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."

Comments

Head asplodes

[mcgrew]

'What we're suggesting is that something that doesn't really interact with anything is changing something that can't be changed.'"

Re:Wait till the religion fanatics hear this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Luckily the detected difference is somewhere around .0001% so I don't think we'll be rewriting history even if their observation is confirmed.

So the the Earth is "around" 4,500,000,000 years old and the difference is "around" .0001%? 0.00013% of 4,500,000,000 years is 6000 years! That can't be a coincidence! Earth is 6000 years old!

Re:Occam's Razor

[Red Flayer]

Sturrock got old, went crackpot. Happens all the time, even to Nobel-prize winners. Check out Josephson or Weber.

I think what you mean to say is that you have observed an unexplained increase in the rate of mental decay in those scientists, and that further study is warranted.