4 ms·
I also wonder this! Some real physicist tell me what I’m getting wrong here: neutrinos have mass but the magnitude is so infinitesimally small, and the oscill
by cobbzilla 3mo ago
I also wonder this!
Some real physicist tell me what I’m getting wrong here:
neutrinos have mass but the magnitude is so infinitesimally small, and the oscillation smaller still, such that you’re bumping up against some fundamental properties of the universe and the oscillation is “borrowing” and “returning” some tiny amount of mass/energy from the vacuum.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- falseprofit 3mo agoNot a physicist, but here are a couple Wikipedia excerpts I found: From page “Conservation of mass”: “In general, mass is not conserved. The conservation of mass is a law that holds only in the classical limit.” From page “Neutrino oscillation”: “Neutrino oscillation arises from mixing between the flavor and mass eigenstates of neutrinos. That is, the three neutrino states that interact with the charged leptons in weak interactions are each a different superposition of the three (propagating) neutrino states of definite mass. Neutrinos are produced and detected in weak interactions as flavour eigenstates[a] but propagate as coherent superpositions of mass eigenstates.[23]”
- cobbzilla 3mo agoso it’s changing mass/energy with itself? and the whole thing says constant? I guess that makes sense.
- falseprofit 3mo agoMaybe it isn’t changing mass at all, and what’s changing is just the probability distribution resulting from a hypothetical flavor measurement. If we could measure the mass (collapse to mass eigenstate), I think I understand we would see no oscillation.