What a Neutrino Really Is… And Why It Passes Through Everything

Описание: Right now, 100 trillion neutrinos are passing through your body every single second. They come from the heart of the sun, from exploding stars, and from the very first second after the Big Bang. They pass through the entire Earth as if it doesn't exist. In your entire lifetime, maybe one will ever touch an atom inside you.

This is the full story of the neutrino - the lightest, most abundant, and most elusive massive particle in the universe. We explore how Wolfgang Pauli first proposed a particle no one could detect to save the law of energy conservation, how it took 26 years before Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan finally caught one using a nuclear reactor, and why this "ghost particle" passes through a light-year of solid lead with only a 50/50 chance of being stopped.

We break down the four fundamental forces of nature to explain exactly why neutrinos are invisible to ordinary matter - it's not magic, it's probability. We follow the incredible experiments built to catch them: a tank of cleaning fluid buried in a gold mine, 50,000 tons of ultra-pure water watched by 11,000 light sensors in a Japanese mine, a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice instrumented at the South Pole, and the heavy water detector in Canada that finally solved the 30-year solar neutrino mystery.

We cover neutrino oscillations, the discovery that neutrinos change identity as they travel (proving they have mass and earning two Nobel Prizes), and the detection of neutrinos from Supernova 1987A - particles that arrived roughly three hours before the light, carrying news of a star's death from about 168,000 light-years away.

And we look ahead: the cosmic neutrino background (relics from 1 second after the Big Bang still filling every cubic centimeter of space), the search for the neutrino's true mass, whether neutrinos are their own antiparticle, and whether they hold the answer to why the universe contains matter at all.

KEY SOURCES:
Reines, F. & Cowan, C.L. (1956). "The Neutrino." Nature, 178, 446–449.
https://www.nature.com/articles/178446a0

Fukuda, Y. et al. [Super-Kamiokande Collaboration] (1998). "Evidence for Oscillation of Atmospheric Neutrinos." Physical Review Letters, 81(8), 1562–1567.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

Ahmad, Q.R. et al. [SNO Collaboration] (2002). "Direct Evidence for Neutrino Flavor Transformation from Neutral-Current Interactions in SNO." Physical Review Letters, 89(1), 011301.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

Hirata, K. et al. [Kamiokande-II] (1987). "Observation of a Neutrino Burst from the Supernova SN1987A." Physical Review Letters, 58(14), 1490–1493.
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...

IceCube Collaboration et al. (2018). "Multimessenger Observations of a Flaring Blazar Coincident with High-Energy Neutrino IceCube-170922A." Science, 361(6398), eaat1378.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s...

#neutrino #physics #space #science #ghostparticle #quantumphysics #particlephysics