One of the best sites for information on particle physics (for non-specialists) is The Particle Adventure.
Neutrinos are the least studied elementary particles because of they interact very, very rarely. It's no joke that they can "pass through matter like smoke", as the story said. The typical neutrino can pass through several light-years of lead without interacting once. The only reason they can be detected at all is that a tremendous number of them pass through the Earth every second. I forget the exact number, but it's something like trillions per square meter per second. Even so, a decector the size of SNO will only see a few hundred events per second. On the other hand, this is also why neutrino experiments like SNO or Super-K are so exciting for astrophysicists. The light that we see from the sun has all come from the surface, photons produced in the core can't make it through the sun to get to the earth. Neutrinos produced in the core can easily penetrate the whole of the sun and reach the earth. As a result, a very good neutrino telescope can look directly into the core of the sun. There are a berzerk number of other reasons to be excited about neutrino experiments, see the Particle Adventure for more.
Oh, and if you thought the SNO picture was cool, check out some of the photos on the Super-K, they've pretty much won the best-looking physics experiment ever contest.
It's a shame that there isn't something amateur scientists could do that would be truly useful to particle physics.
One thing you might look at are lattice QCD calculations. People have figured out a way to do some low-energy strong force calculations (the ones that are traditionally very hard), but they take a lot of computing power, and some very impressive super-computers are being built to deal with them. I have no idea how much work has been put into it, but it might be very useful to produce a distributed system to do these calculations. Volunteers could contribute code and processor time.
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Neutrinos are the least studied elementary particles because of they interact very, very rarely. It's no joke that they can "pass through matter like smoke", as the story said. The typical neutrino can pass through several light-years of lead without interacting once. The only reason they can be detected at all is that a tremendous number of them pass through the Earth every second. I forget the exact number, but it's something like trillions per square meter per second. Even so, a decector the size of SNO will only see a few hundred events per second. On the other hand, this is also why neutrino experiments like SNO or Super-K are so exciting for astrophysicists. The light that we see from the sun has all come from the surface, photons produced in the core can't make it through the sun to get to the earth. Neutrinos produced in the core can easily penetrate the whole of the sun and reach the earth. As a result, a very good neutrino telescope can look directly into the core of the sun. There are a berzerk number of other reasons to be excited about neutrino experiments, see the Particle Adventure for more.
Oh, and if you thought the SNO picture was cool, check out some of the photos on the Super-K, they've pretty much won the best-looking physics experiment ever contest.
One thing you might look at are lattice QCD calculations. People have figured out a way to do some low-energy strong force calculations (the ones that are traditionally very hard), but they take a lot of computing power, and some very impressive super-computers are being built to deal with them. I have no idea how much work has been put into it, but it might be very useful to produce a distributed system to do these calculations. Volunteers could contribute code and processor time.