![]() Instead it confirmed their initial experiment that suggested there were sterile neutrinos. I remember talking to the people at Los Alamos who had first found what appeared to be the suggestive sterile neutrinos, and they all expected there to be absolutely no sign of sterile neutrinos. They were testing it at other machines at. People expected this Los Alamos anomaly to go away. There’s reason to believe that there may be many types of neutrinos, but that’s just a possibility. One explanation would be that there is yet another type of neutrino that only interacts with other neutrinos and perhaps some sort of dark matter. And is there a chance there are even more?Īt Los Alamos, they were finding there were too many neutrinos turning up in one of their experiments. Yet we’ve now seen three different types of them. Pauli assumed he couldn’t check the answer because he and other physicists thought neutrinos would be completely undetectable. It solves your problem, but it’s unsatisfying. So to sit and say, “What’s missing? Let’s just scrape all those things that are missing and put them together into a new particle” to answer the question, it feels like a “just-so story”-like “How did Leopard get its spots? Well, some ancient god threw mud at him.” Sure, it’s an answer. They had a problem with beta decay, this nuclear reaction that seemed to have something missing. Why was the neutrino solution so terrible? You write, “The very idea of neutrinos was a terrible thing, in the words of the first person who imagined it.” Wolfgang Pauli proposed neutrinos in 1930 to explain why there seemed to be missing energy and momentum in a certain type of particle decay. ![]() So an imbalance had to arrive somewhere, and neutrinos could be a clue as to the source of that imbalance. There’d be no matter left if all the matter and the antimatter in the universe had just annihilated. We know that when the universe first began, it had to be a perfect balance of matter and antimatter. If a neutrino does turn out to be its own antiparticle, it could allow us to understand why the universe is made of mostly matter and not antimatter. That one touches on the really big question of the origin of the universe. To me, I think that’s the biggest and most dramatic question about neutrinos. My favorite mystery is the determination of whether or not it’s its own antiparticle. Which of the myriad of questions neutrinos pose intrigues you the most? He has written some interesting speculations about neutrinos that are a little bit on the edge. I thought of Alan Chodos, a theoretician who thinks outside the box. ![]() I talked to MIT Press about doing a book, and they were interested, but they wanted to make sure there was an expert in the field writing with me. My interest developed more as I became a science writer and started seeing these interesting neutrino results coming out. It wasn’t something I understood until I went to study physics in college. There was always a mythology in my family about him, but it wasn’t really clear what he had done. I am the grandson of one of the co-discoverers of neutrinos, Clyde Cowan, Jr. So you actually have a personal connection to neutrinos. Scientific American spoke to Riordon about why these bizarre bits of nature are so cool and how his own family history fits into the story of neutrinos. Because of their many oddities, neutrinos seem like promising conduits for answering some of our biggest questions: Why is the universe made of matter and not antimatter? What is dark matter? And can anything travel faster than light? In the new book Ghost Particle: In Search of the Elusive and Mysterious Neutrino (MIT Press, 2023), Riordon and his co-author, physicist Alan Chodos, document how the surprising particles were first proposed and discovered and what scientists have figured out so far-plus everything they hope to eventually understand. The exciting science lies in answering these questions.” “These are definitely here and definitely mysterious. “To me, the most interesting thing is how we know surprisingly little about them,” he says. Science writer James Riordon recently set out to list what was known versus unknown about neutrinos, and he found the second column was longer. Neutrinos are among nature’s most plentiful yet mysterious creations. They’re small, nearly imperceptible, and there are 500 trillion of them passing through you right now.
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