Science News, New Scientist, etc: A “sterile” neutrino may shake up physics (or, when is a quote so good you might need to explain it?)
This is a post on some hot neutrino news, mainly, but also and more on my mind it is about quotes that jump out to the reporter as perfect. They are so perfect they may need to be handled with care.
The news is that recent examination of neutrinos spat out by Fermilab near Chicago and detected 450 miles, or about 725 km, away in their ghostly rarity in the underground Soudan Iron Mine laboratory found slight evidence that some neutrinos have more mass than others. The difference shows up when comparing neutrinos to their anti-neutrino versions. None are going to weigh very much, all down in the realm of billionths of a proton mass, but that’s a problem. Evidence is that all neutrinos travel at about the same near-light-speed rate. But that requires they all have very much the same teensy mass and that a given neutrino and its corresponding anti-neutrino have identical mass. Now it looks like their masses may vary. Ergo: problem.
Hot out now on line is a feature at Science News by prolific reporter Ron Cowen under the hed Neutrino experiments sow seeds of possible revolution . He gives the story his usual, resourceful treatment, with opinions offered from sundry people and, as is his custom, not much reliance on press releases.
I first went wow, and then thought to myself huh?, upon reading a quote in here from a theorist. It makes perfectly the point that this is potentially a big deal. The man tells Cowen that the data “could even signal a tiny breakdown of Einstein’s theory of special relativity…this could completely alter the way we are doing physics now.” As I say, oh boy wow. Completely alter it. But wait a second. Really, completely alter every part of what? And who is we? You may see the problem already. Is it just the theorists group, or all his colleagues who worry about some aspects of special relativity, or all facets of Einstein’s legacy, or all physicists? Even allowing for hyperbole, the neurotic journalist must ask him or herself, can this quote stand without crutches? One somehow doubts that a physicist puzzling over the computational prowess of entangled photons needs to change his experiments if neutrinos defy Uncle Albert. But if one throws in a caveat like “Physicist X said, of his corner of an arcane field in field theory, that ‘This changes everything’” that just clutters things up. It’s a problem.
Other than that, and its not much to quibble over, Cowens piece handles this about as well as can be expected at this length. It’s a tough topic. The piece out now follows a previous article by Cowen, June 1: Elusive Neutrino Change-Up Finally Detected ;
Other outlets took their own whacks at the news:
- New Scientist – David Shiga: Sterile neutrino back from the dead ;
- Ars Technica – John Timmer: Unexpected antineutrino masses a puzzler for Standard Model;
Other recent neutrino news:
- BBC – Paul Rincon: Neutrino ‘ghost particle’ sized up by astronomers ; Different observations (with telescopes) help narrow error bar around neutrino mass (or masses).
- Scientific American – Steve Mirsky: Neutrino Mass Upper Limit Estimated by Galactic Distribution ;
- Charlie Petit
Grist for the Mill: Fermilab Press Release ; Indiana University Press Release ;
