Neutrino 'Flip' Discovery Earns Nobel For Japanese, Canadian Researchers

Dave Knott writes with news that the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Takaaki Kajita (of the University of Tokyo in Japan) and Arthur McDonald (of Queens University in Canada), for discovering how neutrinos switch between different "flavours." As the linked BBC article explains: In 1998, Prof Kajita's team reported that neutrinos they had caught, bouncing out of collisions in the Earth's atmosphere, had switched identity: they were a different "flavour" from what those collisions must have released. Then in 2001, the group led by Prof McDonald announced that the neutrinos they were detecting in Ontario, which started out in the Sun, had also "flipped" from their expected identity. This discovery of the particle's wobbly identity had crucial implications. It explained why neutrino detections had not matched the predicted quantities — and it meant that the baffling particles must have a mass. This contradicted the Standard Model of particle physics and changed calculations about the nature of the Universe, including its eternal expansion.

Comments

Disappointing prize

[ganv]

It is disappointing to see the high energy physicists continue to dominate the nobel prize. Since the 1930s, anyone who discovers some new quirk about some fundamental particle gets the prize. Nevermind the fact that the discovered particle properties steadily become less and less relevant to anything that affects humans in any practical way. When Chadwick discovered the Neutron, that deserved a Nobel Prize. In many ways it was the beginning of nuclear physics. Neutrino mass was a nice puzzle. They (partly) solved it. Good work. But who cares? The future of physics is either to become solvers of interesting but irrelevant puzzles (which will be funded at the level that society funds other impractical but fascinating fields like poetry or classical music), or to become solvers of fundamental quantitative problems in materials science, environmental science, engineering, biology, and computational science that society needs solved. The overwhelming majority of actual physicists have already realized this fact and moved to work on relevant problems. But the nobel prize committee is stuck on the old path to irrelevance. The physiology prize is given to scientists who developed cures for parasitic diseases that affects many people while the physics prize goes to the discovery of a property of particles that can only be indirectly measured with massive detector. And we wonder why physics seems uninteresting to the next generation?