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!
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.
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
"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.
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.
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)
A friend from college got into considerable trouble as a kid when he asked that question in Catholic school, although he rephrased it slightly. His form was "Can Jesus make a dildo so big He can't shove it up His ass?" The Nuns showed no interest in discussing the philosophical aspects of that question.
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?
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.
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.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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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