[VadeRetro]

Well, first of all, neutrinos are pretty 'iffy' right now as to whether they've actually been detected at all.

Neutrinos got detected in the late '40s or early '50s. We knew to look for them because some kind of missing "little neutral thing" was needed to account for the variable energy sum of the then-detectable particles (proton and electron) coming out of neutron decay. One neutron being like another, conservation of energy demanded that the sum of the energies should be a constant and it wasn't. Thus there had to be another product, something hard to detect.

Although most neutrinos pass through the Earth without interacting with anything, some few will hit. We now detect supernova events like SN1987A from the spike in neutrinos.

[NJ_gent]

I was under the impression that neutrinos had been believed to have been detected, but that the tools to detect them lacked the precision to do so reliably. If I'm mistaken there, then it was a bad example to use in that list. :-)