Paul Revere by Cyrus Dallin, North End, Boston

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Sunday, October 11, 2015

SUNDAY SCIENCE BLOG


The Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to Japanese scientist Takaaki Kajita, and Canadian scientist, Arthur P. McDonald  “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass”


I've always been fascinated by the idea that we are constantly being bombarded by these tiny neutrinos every day all day, and that they pass through us and the Earth every day all day.













Physicist Lawrence Krauss explains why Nobel Prize winning physicists, Takaaki Kajita's and Arthur B. McDonald's recent discovery, that neutrinos have mass, is so important:


"This is exotic and amazing stuff, but why should neutrino oscillations and neutrino masses be worthy of popular, or even scientific, interest? The reason is simple. In the standard model of particle physics, developed throughout the last fifty years of the twentieth century—the model which has correctly described every other observation that has been made in particle accelerators and other experiments, and which represents perhaps the greatest intellectual adventure that science has ever seen—neutrinos have to be massless. The discovery of a massive neutrino, therefore, tells us that something is missing. The standard model cannot be complete. There is new physics remaining to be discovered, perhaps at the Large Hadron Collider, or by means of another machine that has yet to be built."



WAY, WAY, WAY OFF TOPIC:

The students at UT-Austin have a wicked sense of humor!:

Dildos to replace guns at UT-Austin campus carry protest 
9:22 a.m. Oct. 10 via Houston Chronicle 

AUSTIN - Hundreds of students at the University of Texas at Austin will protest a new law that allows students to carry guns on campus not with signs or sit-ins, but by "strapping gigantic swinging dildos to our backpacks." Their mantra?

Cocks not Glocks!


6 comments:

Les Carpenter said...

"Cocks not Glocks!

Soon to be the national rallying slogan of gun control advocates? :-)

Les Carpenter said...

And, here I thought neutrinos were cousin to langostinos. :-)

Shaw Kenawe said...

RN, langostinos pass through one's mouth, with a stop-off at one's munching teeth, then they continue on down to one's stomach and eventually pass through -- well you know the rest. But yeah, like neutrinos, they DO go through one's body. :)


"Cocks Not Glocks" -- a pretty funny slogan, and not too hard to take. Oops!

Infidel753 said...

There's always some new wrinkle in physics. I'm barely up to speed on quantum mechanics and that's almost a century old now.

The standard model seems fairly robust, so I'm sure the massive neutrino will eventually be reconciled with it, but I wonder if we'll ever arrive at a fully complete model.

Or maybe it's just that the neutrinos are becoming massive because they eat too many langostinos?

dunkinville said...

Neutrinos are cool. Found this from The New Yorker:

"Even though the existence of neutrinos was predicted in 1930, by Wolfgang Pauli, none were experimentally observed until 1956. That’s because neutrinos almost always pass through matter without stopping. Every second of every day, more than six trillion neutrinos stream through your body, coming directly from the fiery core of the sun—but most of them go right through our bodies, and the Earth, without interacting with the particles out of which those objects are made. In fact, on average, those neutrinos would be able to traverse more than one thousand light-years of lead before interacting with it even once."

Jerry Critter said...

Dildos only fire blanks.