How screwed up the House of Representatives must be. They tried, and could not even impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Why did they even try? Well, Donald Trump told them to do so.
Speaker Mike Johnson doesn't want aid for Ukraine. So he also yesterday tried to sneak though only aid for Israel. That vote, too, failed to pass. He said he would next week still attempt to impeach Mayorkas. In the Senate, thanks to Donald Trump, it looks like the immigration part is holding back their aid package. Senate President Chuck Schumer now plans to bring to a vote only the Israel/Ukraine/Taiwan financial portion.
- It is the smallest particle, with the electron as #2. Neither has yet been actually measured for mass size.
- Elementary particles form matter and radiation.
- There are two kinds of particles, Fermion and Boson. Remember fermion, because it was named after Enrico Fermi, the godfather of neutrinos.
The dominant theory of particle physics is the Standard Model, first introduced in 1974, a decade after I took introductory physics in college.- There are so many of them.
Ever wonder how many atoms there are in your body? Seven billion billion billion, or 7 times 10 to the 27th power. Of this two-thirds is hydrogen, one-fourth oxygen and one-tenth carbon.
Further, there are as many atoms in a single molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the universe.- Well, then, how many atoms in the entire universe? No one knows, but one estimate has it at 10 to 78th to 82nd power.
- BUT THERE ARE A BILLION TIMES MORE NEUTRINOS IN THE UNIVERSE THAN ATOMS!!!
- But aha, there are more photon particles than neutinos. So much more that some scientist say infinitely more. On science day I share this kind of nonsense, for that is not good science.
- A photon is a particle with no mass. Neutrinos do, and this is part of the mystery.
- Photons make up light.
- Photons are both particle and wave, plus excitation.
- The term photon was invented in 1926.
- The recently detected Higgs boson decays into pairs of photons.
- There is the theoretical dark photon.
- The Sun sends 65 billion neutrinos per second per square centimeter to Earth.
- A 100 trillion neutrinos pass through a human body/second.
- Nuclear reactions create neutrinos.
- In all stars, nuclear reactors, etc, so both fusion and fission produce neutrinos.
- Of course, both photons and neutrons are created inside the core of stars, but while a photon might take tens of thousands of years to reach the outer surface, neutrinos make this trip in around 3 seconds.
- In other words, if Betelgeuse explodes into a supernova today, there are sites that will detect neutrinos long before the light reaches us, so telescopes can be pointed ahead of time to record an exploding star. This is expected very shortly in geological time. Betelgeuse is 700 times larger than our Sun, and is the 10th brightest object in the sky.
- Even though a neutrino has a mass about 6 million times lighter than an electron, Neutrinos account for 20% the total mass of the known universe.
- There are three kinds, or flavors, of neutrinos.
- Actually, that might not be correct, for it seems there might well be a fourth, another part of the mystery.
- Neutrinos are hard to detect.
- On average, only one neutrino from the Sun will interact with a person's body during a lifetime.
- There are two facilities in the world built to do this, one in the U.S. and the newer one in Japan. More on these later.
- Neutrinos are known as ghost particles, and could well be, or lead us to, dark matter. Remember, how dominant this is, for what we see is only 4% of what is out there.
All the above because this is science Wednesday, and I just watched on NOVA, Particles Unknown. You too can view this 53 minute program. Some history is interesting.
In 1930 Wolfgang Pauli proposed the existence of a new tiny and very light particle with no electric charge. Enrico Fermi later named this the neutrino, Italian for little neutral one.
Fermi was born in 1901 in Rome, and in the 1930s at the University of Rome already had perhaps the top particle physics research team in the world, both in theory and experimentation. Their work eventually led to the first atomic bomb. The youngest was known as The Puppy, Bruno Pontecorvo, and in the years to come worked on the Manhattan Project, but had communist leanings, and in 1950 defected to the Soviet Union under cloudy circumstances, where he was mostly shielded, but did extraordinary work in particle physics, especially neutrinos. His work led to the Japan's Super-Kamiokande experiment, the most advanced neutrino facility in the world today.
Fermi won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938, but left Italy that year, for Mussolini advanced racial laws that threatened his Jewish wife. He worked on the Manhattan Project, leading a team at the University Chicago, where he built a nuclear reactor that supported the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction in 1942. He also worked with Edward Teller on the Hydrogen Bomb. He was present for the Trinity Test on 16July1945 for the first explosion of an Atomic Bomb. His Fermi method was used to estimate the bomb's yield. After World War II he worked under Robert Oppenheimer, where both opposed the development of the H-Bomb. Below, Oppenheimer to the left and Ernest Lawrence to the right.
His neutrino work led to the establishment of the Fermi National Accelerator, near Chicago. While the lab was founded in 1969 and named to honor Enrico Fermi in 1974, recent activity has shifted, and since 2007, Fermilab now aims to become the world center for neutrino physics. They are hosting the $3 billion Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) now under construction. The Sanford Underground Research Facility, which is extending the Homestake Mine in Lead, South Dakota, will accommodate the far detector modules for DUNE. A start-up date is now scheduled for the early 2030s.
DUNE's primary competition is the Japan Hyper-Kamiokande Experiment, scheduled for operation in 2028. Hyper-K should only cost $1 billion, but will be more capable. The two sites will complement each other in the search for neutrinos.
Of course CERN is also in the picture, and teams are currently upgrading and assembling multiple detectors to assist the U.S. and Japan. Since last year, the CERN Neutrino Platform has been preparing for ProtoDUNE's second run. The two cryostats will be filled with liquid argon and should begin taking data around now.
Want to learn more about neutrinos? The story returns to Italy, where Fermi led the original research. The Neutrino 2024 31st International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics will occur from June 16-24 in Milan.
The main topics will be:
- Neutrino oscillations
- Neutrino mass
- Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay
- Neutrino interactions
- Accelerator neutrinos
- Reactor neutrinos
- Atmospheric neutrinos
- Solar neutrinos
- Supernova neutrinos
- Astrophysical neutrinos
- Geo neutrinos
- Neutrino role in cosmology
- Sterile neutrinos
- Theory of neutrino masses and mixing, Leptogenesis
- Beyond Standard Model searches in the neutrino sector
- New technologies for neutrino physics
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