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Note: While impressive, and a technical milestone for NOvA, this is still in the realms of known physics. The exciting parts will come as the quantities of data
by misnome 11y ago
Note: While impressive, and a technical milestone for NOvA, this is still in the realms of known physics. The exciting parts will come as the quantities of data ramp up and we can probe unknown areas of physics.
See also; articles about "First Collisions" every time the LHC turns on again.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y agoEveryone can't all go work on the LHC. Even the lowly work of refining measurements of known phenomena is important and necessary.
- misnome 11y agoMy comparison with the LHC was in particular to reporting "first collisions" - whilst an impressive technical accomplishment, the physics measurements come later. There is nothing 'lowly' about measuring any of the fundamental parameters.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoOr some of us worked on the LHC (tier 1 data taking at Fermilab) and it was a terrible gig.
- fnordfnordfnord 11y agoI had a terrible gig there too! It (BTeV) died young.
- ForHackernews 11y agoActually, neutrino properties are not explained fully by the current "Standard Model" of particle physics: http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/february-2013/neutrinos-the-standard-model-misfits http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/february-2013/neutri... For example, the Standard Model predicts that neutrinos should be massless, but we know from experimental results that they do have mass. So while these neutrino experiments may not be "unknown physics" (in the sense of totally novel results) they are exploring "unexplained physics" that is not predicted by the widely accepted theoretical models.
- scott_karana 11y agoWouldn't it be interesting if neutrinos shared properties with photons?
- misnome 11y agoDon't confuse my statement of "Realms of known physics" with "The Standard Model". And i'm fully aware of the state of neutrino physics, and what is and isn't known. My point is that this is a technical milestone, not a knowledge-of-physics one - we have seen plenty of evidence for neutrino flavour changing, at much better precision than the current results for NOvA, just not in this particular experiment - yet.