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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.
Sorry we hosed up your Standard Model, eh.
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Until Gabor Fekete weighs in on this, I'm unconvinced.
Spelling it correctly would be a worthwhile milestone on your quest.
You sure the neutrinos, they're not mutating?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
So what exactly does a neutrino taste like?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
While it is physics beyond the Standard Model it is really easy to incorporate it into the model. In fact it makes the leptons more like the quarks in that they now both have a mixing matrix.
It's fantastic to hear that Art finally won the Nobel though - many of us were wondering how long it would be before he did! It's very well deserved for a discovery which was at least as significant, and far more surprising, than the Higgs.
Suddenly sounds a lot more feasible.
Alternately - they switch between tasting of one and the other. Obvious really.
Like "why does this lump of rock ruin my film?" and "as if we'd ever figure out how to stick two atoms together?"
If you want a practical application of neutrino detectors and their relevance today, you need look no further than Online Monitoring of the Osiris Reactor with the Nucifer Neutrino Detector which has direct applications in the field of nonproliferation. Here's a map of the world as a function of its antineutrino flux. It's a little low-res as of last month, but it looks really interesting - as in, it's a map of every nuclear reactor on earth - once you subtract out the background from decay of naturally-occurring elements in the crust.
Not only have we used knowledge of new fundamental particles to learn how to split and fuse the atom to release energies that would have been unimaginable to the Curies, we can use knowledge of newer, harder-to-detect, and "irrelevant" fundamental particles to detect bad actors trying to build bombs on the sly. If the fundamental particles underlying the first nuclear war are Nobel-worthy, surely the particles that are being measured in order to prevent history's second nuclear war, ought to be worthy of consideration, even if nobody's figured out how to make a bomb out of them.
'Practical' uses for developments in advanced physics take a long time to be realized. Einstein wrote a paper called "Emission and Absorption of Radiation in Quantum Theory" in 1916. Basically the fundamentals of lasers. It took another 44 years for the first laser to be built. CDs weren't being sold until the 80s. Stop asking "What does it do NOW??" You sound like a child. Grow up and understand that science is a long term strategy.
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.
I'm not sure what you mean by dominate but a significant share of prizes awarded in the last fifteen years were for physics with clear practical applications, including LEDs (2014), graphene (2010), fiber optics and CCDs (2009), giant magnetoresistance (2007), laser spectroscopy (2005), and the integrated circuit (2000). The 2003 prize was given for "contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids". Other years the prizes was awarded for astrophysics: 2011, 2006 and 2002. The other prizes appear to be for quantum physics, but not all of them deal with LHC-type of high energy physics.
I have to consult the exchange rates to see how the Canadian neutrino is faring against the American neutrino.
Dark Reflection
The prizes go to groups that solve or answer questions that are very hard to answer, not just because iterative technology has allowed them to create better materials.
By dominate I mean 2 of the last 3 prizes and a fraction of recent prizes that is far larger than the fraction of physicists that work on high energy physics. (I count 6 out of 21 prizes since 1995 in high energy physics, or 28% to a community that is something like 15% of the American Physical Society). We simply haven't figured out how to recognize the more important contributions in less reductionist and more applied areas of physics. Last year's prize for semiconductor LED breakthroughs was a step in the right direction. But going back to neutrinos so quickly reflects the prize committee doesn't really get it.
McFlip to be offered soon at McDonald's everywhere.
Repeating memes isn't an "internet" thing, it's an "idiot" thing.
If you want a practical application of neutrino detectors and their relevance today ...
Neutrino detectors may also be useful in high frequency trading. That is certainly an application that benefits the common people.
78 to 100 Planck lengths.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
By dominate I mean 2 of the last 3 prizes and a fraction of recent prizes that is far larger than the fraction of physicists that work on high energy physics. (I count 6 out of 21 prizes since 1995 in high energy physics, or 28% to a community that is something like 15% of the American Physical Society). We simply haven't figured out how to recognize the more important contributions in less reductionist and more applied areas of physics. Last year's prize for semiconductor LED breakthroughs was a step in the right direction. But going back to neutrinos so quickly reflects the prize committee doesn't really get it.
So, what you're really saying is that there needs to be a minimum average amount of rest mass per Physics Nobel Prize, and the recent trend is underweight?
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Sorry but you are wrong. The question has to be first of all interesting. I can come up with a million different rather hard to answer questions that do not deserve a Nobel Prize, and yes, particle physics is over represented among the Nobel prizes. I have no opinion if this particular batch deserves it or not, but overall you need a result twice as good outside particle physics to get the Nobel prize.
Alfred Nobel's will says that his estate should fund 'prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind'. He lived in an age when physics was the study of the fundamental problems facing engineers of his day. Look at the careers of Kelvin or Helmholtz or Maxwell to see how closely tied these areas were. (Kelvin built transatlantic telegraph equipment, Maxwell developed color photography and studied bridge design, Helmholtz worked on physiology and thermodynamics inspired by applied science). I suspect the distance between modern fundamental particle physics and practical benefits to humanity might seem very foreign to Nobel were he alive to see it.
My concern is not actually for a subfield of physics. Applied research is often better funded than traditional reductionist physics. My concern is for physics as a discipline, and for the career path our brightest young aspiring physicists are directed down. We are at a cross-roads. Either physics will be the search for ever more fundamental models of the constituents of matter that become ever more irrelevant, and all the useful work will be done by people who call themselves something else. Or physics will become the application of quantitative models to fundamental problems in wide areas of science, and much of modern science will become ever more indistinguishable from applied physics. In the former case physics drifts into obscurity. In the latter case, physics strengthens its place as the central and fundamental science.
I think this is the original 2001 Slashdot post from SNO (Sudbury Neutrino Observatory) in Sudbury, Ontario. It did not attract much Slashdot discussion at the time.
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
It likely can't : with fixed reactors you can accumulate a year of neutrino data, with submarines they're always on the move. We can imagine putting a mesh of dozens or hundreds neutrinos detectors on the ocean floors (or otherwise have a lot of neutrinos detectors in many places, ocean or sea floor is just one place they can work) at a staggering cost, not sure if that would work.
On the global antineutrino map 2015 you can't even see the low power reactors in Israel and North Korea (one for each) that are only used for producing bomb plutonium. But they're likely turned off or used infrequently.
I don't understand how anything exists at all. Let's say energy from the Big Bang is not a problem (because it came from vacuum energy from.. somewhere). Then everything should be energy/photons and equal parts of matter and antimatter that meet and convert to energy then equal parts matter and antimatter again and over again.