Slashdot Mirror
Follow Up On Solar Neutrinos and Radioactive Decay
An anonymous reader writes "A few days ago, Slashdot carried a story that was making the rounds: a team of physicists claimed to have detected a strange variation in radioactive decay rates, which they attributed to the mysterious influence of solar neutrinos. The findings attracted immediate attention because they seemed to upend two tenets of physics: that radioactive decay is constant, and that neutrinos very, very rarely interact with matter (trillions of the particles are zinging through your body right now). So Discover Magazine's news blog 80beats followed up on the initial burst of news and interviewed several physicists who work on neutrinos. They are decidedly skeptical."
Wait till the religious fanatics hear this. I have already heard claim from them years ago that radioactive decay is not constant, and that's why carbon dating can not be trusted. The fossils are not a few million years old. The Earth is only a few thousand years old.
I bet these religious fanatics will now site this article as their proof!
Free Martian Whores!
This might be the best season to go on that trip to chernobill that I was planning...
UVB-76, posing as a radio broadcast.
Anxiously awaiting Slashbot editors new post about Update On The Follow-Up To The Update On The Solar Neutrinos and so on and so forth.
Yours In Barrow,
Kilgore Trout.
I would rather have lame then not trying.
Also, I would rather have lame then AC.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
According to TFA, neutrinos shouldn't be altered much by solar flares which seems to be an almost slamdunk argument against the solar flare part of the claim. In order for this to make sense we'd need wrong not just about neutrino physics but also about basic star modeling. The point that much of the data examined comes from older labs where they have not gone and looked for possible causes in variations also seems to be a strong one. Right now, I'm pretty skeptical of these claims but it should be interesting to see what happens in the next few years.
Maybe we should use the ones we already have before we worry about getting neutrinos.
... he of the fifth force infame.
From that alone, I think this theory must be wrong.
"Starburst" by Fred Pohl, except it was a beam of kaons that influenced radioactive decay, not neutrinos. Hilarity ensued.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Of course the trained experts are reluctant to change their view of how the world works. In proper amounts this skepticism is a good thing. I just hope they are open minded enough to recognize the signal in the data, if there is one. As for it being neutrino flux - that's just conjecture. It may simply be distance to the sun's core rather than a particle. What if the fission or fusion of nuclei has an impact on the stability of nearby, possibly entangled nuclei?
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
Also, I would rather have lame then AC.
You're halfway there. You're lame, but not AC yet.
I would rather have lame then not trying.
Also, I would rather have lame then AC.
I'd much MUCH rather have not trying. A first post that isn't a troll or a racist joke or a sad attempt at cookie-cutter humor would be a drastic improvement.
I would rather have lame than Dane Cook. I'd take the dumbest AC here making the lamest joke imaginable over Dane Cook. Unless it was Dane Cook being sodomized by a rhinoceros. That I'd watch.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
I don't care who might abuse the data in what way -- As Doctor Gregory Sullivan (a skeptic of these results) said in the Discover article, "Data is data. That’s the final arbiter." If nuclear decay rates are varying, I very strongly doubt neutrinos are doing it.
I think it was Isaac Asimov who said that major scientific revolutions generally don't come with a scientist shouting "Eureka!" They generally start with a scientist looking at the data and saying "That's funny..." If other researches look at the nuclear decay rates, and also see this sort of variability... That would be really, really funny -- something Really Really Big that we are, at the moment, completely clueless about.
I'm quite confident that the effect, if any, won't much change the dating of fossils, which is what the 4004 BC type creationists want.
Maybe be earth really is only 6,000 years old, and the Carbon-14 dating has been seriously skewed by solar flares!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
There are several papers posted on the arXiv.org by Jenkins and Fischbach, this one is my favorite. It's about measurements done on samples of a radioactive isotope of gold - the samples are shaped differently and this alters, presumably, some aspect of their interaction with neutrinos.
Sturrock got old, went crackpot. Happens all the time, even to Nobel-prize winners. Check out Josephson or Weber.
You've got a job that you can't lose or don't care about any more. You're desperate to discover something Earth-shattering, to leave a mark on the world. You just stop looking so hard for systematic errors. Everybody sees blips and wiggles in their data. Normal people put a grad student on the job, and she spends thankless months finding out the janitor puts his mop bucket near the detector and jiggles it or some equally ridiculous and meaningless effect. But people who have gone crackpot think their blips and wiggles have overturned all the other data in the world. They don't look so hard for those stupid down-to-earth effects, and go ahead with foolish press releases. The slashdot community ought to be sophisticated enough not to fall for it every time.
Radioactive decay is not constant, it's random. What's constant is the probability that any given radionuclide will decay in a given unit of time. We only see constants like the half life come up because statistical effects smooth out the quantum randomness.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Information is what is occurring and data in the interpretation of the phenomenon. That is why you can have two observers both with "DATA" to back up their finding coming to a different conclusion. Data is not an absolute.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
IceCube and Amanda (among many other experiments) have been running for many years collecting data on neutrino flux. Archeological digs have been dating many objects over the same period of time. With the sheer amount of data available, it seems like it should be straightforward (perhaps not easy) to answer this question.
The article lists a reason for mistrusting the data as "the researches didn't take the data themselves." That's often the case in science!
I do agree though, with great changes in physics comes great responsibility to collect a lot of data. Of course, everyone has the same data available to them... if you're pretty damn confident, then it makes sense to get the results out there so that you can get a lot more eyes looking at the data.
(I'll be over here in my corner trying other permutations of "with great ___ comes great ___." I'll report back soon.)
1. 2.
to the irresistible force paradox
"what happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irresistible_force_paradox
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
We already know that some radioactive decay results in the release of a neutrino or anti-neutrino. The release of a neutrino is the same as the absorption of an anti-neutrino and vice versa. Ergo, it should be expected that variations in total numbers of neutrinos of the specific energy linked to that specific type of decay event would result in a change in the number of decay events recorded. I simply do not see where this impossibility claim comes from, unless they are claiming that neutrinos of the wrong type/energy are involved.
We also already know that what appears random is often the result of never being able to have enough data and never being able to make the step sizes infinitely small in the calculations; that randomness, per-se, is actually pretty rare in nature. (Indeed, randomness would seem to violate the requirement that information cannot be created or destroyed. An event is information and physics prohibits information simply "happening".)
It then follows that radioactive decay almost certainly cannot be a totally random event and therefore almost certainly cannot be absolutely invariate.
(Indeed, plenty of other people claim to have altered radioactive decay rates, so the claim itself isn't that revolutionary. I'm shocked that the scientific community is so ignorant as to what it itself has been saying for decades. If publishing papers is that important, then reading them must be just as important.)
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)
According to TFA, neutrinos shouldn't be altered much by solar flares which seems to be an almost slamdunk argument against the solar flare part of the claim.
While I am extremely sceptical as well they do provide an argument to explain this: some flares are caused by some event in the sun's core. Of course means the rate change would occur (probably substantially) before the flare since the neutrinos would arrive at almost the speed of light whereas the propagation of material/energy to cause a flare would presumably take a lot longer. Without seeing their data, I don't know if they are in agreement with that nor whether they have accounted for cosmic ray activity that (I would guess) could easily be affected by the change in the sun's magnetic field associated with a flare.
I am also surprised that they have not considered Dark Matter since there are more theoretical possibilities there. There are also the strange, oscillations in rates observed by the DAMA experiment which still have not been explained (although again I am very sceptical about it being DM). Nevertheless it would be interesting to see if the decay rate effect is consistent with the DAMA results: having one unexplained result is better than two!
Variability in half life/decay rates is unlikely, and this data is not nearly enough to prove a significant effect. Because of the massive amount of research done on radioactive decay as part of various nations bomb making projects, looking for ways to get a hyper-fast reaction with less material or get criticality at all from some borderline case substances, this data would have to be supported by a quality new major research project to be taken at all seriously. Probably, the study would have to get a similar 33 day cycle for the same isotopes as these reports, AND find the same cycle for a bunch of others, AND rule out some of the possible alternate causes by doubleblind testing.
If that's done by some place such as MIT or one of the national labs, and the data glitch persists, then it starts counting as very significant. For just one reason, Supersymetry theories predict short lived supersymetric particles such as the Selectron and the Sneutrino. The supersymetric versions of particles have substantially more rest mass than the regular versions. Neutrinos that couple more strongly to neutron cross section of a nucleus could arguably actually be Sneutrinos. To live long enough to cross the 8 light minute gap between Earth and Sun, they would have to be moving at incredibly close to the speed of light, much more so than for regular neutrinos, which are already very close (around 99.0%). Somewhere around 99.97% of C, you get enough time dilation on Sneutrinos that they could routinely make it across the gap.
So, solar emission models for this effect could be predicting both a way to experimentally validate Supersymetry AND the existence of a reaction deep inside the solar core that produces such incredibly energetic particles. Furthermore, you could derive the energy of the initial solar reaction by sending a space probe outward towards Mars and perhaps beyond, and having it run constant testing on a radioactive isotope sample on-board to see if/when the effect falls off. Such an experiment could be incorporated into an existing planned mission, say another Mars Observer or Cassini to Saturn style probe.
That's why this is interesting - it may be a 10,000 to 1 longshot, but a. If it's true, it's a major step for both subatomic physics and astrophysics, and b. if it's true, it makes some predictions where we can do further experiments and refine the theories, and some of these should be in a reasonable cost range compared to alternates (such as building a particle accelerator from the Earth to the Moon to possibly get a little closer to proving/disproving Supersymetry).
Who is John Cabal?
When I first saw the original article earlier this week, my immediate reaction was, "Bait & Switch. Better to sit this one out." -This seems like another small scale version of the Fake Moon Landing; innocently presented to invite curiosity, and then behead those foolish enough to stick their necks out and question conventional wisdom and authority. A great way to remind people that they will be punished for thinking without permission.
We'll have to see how this unfolds, but I'm getting a witch-hunt feel off this. I wouldn't be surprised if the authors of the original study are revealed later on to be the academic equivalent of child molesters or something.
The only fools, though, will be the people who allow this kind of tactic to throw them off the scent. The universe works in weird ways, and you can't be put off by this kind of silliness if you want to explore. You will NEVER have permission or approval to explore outside the box. Never. You just have to ignore the protests and get on with educating yourself. The TV talking head people can scowl all they want. Only cowards are prevented by laughter and the hairy eyeball!
-FL
We just need to collect some neutrinos to try it. We'll have to sneak Chekov aboard that aircraft carrier to get some first.
Vision with execution is hallucination.
my smoke detector keeps going off in the middle of the night?
Upholds the one tenet of press releases about science: The extreme bias toward "revolutionary" things means an extreme bias toward reporting about the things least likely to be true.
Maybe this is the clue about a vast realm of natural physics we haven't yet considered because we never saw a phenomenon we could measure. Not Heaven. Not angels. Not ghosts. It just happens that neutrinos and solar flares coincide with this change in radioactive decay. The neutrinos don't change the decay. Something we haven't been able to measure yet is causing it. Just a maybe. Someone needs to do an experiment.
very cool, but bummer that they're so skeptical. would have been a sweet scientific breakthrough
The neutrinos, the radioactive decay, the earth's crust..
Or did I dream it?
The most suspicious thing to me is that there is a phase shift between the inverse distance squared to the sun and the magnitude of this effect, and this phase shift is *different* for the two experiments they get data from. I've looked through some of their articles, and they only mention this important issue in passing. If this is due to the flux of some particle from the sun, then there should be no phase shift, and even if you come up with some explanation for that, you would still expect to observe the same behavior in different labs.
A phase shift is, on the other hand, consistent with systematic errors due to external temperature, for example, and such a shift would be expected to vary according to local climate etc. Though they say they've excluded all such effects, I still think this is the most likely explanation.
It would still get modded down.
These guys claim to have observed systematic variation in decay rates. They then theorized that the variation is connected with solar neutrinos. Invalidating the theory (it seems implausible to me) in no way invalidates the observations.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
This idea that decay rates depend on environmental factors is well known as a fertile field for crackpots. Here's a FAQ I wrote about it.
FAQ: Do rates of nuclear decay depend on environmental factors?
There is one environmental effect that has been scientifically well established for a long time. In the process of electron capture, a proton in the nucleus combines with an inner-shell electron to produce a neutron and a neutrino. This effect does depend on the electronic environment, and in particular, the process cannot happen if the atom is completely ionized.
Other claims of environmental effects on decay rates are crank science, often quoted by creationists in their attempts to discredit evolutionary and geological time scales.
He et al. (He 2007) claim to have detected a change in rates of beta decay of as much as 11% when samples are rotated in a centrifuge, and say that the effect varies asymmetrically with clockwise and counterclockwise rotation. He believes that there is a mysterious energy field that has both biological and nuclear effects, and that it relates to circadian rhythms. The nuclear effects were not observed when the experimental conditions were reproduced by Ding et al.
Jenkins and Fischbach claim to have observed effects on alpha decay rates correlated with an influence from the sun. They proposed that their results could be tested more dramatically by looking for changes in the rate of alpha decay in radioisotope thermoelectric generators aboard space probes. Such an effect turned out not to exist (Cooper 2009). Undeterred by their theory's failure to pass their own proposed test, they have gone on to publish even kookier ideas, such as a neutrino-mediated effect from solar flares, even though solar flares are a surface phenomenon, whereas neutrinos come from the sun's core. Their latest claims, in 2010, are based on experiments done decades ago by other people, so that Jenkins and Fischbach have no first-hand way of investigating possible sources of systematic error.
Cardone et al. claim to have observed variations in the rate of alpha decay of thorium induced by 20 kHz ultrasound, and claim that this alpha decay occurs without the emission of gamma rays. Ericsson et al. have pointed out multiple severe problems with Cardone's experiments.
He YuJian et al., Science China 50 (2007) 170.
YouQian Ding et al., Science China 52 (2009) 690.
Jenkins and Fischbach (2008), http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3283v1
Jenkins and Fischbach (2009), http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3156
Jenkins and Fischbach (2010), http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.3318
Cooper (2009), http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.4248
F. Cardone, R. Mignani, A. Petrucci, Phys. Lett. A 373 (2009) 1956
Ericsson et al., Comment on "Piezonuclear decay of thorium," Phys. Lett. A 373 (2009) 1956, http://arxiv4.library.cornell.edu/abs/0907.0623
Ericsson et al., http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.2141
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just change your viewing threshhold...the great thing about technology is that it can let each of us see reality through the filter of our choosing without affecting anyone else's freedom. Unless just the very fact that someone is free to post something you don't like, even if you can tweak settings to ignore it, bothers you, and you want to CONTROL them?
(Disclaimer: I don't expect to see significant breakthroughs any time soon in the quest to identify a discrete "simple" mechanism at Planck scale or similar, but that hasn't stopped Wolfram and unconnected others treating the possibility seriously. The extremely limited experimental simulations possible on foreseeable computers don't show signs of ruling out the possibility, so the thoughts below are confined to such a model and treat field theories et al as emergent.)
If there is a hypothetical microstructure in the form of a simple graph (as formally defined) or similar which is continually involved in determining the next local state based on the current local state via some "simple" (enough) mechanism/rule/Wolfram "program", then it should be obvious to many of us with deep experience in computing that there is a major unaddressed clock synchronisation problem that must be solved in order to produce the observed consistency of time across regions which cannot share a time signal.
I've recently speculated that the CMB might have a role in this given that, under certain measurement assumptions, space is approximately filled with CMB photons, with their omnidirectional passage being sufficient to stimulate a natural resonance in the microstructure. Obviously the neutrino flux, or the combination of both, could be part of such a story. And that might make local variation in radioactive decay rates correlated with neutrino flux variations no more surprising than the variation in refractive index between various forms of (transparent) condensed matter.
At this stage it is all speculation, and fun, but certainly not anti-scientific.
-- Our systemic servants do not good masters make.
I can't find anything which says how much variation they claim to have seen. Usually when the word "significant" is missing, it means that the variation can't be reliably distinguished from measurement error.
I don't give a rip what they think might be causing variation in decay rates. Not yet.
I want to see some verification that decay rates actually vary at all, first. Last I heard, they don't
"They" are "decidedly" "skeptical".
They is one guy.
"decidedly skeptical" is an oxymoron.
He's skeptical, period.
He is a scientist. He'd damn well better be skeptical.
He raises questions. The "science" magazine (not journal) Discover calls this a "smackdown".
TFA is so full of shit as to be worse than useless. It answers nothing and raises questions the original researchers themselves raise. A determined reporter doesn't have to look hard to find someone skeptical, and can easily impregnate their result with all manner of conflict-ridden verbiage. But a *good* reporter lets the science tell its own story.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I would love to see a correlation chart between space weather (x-ray, proton flux) and radioactive decay. far more precise measurements (decay rate per minute) may be required. I wonder when the solar influence is strongest: while the solar flare is developing within the sun, when it erupts on the surface, when the solar flare becomes visible on earth or even only when the proton-storm hit's the atmosphere. this should give a first guess to what is causing the effect and I would not even rule out some quantum effect that translates faster than the speed of light. maybe we are just witnessing the effects of somthing that might one day become subspace communication ;-)
“Data is data. That’s the final arbiter. But the more one has to bend [well-establish physics], the evidence has to be that much more scrutinized.”
The more one has to bend, known bad physics, the more the proprietors of that known bad physics will scream blue murder.
substitute, religion, politics and social construct.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.