As someone who uses Synaptic, all I can say is... And?
Oh noes, I'll either have to see if the new GUI app suits my needs, or resort to the command line utilities that I was already familiar with. Or Aptitude. Whichever.
Disclaimer: I never liked synaptic, mainly because for me its interface rendered it totally unuseful because it was hideous and not really well designed, plus it was easier for me to just apt-get. I still use apt-get because its faster, but I think anyone can just pick up the software center and use it, unlike synaptic which I think is very confusing for noobs or even newcomers which are familiar with apt tools.
Right. I like synaptic for finding packages when I don't know their names because I find it easier to browse and conduct iterative searches than apt-cache search in a terminal. I don't see why it should be confusing for anyone familiar with the ins and outs of apt, but it's still just a basic gui wrapper around those tools.
It is not something that Joe Non-Linux-Lover can just sit down and use. I know; I have a friend who is a complete computer novice and is using Ubuntu. He manages just fine, but he doesn't go anywhere near Synaptic. Update Manager is the only way he, you know, manages updates. But when he needs something new on his machine, I have to walk him through step-by-step on using Synaptic over the phone.
Hopefully Software Center will be something he can actually use on his own.
Synaptic isn't it. Despite being, from my perspective, the "noob" way of interfacing with apt. I sometimes like doing things the 'noob' way, but hey, I'll still be able to!
I can't think of a reason to complain. I mean, if I can accept that Emacs doesn't come with a default install (which is much more important to me than a gui apt front-end), then I can handle this. I can't understand the whining.:P
You're assuming that the people who design cheap chargers for computers compare at all about efficiency in the AC Adapter.
Shit, most of em don't even care if their adapter draws significant amounts of power just being plugged in, with no device attached. Half the crap-ass power bricks sitting around my house are warm even when doing nothing.
Had they failed, the market they were building cars to satisfy would have been filled by another company.
Eventually, if all your "might"s and "maybe"s panned out, but since the short term effect would have without a doubt been a massive upswing in unemployment, and thus reduction in demand, it's not clear that any of those "maybe"s would work out as you have to assume they would for this not to be a horrible idea.
New jobs do not spontaneously appear to replace old ones, it takes time. The effect of losing jobs feeds back into the economy, causing the problems to escalate, and can stymie the eventual creation of the new jobs that were supposed to spontaneously appear so nothing bad would happen in the first place.
I know it's trendy and hip to be on the "The World Will End" bandwagon these day
Search/replace arguments have never been trendy or hip; they have always been lazy and stupid.
Keep in mind that calling it a "sedan" may give the wrong impression that it's going to be like a Toyota Corolla.
It's going to be more like a BMW "luxury sports-sedan", which only makes sense to try to go for that market given that it's priced as though in that market. Quite a few people find those pretty sexy, and will probably find the high acceleration rate of the Tesla offering to be a nice sexy icing on the sexy cake too.
Actually the best thing about the Onion is that you don't have to sit through shit, because 99% of the time, 100% of the humor is in the headline itself.
You only read the rest of the article if you want to see the joke in the headline get beaten to death. Oh and 1% of the time they actually expand on the humor and its worth reading.
That's what they meant by "13-year-old password security bug"! Turns out you could get access to any system by screaming "Cockfag!" into the microphone.
Which brings up another question: do you know whether the measured rate of neutrino mixing gives us a lower bound for the neutrino mass? Or is it a strictly binary zero/nonzero thing?
It tells us the difference between their masses, so it is a lower limit on mass-having neutrinos -- the lower limit for any neutrino could still be 0! Google tells me this difference is 0.07 +- 0.04 eV. And other observations have only yielded upper limits, of around 20 eV.
Afraid not. But my gut tells me it shouldn't. Consider a hypothetical very thin pane of glass, so that the typical photon only interacts once; or, better still, consider the ideal model of a mirror. Each photon only interacts once when bouncing off a perfect mirror, but because the single interaction is with all the atoms simultaneously (i.e., a superposition) it still bounces off at the expected angle.
I'm having trouble mentally mapping this to the situation in question. It seems like it's saying the neutrinos should be reflected back at the emitter, instead of reaching the distant detector.:/
I also highly recommend the movie Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - haven't read the play, but imagine it's also good - which is Hamlet from the perspective of the supporting characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
The play is also really good, but also goes a little farther and to darker places. One difference I noticed (reading play and watching movie in close proximity) was that in the part with the players, and "The Rape of the Sabine Women... or rather Woman... or rather Alfred," Alfred isn't some weird looking goon, but rather a young boy. I guess they didn't want to broach the subject of underage male prostitution in the film.
I strongly suspect that the effect is the same. The interactions aren't actually discrete because both the atoms and the photon are subject to quantum mechanics.
The theoretical implications aren't, though. I mean, photons don't act like mass-full particles in a non-vacuum, and things traveling as fast as light through a given medium doesn't make the thing behave as if mass-less like a photon.
It's true I was cheating, treating the interactions as classical discrete events. But in a QM sense, the probability of seeing a photon is based on the interference of all possible paths, and that interference is based on the phase, which is based on the path length, the wavelength, and the speed of light. The effect of moving slower through a medium is really an effect of a longer average path length.
At least that's how I understood QED, and I'm not putting any money on there not being a "mis-" in front of that.:)
Also remember that the atoms are fairly closely packed.
I guess that's true in some senses, but even in terms of EM cross-section, Rutheford's scattering experiments showed long ago that even for a proton, matter is by and large empty space and the atoms are not closely packed. Certainly for neutrinos, whose interaction cross section is much smaller than a proton itself, this is not the case.
I don't think that's true - the critical fact is that the interaction might have been with any of the atoms. Even a single photon will behave the same way, and I don't think the interaction rate makes any difference as such, although I admit I'm not certain of this. Can I mention that my PhD was in quantum optics at this point?:-)
Despite my classical description, I was still thinking of the average in terms of integrating all the possible paths for a neutrino. And I was thinking that in that case, if we subtracted out the cases of no interaction, then the 1st order answer would be a single interaction with random scattering, and the 2nd+ order effects (in this case meaning 2+ interactions) would be so small as to not matter. Implication: You're as likely to see a neutrino (that has interacted mid-route at least once) in any direction as you are in the direction of the initial beam.
But yes you can mention your PhD.:P If you've done or seen the math that says the interaction probability doesn't matter, even if you subtract out the no-interaction case, then fair enough. Or if I'm completely off, even more fair. I happily bow to superior knowledge of the behavior of photons in mediums.:)
Even so, I hope one day we'll see a similar experiment carried out across a vacuum - Moon to Earth, maybe. That would eliminate any lingering doubts.:-)
How about from the Sun to Earth?
Okay, yes, in this case we don't have the luxury of a detector located proximate to the sun to measure the initial outbound neutrino ratios. We just have a theoretical model for the number and type of neutrinos it should be emitting, a deficit of the expected types at earth, and a surplus of other types that exactly matches the difference.
So maybe it's not definitive, lingering-doubt-eliminating proof, but hey, it's pretty damn good. Certainly alternate theories are going to face an uphill battle not only explaining how the effect could happen, but arriving at the same measured values.
I thought of the same objection as the OP, although I would have expressed it differently: the basis for the experiment is that massless neutrinos can't change type because they travel at the speed of light hence experience no proper time. But actually they only travel at the speed of light in a vacuum. Granted the proper time between emission and detection would still be awfully awfully small, but do we know for sure how quickly oscillation occurs (in proper time)?
Photons only travel at less than the speed of light in a non-vacuum because of interactions; between interactions (between atoms, which is a vacuum) they still travel at the speed of light. It's the only speed a photon can travel at. It's not like the properties of light implied by masslessness and speed-of-light travel cease to be in a medium.:)
So I would strongly suspect that the QM-implied oscillations still require mass-full neutrinos, even taking into account mediums through which they travel. If there were such a medium that meaningfully slowed them.
I'm not sure that there's any problem with the neutrino needing to be emitted in the same direction; wouldn't wave mechanics take care of this, just like a photon traveling through glass? The odds of a photon interacting with a single atom and coming out in the same direction are minimal, but when you've got a whole bunch of atoms it just works out.
Obviously, as you point out, the plausibility of this objection depends on the rate of neutrino-atom interactions. So the question becomes: what is the probability of a neutrino interacting with matter over a 300km hop, and how does it compare to the fraction of changed neutrinos measured? You've said yourself they sent out an awful lot of neutrinos.
The photon-through-glass thing requires many, many interactions so the average is what we see when we treat the light as if they were rays bent by glass-air interfaces.
But neutrino interactions are exceedingly rare. I don't know the exact numbers; I'm sure there are decent values from both theory and measurement for the interaction cross-section based on energy, but here's some ball park numbers that should help put the scale in mind: Solar neutrinos pass through the earth at a rate of about 65 billion per second per cm^2, and large neutrino detector array might see on the order of a dozen interactions per day. This particular experiment, whose neutrinos are both lower in energy and quantity than solar neutrinos, saw 88 interactions they could attribute to their emitter in a year. 6 of these were of the electron neutrino type.
Here's a page which estimates the mean free path (average distance between interactions) as more than a light year through lead!
So, given the extremely low probability of interaction, you can't explain a result of 88 muon neutrinos, and 6 electron neutrinos, by saying the e neutrinos are the ones that interacted (at least) twice. You'd need to see many orders of magnitude more muon neutrinos before you'd expect to see even one electron neutrino if this was the case. And if this explanation depends on averaging the result of many interactions to get the changed neutrinos to travel in the same direction then the probability of seeing any of them would be ludicrously low.
From either perspective, the important question is: have the theoreticians actually considered this idea? If they have, it is safe to assume that they have been able to eliminate it, or they wouldn't be making the claims they are. But it isn't reasonable to expect everyone to automatically assume that they have indeed considered every possibility, particularly the dumb sounding ones. (It's surprising how often dumb-sounding possibilities don't look so dumb once you've actually done the maths.)
But the particular information that I was asking about, that is, the cause of neutrino oscillations (which you would know if you had actually been paying attention rather than being a snotty smartass), is not, to the best of my knowledge, to be found there.
I paid attention, it's why I googled you up "why" for you. Did you pay attention? The answer to your question was right in there! You may have had to click a link in the text to get to the fuller explanation, sorry! But the answer I already gave you is: It's a natural consequence of neutrinos having (different) masses, and quantum mechanics. In QM, the neutrino isn't a classical particle of one well-defined type sailing along, that "mysteriously" decides to become a different particle in the middle. It's a QM-wave-particle-thing described by probabilistic equations. Until it interacts with something and the waveform collapses, it really isn't any one of the possible outcomes (if there are more than one).
Which theory says there would be, if the different neutrino flavors have mass. That's why you always hear about neutrino mass and oscillation at the same time. Because way back in the late 50s, they figured out that if you assumed unequal masses for the neutrino flavors (and so non-zero for at least two of the three), then the neutrino wave functions for each flavor would include the possibility of being a different flavor. So seeing evidence for neutrino oscillation is evidence for a successful prediction from which we can infer that neutrinos have mass.
None of it is "proven" with a sufficiently large evidence pool like you say, but within the theory that is making these so-far so-good predictions, there is a well-defined explanation for why this is happening.
What you seem to have missed in the paper you linked was that this mechanism is not one of the issues "still under discussion". They're talking about details of the predictions, the specific probabilities and characteristics, and how that meshes with experiment. Like why does a known-bad assumption for calculating the probabilities result in correct predictions? And then they proceed to answer, by factoring in the phase of the wave packet first, making the bad assumption unnecessary. Those answers will probably continue to be debated, but the point is "Why are these things even oscillating in the first place" wasn't up for grabs.
Unless you want to know the underlying mechanism behind wave functions, superposition of states and other QM weirdness. Then of course nobody knows the answer to "Why this crazy shit?", but at the same time the "That's Just Too Weird So It Can't Be Right!" ship sailed a long time ago. Particles can't be thought of as little spheres in space with well-defined identities so sometimes they seem to spontaneously switch; deal with it.
So there's your answer (again). If you need a more detailed answer than that, why precisely QM and the Standard Model say this will happen, take a class, read a (text)book, at least a website, what-fucking-ever. Just stop acting like being able to ask a question means your alternative is just as likely, without doing any of those things. Or acting like getting called out for doing that is the same as being called out just for asking a question.
Because any time you're talking about a regional or global issue where arriving at certain conclusions means you'll have to do something it always ends up falling into politics, whether you're for or against it. It's just the way it works at the scale of societies.
I wish there were a list of "climate change skeptics" who could be emailed your piece. Beautiful.
Not that I personally understand the science behind it
Thanks, but a major point I didn't communicate to Jane Q Public well enough was that if you want to understand it, that's great, but you need to seek out knowledge. It's great to question what it is that you're trying to understand, if you recognize that your questions might already have answers, or at least been taken into account. So don't just assume they haven't until someone demonstrates otherwise. Maybe someone demonstrated already, and you just need to read some more.
Like when Jed was out trying to shoot some food and missed, but noticed crude oil bubbling up from the bullet divot.
Yes! An important theme flagrantly missing from the recent gritty sci-fi reboot of the The Beverly Hillbillies! In this version, the bullet that finds oil was shot right through the eye of the velociraptor Jeb was shootin' at.
The graph goes on until 2010, and the 10 hottest years are all in the last decade. The only exception is 1998, which was exceptionally warm due to a extreme El Nino
Which is why anti-AGW folks love to cherry-pick 1998 as their starting point for saying global warming stopped or reversed in the last decade. They take the temperature in 1998, which was a high spike, and the temperature in 2008, which was a low spike, and find that the latter is lower, and bam! Warming disproved.
Do they? Or do they often collide with atoms and experience the same kind of "conversion"? As far as I know, nobody has performed any experiments to find out.
A skeptic would see the bold part as the first and easiest problem to solve.
The very idea that they might change from one form to another is very recent.
I guess just over half a century is 'very recent' by some standards, but I'd say probably not by the standard of "recent enough for me to assume no experiments have been conducted."
The skeptic looks for potential causes for an observation, rather than accepting that it happens spontaneously or through "mysterious" processes. If the cause is unknown, then speculation as to the possible cause is not only called for, but necessary. Further evidence will not be forthcoming until those speculations are tested.
And then they think about that potential explanation, and what it implies, and whether it can explain the evidence, and if it does if there's any aspect of the evidence that can distinguish between this and other hypothesis.
And of course the actual scientists have been doing this for some time, and this experiment will hopefully further the cause. But look at you with your "rather than accepting that it happens spontaneously or through 'mysterious' processes". Implying that others are doing this, while you're the one furthering science by looking for causes.
You can't just blow off that kind of arrogance-ignorance cocktail by saying "It's just my opinion."
I do not claim to be as qualified to speculate on the matter as professional physicists; nevertheless, in an absence of explanation I still have a right to speculate.
And yet you did claim that you were at least as likely, if not more likely, to be right and the professional physicists wrong. Please don't explain how this is just your opinion. Of course it is. The point is -- in your opinion, you're qualified to opine that they are probably wrong, and in fact that you're going to believe so until you are proven wrong. In your opinion, they aren't considering obvious explanations.
So, your words ring hollow. If you really believed that, you would have formed the opinion that the physicists probably know what they're doing, and your idea, even if you think it has merit, is the long-shot.
Yes it's just your opinion, just speculation. If you understood skepticism, then the opinion you formed would have reflected that understanding. Get it?
Don't be an ass. My opinion, so far, is that it seems just as likely. I did not claim or pretend that it was anything more than that. Further, if you actually used your brain, you would know that the probability that I, personally, had the equipment to perform such an experiment is just about nil. So your criticism is 100% hot air.
So using your brain means concluding that there's no way to learn anything more, and so not trying?
I'd have thought using your brain meant realizing that what you're proposing means a neutrino interacting twice -- the first muon neutrino interacting with some matter, and the electron neutrino hypothetically emitted by that interaction itself interacting with the detector. Even setting aside the issue that the second neutrino would have to be emitted in the same direction, that means the probability of this occurring is the probability of a single interaction squared. It means your idea is highly dependent on the probability of neutrino-atom interactions.
And then you could have used your brain to deduce that people have already performed experiments indicating the odds of neutrino interaction, so you don't have to.
But I guess, "Well I can't conduct particle physics experiments myself, so I'll just run with what I already know" counts as using your brain... to justify ignorance.
Don't lecture me about skepticism. I am all about looking for the answer... but there has, as yet, been no opportunity to do so! So you are talking out your ass. You ask the impossible of me, and berate me for not delivering it.
There's nothing impossible about googling "Neutrino", learning more about them, and figuring out if your hypothesis is remotely likely or not.
But by saying it was impossible for you to learn more, and using that as your excuse for arriving at a premature opinion, you exemplify what I'm talking about even as you deny it.
I did not try to present ignorance as evidence. I was clearly speculating, and as you well know, at this time any real evidence is still waiting to show up. And I will be happy to accept that evidence, if it was responsibly gathered. Until then, I am entitled to my opinion as to what is more likely.
You're always entitled to your opinion; there's no "until". Whether you are exercising proper skepticism in arriving at it is a different matter. For example, there is ample evidence that applies to your hypothesis. You surely must have known there at least could be, yet did nothing to seek it out, and didn't even ask "Hey, does anyone know if this scenario seems plausible?" Nope, in a cloud of ignorance, you arrived at the opinion that these scientists ignored an obvious explanation that was at least, or more, likely than what they claimed.
And now you're defending that opinion on the basis that your ignorance was impossible to fix. You are implicitly saying that "I don't know" is a basis for arriving at a conclusion.
So, don't be an ass, you say? It is my policy to be an ass to asses whose first thought on a subject they don't understand is "Hey I spent 3 seconds thinking and 0 seconds investigating my idea, and I think it's just as likely -- maybe more likely! -- that I'm right and these people who do understand the subject are idiots!"
Next time be a real skeptic, which means being skeptical of your own ideas first. Instead of forming a conclusion, ask sincere questions. "Is this possible?" instead of "I think they're probably wrong!"
Not necessarily. They could be different neutrinos, caused by atoms in the way absorbing some neutrinos and emitting others. I am not sure but I suspect that is what GP was getting at. Rather than evidence of neutrinos actually changing from one type to another, it seems just as likely (more likely?) that intervening matter performed a conversion.
So here's the thing about skepticism.
You start out with an excellent question -- how do we know (or rather, quantify our confidence that) it was the neutrinos changing in-flight, rather than something else, like them being absorbed and re-emitted by intervening matter?
Then, rather than treat this like a question to which you do not know the answer, and try to find out, you instead decide that it's "just as likely (more likely?)" that your interpretation is correct.
Skepticism is based around the idea of asking honest questions, and then looking for the answer.
Skepticism is not based around asking a rhetorical question (or just phrasing it as a statement), not bothering to find an answer, and assuming that your ability to ask a question means the conclusions of the research are now in doubt.
Skepticism, and science, are not about just asking questions. They're about seeking knowledge. They are never about letting ignorance serve as evidence.
I hope this help clears up a common confusion regarding question asking and skepticism.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who uses Synaptic, all I can say is... And?
Oh noes, I'll either have to see if the new GUI app suits my needs, or resort to the command line utilities that I was already familiar with. Or Aptitude. Whichever.
Disclaimer: I never liked synaptic, mainly because for me its interface rendered it totally unuseful because it was hideous and not really well designed, plus it was easier for me to just apt-get.
I still use apt-get because its faster, but I think anyone can just pick up the software center and use it, unlike synaptic which I think is very confusing for noobs or even newcomers which are familiar with apt tools.
Right. I like synaptic for finding packages when I don't know their names because I find it easier to browse and conduct iterative searches than apt-cache search in a terminal. I don't see why it should be confusing for anyone familiar with the ins and outs of apt, but it's still just a basic gui wrapper around those tools.
It is not something that Joe Non-Linux-Lover can just sit down and use. I know; I have a friend who is a complete computer novice and is using Ubuntu. He manages just fine, but he doesn't go anywhere near Synaptic. Update Manager is the only way he, you know, manages updates. But when he needs something new on his machine, I have to walk him through step-by-step on using Synaptic over the phone.
Hopefully Software Center will be something he can actually use on his own.
Synaptic isn't it. Despite being, from my perspective, the "noob" way of interfacing with apt. I sometimes like doing things the 'noob' way, but hey, I'll still be able to!
I can't think of a reason to complain. I mean, if I can accept that Emacs doesn't come with a default install (which is much more important to me than a gui apt front-end), then I can handle this. I can't understand the whining. :P
Hey, thanks for the math!
Question: What is the efficiency of the batteries?
You're assuming that the people who design cheap chargers for computers compare at all about efficiency in the AC Adapter.
Shit, most of em don't even care if their adapter draws significant amounts of power just being plugged in, with no device attached. Half the crap-ass power bricks sitting around my house are warm even when doing nothing.
Had they failed, the market they were building cars to satisfy would have been filled by another company.
Eventually, if all your "might"s and "maybe"s panned out, but since the short term effect would have without a doubt been a massive upswing in unemployment, and thus reduction in demand, it's not clear that any of those "maybe"s would work out as you have to assume they would for this not to be a horrible idea.
New jobs do not spontaneously appear to replace old ones, it takes time. The effect of losing jobs feeds back into the economy, causing the problems to escalate, and can stymie the eventual creation of the new jobs that were supposed to spontaneously appear so nothing bad would happen in the first place.
I know it's trendy and hip to be on the "The World Will End" bandwagon these day
Search/replace arguments have never been trendy or hip; they have always been lazy and stupid.
Keep in mind that calling it a "sedan" may give the wrong impression that it's going to be like a Toyota Corolla.
It's going to be more like a BMW "luxury sports-sedan", which only makes sense to try to go for that market given that it's priced as though in that market. Quite a few people find those pretty sexy, and will probably find the high acceleration rate of the Tesla offering to be a nice sexy icing on the sexy cake too.
Actually the best thing about the Onion is that you don't have to sit through shit, because 99% of the time, 100% of the humor is in the headline itself.
You only read the rest of the article if you want to see the joke in the headline get beaten to death. Oh and 1% of the time they actually expand on the humor and its worth reading.
That's what they meant by "13-year-old password security bug"! Turns out you could get access to any system by screaming "Cockfag!" into the microphone.
Which brings up another question: do you know whether the measured rate of neutrino mixing gives us a lower bound for the neutrino mass? Or is it a strictly binary zero/nonzero thing?
It tells us the difference between their masses, so it is a lower limit on mass-having neutrinos -- the lower limit for any neutrino could still be 0! Google tells me this difference is 0.07 +- 0.04 eV. And other observations have only yielded upper limits, of around 20 eV.
Afraid not. But my gut tells me it shouldn't. Consider a hypothetical very thin pane of glass, so that the typical photon only interacts once; or, better still, consider the ideal model of a mirror. Each photon only interacts once when bouncing off a perfect mirror, but because the single interaction is with all the atoms simultaneously (i.e., a superposition) it still bounces off at the expected angle.
I'm having trouble mentally mapping this to the situation in question. It seems like it's saying the neutrinos should be reflected back at the emitter, instead of reaching the distant detector. :/
I also highly recommend the movie Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - haven't read the play, but imagine it's also good - which is Hamlet from the perspective of the supporting characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern .
The play is also really good, but also goes a little farther and to darker places. One difference I noticed (reading play and watching movie in close proximity) was that in the part with the players, and "The Rape of the Sabine Women... or rather Woman... or rather Alfred," Alfred isn't some weird looking goon, but rather a young boy. I guess they didn't want to broach the subject of underage male prostitution in the film.
The first fifteen premise-defining minutes of Hancock were fantastic. The delivery on that premise was awful.
So yeah, so disappointing.
I strongly suspect that the effect is the same. The interactions aren't actually discrete because both the atoms and the photon are subject to quantum mechanics.
The theoretical implications aren't, though. I mean, photons don't act like mass-full particles in a non-vacuum, and things traveling as fast as light through a given medium doesn't make the thing behave as if mass-less like a photon.
It's true I was cheating, treating the interactions as classical discrete events. But in a QM sense, the probability of seeing a photon is based on the interference of all possible paths, and that interference is based on the phase, which is based on the path length, the wavelength, and the speed of light. The effect of moving slower through a medium is really an effect of a longer average path length.
At least that's how I understood QED, and I'm not putting any money on there not being a "mis-" in front of that. :)
Also remember that the atoms are fairly closely packed.
I guess that's true in some senses, but even in terms of EM cross-section, Rutheford's scattering experiments showed long ago that even for a proton, matter is by and large empty space and the atoms are not closely packed. Certainly for neutrinos, whose interaction cross section is much smaller than a proton itself, this is not the case.
I don't think that's true - the critical fact is that the interaction might have been with any of the atoms. Even a single photon will behave the same way, and I don't think the interaction rate makes any difference as such, although I admit I'm not certain of this. Can I mention that my PhD was in quantum optics at this point? :-)
Despite my classical description, I was still thinking of the average in terms of integrating all the possible paths for a neutrino. And I was thinking that in that case, if we subtracted out the cases of no interaction, then the 1st order answer would be a single interaction with random scattering, and the 2nd+ order effects (in this case meaning 2+ interactions) would be so small as to not matter. Implication: You're as likely to see a neutrino (that has interacted mid-route at least once) in any direction as you are in the direction of the initial beam.
But yes you can mention your PhD. :P If you've done or seen the math that says the interaction probability doesn't matter, even if you subtract out the no-interaction case, then fair enough. Or if I'm completely off, even more fair. I happily bow to superior knowledge of the behavior of photons in mediums. :)
Even so, I hope one day we'll see a similar experiment carried out across a vacuum - Moon to Earth, maybe. That would eliminate any lingering doubts. :-)
How about from the Sun to Earth?
Okay, yes, in this case we don't have the luxury of a detector located proximate to the sun to measure the initial outbound neutrino ratios. We just have a theoretical model for the number and type of neutrinos it should be emitting, a deficit of the expected types at earth, and a surplus of other types that exactly matches the difference.
So maybe it's not definitive, lingering-doubt-eliminating proof, but hey, it's pretty damn good. Certainly alternate theories are going to face an uphill battle not only explaining how the effect could happen, but arriving at the same measured values.
I thought of the same objection as the OP, although I would have expressed it differently: the basis for the experiment is that massless neutrinos can't change type because they travel at the speed of light hence experience no proper time. But actually they only travel at the speed of light in a vacuum. Granted the proper time between emission and detection would still be awfully awfully small, but do we know for sure how quickly oscillation occurs (in proper time)?
Photons only travel at less than the speed of light in a non-vacuum because of interactions; between interactions (between atoms, which is a vacuum) they still travel at the speed of light. It's the only speed a photon can travel at. It's not like the properties of light implied by masslessness and speed-of-light travel cease to be in a medium. :)
So I would strongly suspect that the QM-implied oscillations still require mass-full neutrinos, even taking into account mediums through which they travel. If there were such a medium that meaningfully slowed them.
I'm not sure that there's any problem with the neutrino needing to be emitted in the same direction; wouldn't wave mechanics take care of this, just like a photon traveling through glass? The odds of a photon interacting with a single atom and coming out in the same direction are minimal, but when you've got a whole bunch of atoms it just works out.
Obviously, as you point out, the plausibility of this objection depends on the rate of neutrino-atom interactions. So the question becomes: what is the probability of a neutrino interacting with matter over a 300km hop, and how does it compare to the fraction of changed neutrinos measured? You've said yourself they sent out an awful lot of neutrinos.
The photon-through-glass thing requires many, many interactions so the average is what we see when we treat the light as if they were rays bent by glass-air interfaces.
But neutrino interactions are exceedingly rare. I don't know the exact numbers; I'm sure there are decent values from both theory and measurement for the interaction cross-section based on energy, but here's some ball park numbers that should help put the scale in mind: Solar neutrinos pass through the earth at a rate of about 65 billion per second per cm^2, and large neutrino detector array might see on the order of a dozen interactions per day. This particular experiment, whose neutrinos are both lower in energy and quantity than solar neutrinos, saw 88 interactions they could attribute to their emitter in a year. 6 of these were of the electron neutrino type.
Here's a page which estimates the mean free path (average distance between interactions) as more than a light year through lead!
So, given the extremely low probability of interaction, you can't explain a result of 88 muon neutrinos, and 6 electron neutrinos, by saying the e neutrinos are the ones that interacted (at least) twice. You'd need to see many orders of magnitude more muon neutrinos before you'd expect to see even one electron neutrino if this was the case. And if this explanation depends on averaging the result of many interactions to get the changed neutrinos to travel in the same direction then the probability of seeing any of them would be ludicrously low.
From either perspective, the important question is: have the theoreticians actually considered this idea? If they have, it is safe to assume that they have been able to eliminate it, or they wouldn't be making the claims they are. But it isn't reasonable to expect everyone to automatically assume that they have indeed considered every possibility, particularly the dumb sounding ones. (It's surprising how often dumb-sounding possibilities don't look so dumb once you've actually done the maths.)
This not being one of those cases. ;)
But the particular information that I was asking about, that is, the cause of neutrino oscillations (which you would know if you had actually been paying attention rather than being a snotty smartass), is not, to the best of my knowledge, to be found there.
I paid attention, it's why I googled you up "why" for you. Did you pay attention? The answer to your question was right in there! You may have had to click a link in the text to get to the fuller explanation, sorry! But the answer I already gave you is: It's a natural consequence of neutrinos having (different) masses, and quantum mechanics. In QM, the neutrino isn't a classical particle of one well-defined type sailing along, that "mysteriously" decides to become a different particle in the middle. It's a QM-wave-particle-thing described by probabilistic equations. Until it interacts with something and the waveform collapses, it really isn't any one of the possible outcomes (if there are more than one).
Which theory says there would be, if the different neutrino flavors have mass. That's why you always hear about neutrino mass and oscillation at the same time. Because way back in the late 50s, they figured out that if you assumed unequal masses for the neutrino flavors (and so non-zero for at least two of the three), then the neutrino wave functions for each flavor would include the possibility of being a different flavor. So seeing evidence for neutrino oscillation is evidence for a successful prediction from which we can infer that neutrinos have mass.
None of it is "proven" with a sufficiently large evidence pool like you say, but within the theory that is making these so-far so-good predictions, there is a well-defined explanation for why this is happening.
What you seem to have missed in the paper you linked was that this mechanism is not one of the issues "still under discussion". They're talking about details of the predictions, the specific probabilities and characteristics, and how that meshes with experiment. Like why does a known-bad assumption for calculating the probabilities result in correct predictions? And then they proceed to answer, by factoring in the phase of the wave packet first, making the bad assumption unnecessary. Those answers will probably continue to be debated, but the point is "Why are these things even oscillating in the first place" wasn't up for grabs.
Unless you want to know the underlying mechanism behind wave functions, superposition of states and other QM weirdness. Then of course nobody knows the answer to "Why this crazy shit?", but at the same time the "That's Just Too Weird So It Can't Be Right!" ship sailed a long time ago. Particles can't be thought of as little spheres in space with well-defined identities so sometimes they seem to spontaneously switch; deal with it.
So there's your answer (again). If you need a more detailed answer than that, why precisely QM and the Standard Model say this will happen, take a class, read a (text)book, at least a website, what-fucking-ever. Just stop acting like being able to ask a question means your alternative is just as likely, without doing any of those things. Or acting like getting called out for doing that is the same as being called out just for asking a question.
Why does this always have to fall into politics.
Because any time you're talking about a regional or global issue where arriving at certain conclusions means you'll have to do something it always ends up falling into politics, whether you're for or against it. It's just the way it works at the scale of societies.
I wish there were a list of "climate change skeptics" who could be emailed your piece. Beautiful.
Not that I personally understand the science behind it
Thanks, but a major point I didn't communicate to Jane Q Public well enough was that if you want to understand it, that's great, but you need to seek out knowledge. It's great to question what it is that you're trying to understand, if you recognize that your questions might already have answers, or at least been taken into account. So don't just assume they haven't until someone demonstrates otherwise. Maybe someone demonstrated already, and you just need to read some more.
Like when Jed was out trying to shoot some food and missed, but noticed crude oil bubbling up from the bullet divot.
Yes! An important theme flagrantly missing from the recent gritty sci-fi reboot of the The Beverly Hillbillies! In this version, the bullet that finds oil was shot right through the eye of the velociraptor Jeb was shootin' at.
The graph goes on until 2010, and the 10 hottest years are all in the last decade. The only exception is 1998, which was exceptionally warm due to a extreme El Nino
Which is why anti-AGW folks love to cherry-pick 1998 as their starting point for saying global warming stopped or reversed in the last decade. They take the temperature in 1998, which was a high spike, and the temperature in 2008, which was a low spike, and find that the latter is lower, and bam! Warming disproved.
So far I have yet to see an explanation
Have you thought of looking?
Link #2 is particularly good.
That's easy, he's dead, so un-Laden!
Do they? Or do they often collide with atoms and experience the same kind of "conversion"? As far as I know, nobody has performed any experiments to find out.
A skeptic would see the bold part as the first and easiest problem to solve.
The very idea that they might change from one form to another is very recent.
I guess just over half a century is 'very recent' by some standards, but I'd say probably not by the standard of "recent enough for me to assume no experiments have been conducted."
The skeptic looks for potential causes for an observation, rather than accepting that it happens spontaneously or through "mysterious" processes. If the cause is unknown, then speculation as to the possible cause is not only called for, but necessary. Further evidence will not be forthcoming until those speculations are tested.
And then they think about that potential explanation, and what it implies, and whether it can explain the evidence, and if it does if there's any aspect of the evidence that can distinguish between this and other hypothesis.
And of course the actual scientists have been doing this for some time, and this experiment will hopefully further the cause. But look at you with your "rather than accepting that it happens spontaneously or through 'mysterious' processes". Implying that others are doing this, while you're the one furthering science by looking for causes.
You can't just blow off that kind of arrogance-ignorance cocktail by saying "It's just my opinion."
I do not claim to be as qualified to speculate on the matter as professional physicists; nevertheless, in an absence of explanation I still have a right to speculate.
And yet you did claim that you were at least as likely, if not more likely, to be right and the professional physicists wrong. Please don't explain how this is just your opinion. Of course it is. The point is -- in your opinion, you're qualified to opine that they are probably wrong, and in fact that you're going to believe so until you are proven wrong. In your opinion, they aren't considering obvious explanations.
So, your words ring hollow. If you really believed that, you would have formed the opinion that the physicists probably know what they're doing, and your idea, even if you think it has merit, is the long-shot.
Yes it's just your opinion, just speculation. If you understood skepticism, then the opinion you formed would have reflected that understanding. Get it?
Don't be an ass. My opinion, so far, is that it seems just as likely. I did not claim or pretend that it was anything more than that. Further, if you actually used your brain, you would know that the probability that I, personally, had the equipment to perform such an experiment is just about nil. So your criticism is 100% hot air.
So using your brain means concluding that there's no way to learn anything more, and so not trying?
I'd have thought using your brain meant realizing that what you're proposing means a neutrino interacting twice -- the first muon neutrino interacting with some matter, and the electron neutrino hypothetically emitted by that interaction itself interacting with the detector. Even setting aside the issue that the second neutrino would have to be emitted in the same direction, that means the probability of this occurring is the probability of a single interaction squared. It means your idea is highly dependent on the probability of neutrino-atom interactions.
And then you could have used your brain to deduce that people have already performed experiments indicating the odds of neutrino interaction, so you don't have to.
But I guess, "Well I can't conduct particle physics experiments myself, so I'll just run with what I already know" counts as using your brain... to justify ignorance.
Don't lecture me about skepticism. I am all about looking for the answer... but there has, as yet, been no opportunity to do so! So you are talking out your ass. You ask the impossible of me, and berate me for not delivering it.
There's nothing impossible about googling "Neutrino", learning more about them, and figuring out if your hypothesis is remotely likely or not.
But by saying it was impossible for you to learn more, and using that as your excuse for arriving at a premature opinion, you exemplify what I'm talking about even as you deny it.
I did not try to present ignorance as evidence. I was clearly speculating, and as you well know, at this time any real evidence is still waiting to show up. And I will be happy to accept that evidence, if it was responsibly gathered. Until then, I am entitled to my opinion as to what is more likely.
You're always entitled to your opinion; there's no "until". Whether you are exercising proper skepticism in arriving at it is a different matter. For example, there is ample evidence that applies to your hypothesis. You surely must have known there at least could be, yet did nothing to seek it out, and didn't even ask "Hey, does anyone know if this scenario seems plausible?" Nope, in a cloud of ignorance, you arrived at the opinion that these scientists ignored an obvious explanation that was at least, or more, likely than what they claimed.
And now you're defending that opinion on the basis that your ignorance was impossible to fix. You are implicitly saying that "I don't know" is a basis for arriving at a conclusion.
So, don't be an ass, you say? It is my policy to be an ass to asses whose first thought on a subject they don't understand is "Hey I spent 3 seconds thinking and 0 seconds investigating my idea, and I think it's just as likely -- maybe more likely! -- that I'm right and these people who do understand the subject are idiots!"
Next time be a real skeptic, which means being skeptical of your own ideas first. Instead of forming a conclusion, ask sincere questions. "Is this possible?" instead of "I think they're probably wrong!"
Not necessarily. They could be different neutrinos, caused by atoms in the way absorbing some neutrinos and emitting others. I am not sure but I suspect that is what GP was getting at. Rather than evidence of neutrinos actually changing from one type to another, it seems just as likely (more likely?) that intervening matter performed a conversion.
So here's the thing about skepticism.
You start out with an excellent question -- how do we know (or rather, quantify our confidence that) it was the neutrinos changing in-flight, rather than something else, like them being absorbed and re-emitted by intervening matter?
Then, rather than treat this like a question to which you do not know the answer, and try to find out, you instead decide that it's "just as likely (more likely?)" that your interpretation is correct.
Skepticism is based around the idea of asking honest questions, and then looking for the answer.
Skepticism is not based around asking a rhetorical question (or just phrasing it as a statement), not bothering to find an answer, and assuming that your ability to ask a question means the conclusions of the research are now in doubt.
Skepticism, and science, are not about just asking questions. They're about seeking knowledge. They are never about letting ignorance serve as evidence.
I hope this help clears up a common confusion regarding question asking and skepticism.
Reposting the excellent blog entry posted by an AC far below claiming to be the author of said blog (and no reason not to believe 'em):
http://neutrinoscience.blogspot.com/2011/06/hello-there-electron-neutrino.html
And yeah, it says there's a set of detectors 280m away, and the final set 295km.
Of course this still means that they aren't measuring "the same" neutrinos like in the original question, but that's just not feasible.