7 ms·

It’s always bugged me that science claims there are trillions of neutrinos going through me, yet can hardly detect them with a nearly trillion dollar machine an

It’s always bugged me that science claims there are trillions of neutrinos going through me, yet can hardly detect them with a nearly trillion dollar machine and a doctorate. Then there’s dark energy, which just seems like a lame excuse for saying “we don’t know”. Nobody says what goes through my body but me! (I’m being funny, y’all! Happy holidays!)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cshimmin 5y ago
The trillions of neutrinos going through you are low energy neutrinos from the sun. We've been able to detect those for decades, and with only moderately pricey technology. The neutrinos in the article are high energy ones produced from proton collisions at the LHC. Although we have ways of producing neutrino beams from accelerators, the LHC is not set up for that, and these neutrinos are sparsely produced, incidentally to the high energy hadron collisions being produced there. In any case, the LHC cost at least an order of magnitude less than a trillion dollars. And the FASER experiment in particular which runs parasitically on existing LHC infrastructure runs on a shoestring budget, largely privately funded.
- Noobquestion 5y ago
  Noob qestion, but I am interested: um "So why the heck they doesn't 'fusion'-react their stuff in a hu liquid?", and why isn't there an energy-surplus gotten from 'friction' ? And yes, way back i read something about the (reversed) bernoulli-effect. Any help ?
  - cshimmin 5y ago
    Hmmm... in good faith I'm not able to parse your question. I don't know what hu liquid is, or what you mean by "their stuff". Maybe you could try again.
    - magicalhippo 5y ago
      I had similar issues parsing the question. I've noticed a marked uptick in almost-but-not-quite comprehensible questions in the last few months in various internet venues, like Discord and Slack. Having run my own MegaHAL[1] on IRC back in the days, it made me think about if someone is having fun with a new generation AI chat bots... Not saying that is the case here though. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaHAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaHAL
aardvark179 5y ago
It’s interesting that you class dark energy (the thing accelerating universal expansion) as, “We don’t know,” but don’t put gravity into that same category. They are both aspects of general relativity that we have failed to integrate with our other most successful fundamental theories, but if you asked an average person on the street I’m sure they’d put them in very different categories of understanding, as you did.
- Ma8ee 5y ago
  The thing with gravity is that it is kind of easy to detect, even for a layperson, while dark energy and dark matter haven't been detected at all, by anyone, but only used as mathematical devices to make indirect measurements of large scale structures align with our models. So, it isn't only the "average man on the street" that thinks there are good reasons to put them in very different categories of understanding.
  - mnw21cam 5y ago
    Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1489/ https://xkcd.com/1489/ The mouseover-text is the important bit: "Of these four forces, there's one we don't really understand." "Is it the weak force or the strong--" "It's gravity." That's even though it's the one with the simplest equations.
    - Ma8ee 5y ago
      Is that an attempt to appeal to authority?
      - kergonath 5y ago
        Worse than that: an appeal to the reader’s sense of humour.
    - tsimionescu 5y ago
      > That's even though [gravity]'s the one with the simplest equations. Aren't the equations for gravity non-linear, while the other 3 are linear?
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
>Nobody says what goes through my body but me! That's selfish! Mandatory trip to Chernobyl!
spodek 5y ago
If you think science has you stomach untenable ideas, it's got nothing on what a lack of science will stick you with.
canjobear 5y ago
> seems like a lame excuse for saying “we don’t know”. Dark matter/energy aren’t excuses, they’re labels for things that behave like matter and energy but whose nature is unknown.
- macintux 5y ago
  Well, dark matter at least to this layperson’s eye a label for observations that are most easily explained by matter, which is not quite the same as a “thing that behaves like matter”.
  - hluska 5y ago
    Just for the record, I’m not trying to be a jerk - I’m a layperson too. However, in science, it’s important to understand that some of the “I don’t know”s are so incredibly precise they’re not intended for the layperson. Rather, many are precise models used to help experts communicate.
  - aardvark179 5y ago
    Not exactly. Dark matter might reasonably considered a label for observations that are most easily explained by matter that only interacts with anything gravitationally. That’s really a quite strange property compared to all the other matter we see, but it does seem to explain a lot of things rather well.
lookatme 5y ago
In all seriousness, I found myself wondering about those numbers before; but consider that there's on the order of 10^27 atoms in your body. So, if we assume a trillion neutrinos in your body, that indicates that for each neutrino in your body, there are 10^15 atoms - that's one part per quadrillion! A machine capable of detecting neutrinos in your body would need to be _unimaginably_ sensitive, before even considering the intrinsic difficulty in detecting them due to low mass and neutral charge.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  Look at it this way: Solar neutrinos carry away approximately 1% of the total fusion power output of the Sun. This works out to about 14 Watts per square meter at the distance of the Earth. The area of a human adult body front-on is about a square meter. It's pretty easy to detect 14 W of typical forms of radiation at those scales! If it were light, it would be equivalent to the light put out by something like a laptop screen, spread out just a bit. You can see something like that with your eyes from a kilometer away!
  - JProthero 5y ago
    This is a great analogy, I'd never seen it translated into tangible terms like that before. I remember reading that, at close enough range, the neutrino emissions from a supernova would be intense enough to be dangerous to structures made of ordinary matter, despite the weakness of their interactions, and that they would reach an observer earlier than other forms of radiation due to their ability to escape the collapsing star relatively unimpeded. Neutrinos would be the least of your problems if you were the observer of course. As I was trying to find a source for this, I discovered there is a unit [1] for the amount of energy released by a supernova called the Foe, which seems apt (it's an acronym derived from 'ten to the power of Fifty-One-Ergs'). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foe_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foe_(unit)
    - gus_massa 5y ago
      Perhaps "Lethal Neutrinos" https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/
pvg 5y ago
John Updike wrote a poem about the crassness of neutrinos: http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~crawford/PSG/PSG21/204_97_L21.9_cosmicgall.html http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~crawford/PSG/PSG21/204_97_L21....
- JProthero 5y ago
  Excellent. I give this 10^14 / 10^14. The pedant in me wants to point out that they are now known to have some mass and do interact a bit, but this was written in 1960.
steve76 5y ago
Nothing goes through you like air through your screen door or water out your faucet. What you are made of is the medium of interaction. The outside of your atoms stays the same while the stuff on the inside interacts. Conduction and convection act with just space mediums like air and water. Electromagnetic radiation acts with space mediums and time mediums. Nature does this because it has no mind. It does things as easy and lazy as possible without the need to make sense. When you do the double slit experiment with an interference pattern, little bits of matter are not emitting. The light bulb filament and the projection screen are using their own internals as a medium of interaction. They're called particles because they have a definite start and a definite end. The temperature knob sticks while the visible color frequency stays the same. With neutrinos, the atom is staying the same temp and color, but it's loosing mass. Nature can do this as well as a bunch of other things because once again, it has no mind. Why this matters in the real world: There's a lot of things held back because of medical ethics. Porcine organ transplants for one. We don't know what diseases would occur in the real world. Genetics are today's microprocessors. Won't be surprised to see organic pharmaceuticals to follow the typewriter. It would be really nice to predict genetic mutations with a really good measurement of the sun. It would be even better to control them with absolute certitude. Emit a particle beam around the earth. Interact it with a leaky heart valve, blood in the brain, a tumor, or the cellular mitosis of a porcine organ transplant like a really good radiation machine hooked up to an antennae. The earth sees tissue bonded together with hydrogen bonds at 98.6 degrees F. The universe sees tiny little bits of quark matter and sucks it right out in a beam of plasma vapor. It would negate a lot of ethical concerns and make them trivial. Humans won't be betting on that we covered all our bases. We would have built something very real outside of nature.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cshimmin 5y ago

The trillions of neutrinos going through you are low energy neutrinos from the sun. We've been able to detect those for decades, and with only moderately pricey technology. The neutrinos in the article are high energy ones produced from proton collisions at the LHC. Although we have ways of producing neutrino beams from accelerators, the LHC is not set up for that, and these neutrinos are sparsely produced, incidentally to the high energy hadron collisions being produced there. In any case, the LHC cost at least an order of magnitude less than a trillion dollars. And the FASER experiment in particular which runs parasitically on existing LHC infrastructure runs on a shoestring budget, largely privately funded.

Noobquestion 5y ago
Noob qestion, but I am interested: um "So why the heck they doesn't 'fusion'-react their stuff in a hu liquid?", and why isn't there an energy-surplus gotten from 'friction' ? And yes, way back i read something about the (reversed) bernoulli-effect. Any help ?
- cshimmin 5y ago
  Hmmm... in good faith I'm not able to parse your question. I don't know what hu liquid is, or what you mean by "their stuff". Maybe you could try again.
  - magicalhippo 5y ago
    I had similar issues parsing the question. I've noticed a marked uptick in almost-but-not-quite comprehensible questions in the last few months in various internet venues, like Discord and Slack. Having run my own MegaHAL[1] on IRC back in the days, it made me think about if someone is having fun with a new generation AI chat bots... Not saying that is the case here though. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaHAL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MegaHAL

aardvark179 5y ago

It’s interesting that you class dark energy (the thing accelerating universal expansion) as, “We don’t know,” but don’t put gravity into that same category. They are both aspects of general relativity that we have failed to integrate with our other most successful fundamental theories, but if you asked an average person on the street I’m sure they’d put them in very different categories of understanding, as you did.

Ma8ee 5y ago
The thing with gravity is that it is kind of easy to detect, even for a layperson, while dark energy and dark matter haven't been detected at all, by anyone, but only used as mathematical devices to make indirect measurements of large scale structures align with our models. So, it isn't only the "average man on the street" that thinks there are good reasons to put them in very different categories of understanding.
- mnw21cam 5y ago
  Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1489/ https://xkcd.com/1489/ The mouseover-text is the important bit: "Of these four forces, there's one we don't really understand." "Is it the weak force or the strong--" "It's gravity." That's even though it's the one with the simplest equations.
  - Ma8ee 5y ago
    Is that an attempt to appeal to authority?
    - kergonath 5y ago
      Worse than that: an appeal to the reader’s sense of humour.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    > That's even though [gravity]'s the one with the simplest equations. Aren't the equations for gravity non-linear, while the other 3 are linear?

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

>Nobody says what goes through my body but me! That's selfish! Mandatory trip to Chernobyl!

spodek 5y ago

If you think science has you stomach untenable ideas, it's got nothing on what a lack of science will stick you with.

canjobear 5y ago

> seems like a lame excuse for saying “we don’t know”. Dark matter/energy aren’t excuses, they’re labels for things that behave like matter and energy but whose nature is unknown.

macintux 5y ago
Well, dark matter at least to this layperson’s eye a label for observations that are most easily explained by matter, which is not quite the same as a “thing that behaves like matter”.
- hluska 5y ago
  Just for the record, I’m not trying to be a jerk - I’m a layperson too. However, in science, it’s important to understand that some of the “I don’t know”s are so incredibly precise they’re not intended for the layperson. Rather, many are precise models used to help experts communicate.
- aardvark179 5y ago
  Not exactly. Dark matter might reasonably considered a label for observations that are most easily explained by matter that only interacts with anything gravitationally. That’s really a quite strange property compared to all the other matter we see, but it does seem to explain a lot of things rather well.

lookatme 5y ago

In all seriousness, I found myself wondering about those numbers before; but consider that there's on the order of 10^27 atoms in your body. So, if we assume a trillion neutrinos in your body, that indicates that for each neutrino in your body, there are 10^15 atoms - that's one part per quadrillion! A machine capable of detecting neutrinos in your body would need to be _unimaginably_ sensitive, before even considering the intrinsic difficulty in detecting them due to low mass and neutral charge.

jiggawatts 5y ago
Look at it this way: Solar neutrinos carry away approximately 1% of the total fusion power output of the Sun. This works out to about 14 Watts per square meter at the distance of the Earth. The area of a human adult body front-on is about a square meter. It's pretty easy to detect 14 W of typical forms of radiation at those scales! If it were light, it would be equivalent to the light put out by something like a laptop screen, spread out just a bit. You can see something like that with your eyes from a kilometer away!
- JProthero 5y ago
  This is a great analogy, I'd never seen it translated into tangible terms like that before. I remember reading that, at close enough range, the neutrino emissions from a supernova would be intense enough to be dangerous to structures made of ordinary matter, despite the weakness of their interactions, and that they would reach an observer earlier than other forms of radiation due to their ability to escape the collapsing star relatively unimpeded. Neutrinos would be the least of your problems if you were the observer of course. As I was trying to find a source for this, I discovered there is a unit [1] for the amount of energy released by a supernova called the Foe, which seems apt (it's an acronym derived from 'ten to the power of Fifty-One-Ergs'). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foe_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foe_(unit)
  - gus_massa 5y ago
    Perhaps "Lethal Neutrinos" https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/

pvg 5y ago

John Updike wrote a poem about the crassness of neutrinos: http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~crawford/PSG/PSG21/204_97_L21.9_cosmicgall.html http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~crawford/PSG/PSG21/204_97_L21....

JProthero 5y ago
Excellent. I give this 10^14 / 10^14. The pedant in me wants to point out that they are now known to have some mass and do interact a bit, but this was written in 1960.

steve76 5y ago

Nothing goes through you like air through your screen door or water out your faucet. What you are made of is the medium of interaction. The outside of your atoms stays the same while the stuff on the inside interacts. Conduction and convection act with just space mediums like air and water. Electromagnetic radiation acts with space mediums and time mediums. Nature does this because it has no mind. It does things as easy and lazy as possible without the need to make sense. When you do the double slit experiment with an interference pattern, little bits of matter are not emitting. The light bulb filament and the projection screen are using their own internals as a medium of interaction. They're called particles because they have a definite start and a definite end. The temperature knob sticks while the visible color frequency stays the same. With neutrinos, the atom is staying the same temp and color, but it's loosing mass. Nature can do this as well as a bunch of other things because once again, it has no mind. Why this matters in the real world: There's a lot of things held back because of medical ethics. Porcine organ transplants for one. We don't know what diseases would occur in the real world. Genetics are today's microprocessors. Won't be surprised to see organic pharmaceuticals to follow the typewriter. It would be really nice to predict genetic mutations with a really good measurement of the sun. It would be even better to control them with absolute certitude. Emit a particle beam around the earth. Interact it with a leaky heart valve, blood in the brain, a tumor, or the cellular mitosis of a porcine organ transplant like a really good radiation machine hooked up to an antennae. The earth sees tissue bonded together with hydrogen bonds at 98.6 degrees F. The universe sees tiny little bits of quark matter and sucks it right out in a beam of plasma vapor. It would negate a lot of ethical concerns and make them trivial. Humans won't be betting on that we covered all our bases. We would have built something very real outside of nature.