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

Wait till the religion fanatics hear this.

[BurningTyger]

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!

Re:Wait till the religion fanatics hear this.

[Antisyzygy]

The problem is that religious fanatics already got a hold of it and accept the results as fact without considering any further review.

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:Wait till the religion fanatics hear this.

[Monkeedude1212]

Except that string theory, dark matter, dark energy, etc, are all theories in that they invite invitation to poke holes in them. Science is an open process that allows anyone to experiment with it and often encourages you to defy the belief in the theory. Most often the giant scientific leaps are when you discover certain properties that don't fit in the theory, or you simply suspend the belief in the theory to find another one that could also be true.

Religion on the other hand, requires your belief, faith in that belief, and shuns any notion that it could be wrong.

So yes - if you know of internet science fanboys who said that String Theory MUST be true, than its sort of the same. But there are more of internet science fanboys who say that String Theory COULD be true, and that it requires more verification to either justify or nullify it.

Re:Wait till the religion fanatics hear this.

[Orange Crush]

And that's a key difference between science and faith. To steal a little from Steven, scientists shouldn't "believe the same thing on Wednesday that they believed on Monday, regardless of what happened on Tuesday." That's not how science works.
If a researcher discovers something surprising, the next steps are confirming their results and measurements were accurate and are repeatable. Then experiments can be devised to test why this might be so.
Nobody should do much believing in science. String Theory, Dark Matter and Dark Energy aren't things to be believed. They're just potential and incomplete explanations for what might be going on. The next step is trying to devise experiments to detect these things and/or test the implications.

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.'"

Sagan responds -

[Darth Snowshoe]

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."