of particles in the solar wind, a predictable effect if the solar wind is part of an electric circuit fueling nuclear fusion on the Sun's surface.

The issue remains: if neutrinos are being generated on the Sun's surface and if sunspots appear to us as dark, cool spots relative to the rest of the Sun, then what, if anything of any relevance, is happening within the Sun's core?

And why does the solar wind continue to accelerate as it passes all of the planets? Why should we suppose any mechanism for accelerating charged particles *other* than an electric field centered at the Sun?

And how is it that the Sun's corona is 100x hotter than its surface if the core is supposedly the source of the energy?

Why did the Ulysses probe observe a million mph flow of electricity into the Sun at its south pole? We're told that it's just not important to the bigger picture, but why is it there in the first place?

Why has man had such trouble generating a controlled nuclear fusion reaction here on Earth? Is it possible that our incorrect assumptions about the Sun are affecting our ability to objectively evaluate methods for nuclear fusion?

To mainstream astrophysicists, these are *individual* problems that will eventually be worked out so that we can continue to believe what they want -- that the Sun is nothing more than a thermonuclear reactor at the core. But, when you look at the whole picture, and when you understand the role that plasma plays within the universe and how plasma operates within the laboratory, the evidence is overwhelming that the Sun is being powered externally and electrically. The fact is that there remains no stellar evolution theory that has not been directly observed to be violated. We willfully and perhaps ignorantly choose to believe that stars "evolve" over time from one place on the HR diagram to another even though we've seen stars jump all over it over short periods of time.

It's testament to the fact that nobody is listening to the EU Theorists that nobody here is apparently aware that Don Scott delivered a scathing review of the Sudbury Experiment in his recent book, "The Electric Sky". The problem with that experiment was that it was not an experiment. It drew conclusions based upon assumptions about how many neutrinos were leaving the Sun because it assumed that the Sun must be generating so many neutrinos within its core. It wasn't until a later experiment that it was determined that these oscillations could not be used to explain the neutrino deficit because the oscillations were not happening in just one direction. I presume that this announcement is a confirmation of those results.

If we are to learn from our mistakes, this should be a lesson to laboratory scientists around the world that astrophysics, curr