Posted on 06/03/2018 1:08:06 PM PDT by ETL
Pip-squeak particles called neutrinos are dishing out more than scientists had bargained for.
A particle detector has spotted a puzzling abundance of the lightweight subatomic particles and their antimatter partners, antineutrinos, physicists report May 30 at arXiv.org. The finding mirrors a neutrino excess found more than two decades ago. And that match has researchers wondering if a new type of particle called a sterile neutrino — one even more shadowy than the famously elusive ordinary neutrinos — might be at large.
Such a particle, if it exists, would transform the foundations of particle physics and could help solve cosmic puzzles like the existence of dark matter, an unidentified inert substance that makes up the preponderance of the matter in the universe.
The new study was conducted with a neutrino detector called MiniBooNE, while the previous neutrino excess was found with a different apparatus, the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector, which operated in the 1990s at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “We have two very different detectors … and we have the same results,” says MiniBooNE physicist En-Chuan Huang of Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Hints of excess neutrinos have shown up in earlier results from MiniBooNE, which has been operating since 2002 at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill. But the new research includes twice as much data, making the neutrino deluge too strong to ignore.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
Apparently Einstein agreed with your view cuz he’s reputed to have pretty much hated quantum mechanics. And physics has only gotten weirder since then.
I imagine there are an infinite number of particles. We are not meant to completely understand the universe there will constantly be stumbling blocks put in our way on purpose imo.
A neutrino is a fermion (an elementary particle with half-integer spin) that interacts only via the weak subatomic force and gravity.[2][3]
The mass of the neutrino is much smaller than that of the other known elementary particles.[1]
Although only differences of squares of the three mass values are known as of 2016,[4] cosmological observations imply that the sum of the three masses must be less than one millionth that of the electron.[1][5]
The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass is so small (-ino) that it was long thought to be zero. The weak force has a very short range, gravity is extremely weak on the subatomic scale, and neutrinos, as leptons, do not participate in the strong interaction. Thus, neutrinos typically pass through normal matter unimpeded and undetected.[2][3]
Weak interactions create neutrinos in one of three leptonic flavors: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, or tau neutrinos, in association with the corresponding charged lepton.[6]
Although neutrinos were long believed to be massless, it is now known that there are three discrete neutrino masses with different tiny values, but they do not correspond uniquely to the three flavors.
A neutrino created with a specific flavor is in an associated specific quantum superposition of all three mass states. As a result, neutrinos oscillate between different flavors in flight. For example, an electron neutrino produced in a beta decay reaction may interact in a distant detector as a muon or tau neutrino.[7][8]
For each neutrino, there also exists a corresponding antiparticle, called an antineutrino, which also has half-integer spin and no electric charge.
They are distinguished from the neutrinos by having opposite signs of lepton number and chirality.
To conserve total lepton number, in nuclear beta decay, electron neutrinos appear together with only positrons (anti-electrons) or electron-antineutrinos, and electron antineutrinos with electrons or electron neutrinos.[9][10]
Neutrinos are created by various radioactive decays, including in beta decay of atomic nuclei or hadrons, nuclear reactions such as those that take place in the core of a star or artificially in nuclear reactors, nuclear bombs or particle accelerators, during a supernova, in the spin-down of a neutron star, or when accelerated particle beams or cosmic rays strike atoms.
The majority of neutrinos in the vicinity of the Earth are from nuclear reactions in the Sun. In the vicinity of the Earth, about 65 billion (6.5×1010) solar neutrinos per second pass through every square centimeter perpendicular to the direction of the Sun.[11][12]
For study, neutrinos can be created artificially with nuclear reactors and particle accelerators.
There is intense research activity involving neutrinos, with goals that include the determination of the three neutrino mass values, the measurement of the degree of CP violation in the leptonic sector (leading to leptogenesis); and searches for evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, such as neutrinoless double beta decay, which would be evidence for violation of lepton number conservation. Neutrinos can also be used for tomography of the interior of the earth.[13][14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino
Yet, no doubt we know only a fraction of a fraction about God's amazing universe.
So much more to learn and many more wonderful discoveries to be made!
WINNING!
I think it’s cosmic nutria. And they are creating rat-hats.
Probably due to the influx of illegal migrant neutrinos...
There is an infinite number of particles so gonna be a long journey of discovery.
I don’t recall which book it was in, but C.S. Lewis pointed out his aversion for the word, “supernatural.” His position was that labeling something as supernatural presupposes that mankind has a full grasp and understanding of all nature, which we clearly do not. Just because something lies beyond our knowledge or understanding does not mean it isn’t natural.
I’m reminded of that every time I read an article like this...
True, but my suspicion is that the fundamental nature of the universe is such that we can never know fully what is at the core of things.
Lol!
He grudgingly accepted QM, because nothing came along that fit the known data points, made better predictions and preserved determinism. He had to accept probabilistic interpretations and the loss of determinism. God indeed throws dice & is not just the creator but the croupier of the universe.
Quantum nonlocality
In theoretical physics, quantum nonlocality most commonly refers to the phenomenon by which measurements made at a microscopic level contradict a collection of notions known as local realism that are regarded as intuitively true in classical mechanics.
However, some quantum mechanical predictions of multi-system measurement statistics on entangled quantum states cannot be simulated by any local hidden variable theory.
An explicit example is demonstrated by Bell’s theorem, which has been verified by experiment.[1]
Experiments have generally favoured quantum mechanics as a description of nature, over local hidden variable theories.[2][3]
Any physical theory that supersedes or replaces quantum theory must make similar experimental predictions and must therefore also be nonlocal in this sense; quantum nonlocality is a property of the universe that is independent of our description of nature.
Quantum nonlocality does not allow for faster-than-light communication,[4] and hence is compatible with special relativity.
However, it prompts many of the foundational discussions concerning quantum theory. ...’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_nonlocality
The universe is made up of protons, electrons, neutrons and morons.
To say the universe is vast with all it's near infinite secrets would be an understatement.
IMO, the earth will the engulfed by the sun before humans even come close to understanding it all...assuming we survive on this planet for that long.
Yep you just use it because it works. As one of my professors said, “Just play the game! Question the rules later!”. He was talking about passing his QM tests.
EPR paradox
The Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox or the EPR paradox[1] of 1935 is a thought experiment in quantum mechanics with which Albert Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (EPR) claimed to demonstrate that the wave function does not provide a complete description of physical reality, and hence that the Copenhagen interpretation is unsatisfactory; resolutions of the paradox have important implications for the interpretation of quantum mechanics.
The essence of the paradox is that particles can interact in such a way that it is possible to measure both their position and their momentum more accurately than Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle allows, unless measuring one particle instantaneously affects the other to prevent this accuracy, which would involve information being transmitted faster than light as forbidden by the theory of relativity (”spooky action at a distance”). This consequence had not previously been noticed and seemed unreasonable at the time; the phenomenon involved is now known as quantum entanglement.
Per EPR, the paradox demonstrated that quantum theory was incomplete, and needed to be extended with hidden variables. The modern resolution is as follows: for two “entangled” particles created at once (e.g. an electron-positron pair from a photon), measurable properties have well-defined meaning only for the ensemble system.
Properties of constituent subsystems (e.g. the individual electron or positron), considered individually, remain undefined. Therefore, if analogous measurements are performed on the two entangled subsystems, there will always be a correlation between the outcomes, and a well-defined global outcome for the ensemble.
However, the outcomes for each subsystem, considered separately, at each repetition of the experiment, will not be well defined or predictable. This correlation does not imply that measurements performed on one particle influence measurements on the other. The modern resolution eliminates the need for hidden variables, action at a distance, or other schemes introduced over time, in order to explain the phenomenon.
A preference for the latter resolution is supported by experiments suggested by Bell’s theorem of 1964, which exclude some classes of hidden variable theory.
According to quantum mechanics, under some conditions, a pair of quantum systems may be described by a single wave function, which encodes the probabilities of the outcomes of experiments that may be performed on the two systems, whether jointly or individually.
At the time the EPR article discussed below was written, it was known from experiments that the outcome of an experiment sometimes cannot be uniquely predicted. An example of such indeterminacy can be seen when a beam of light is incident on a half-silvered mirror. One half of the beam will reflect, and the other will pass.
If the intensity of the beam is reduced until only one photon is in transit at any time, whether that photon will reflect or transmit cannot be predicted quantum mechanically.
The routine explanation of this effect was, at that time, provided by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Physical quantities come in pairs called conjugate quantities.
Examples of such conjugate pairs are (position, momentum), (time, energy), and (angular position, angular momentum). When one quantity was measured, and became determined, the conjugated quantity became indeterminate.
Heisenberg explained this uncertainty as due to the quantization of the disturbance from measurement.
The EPR paper, written in 1935, was intended to illustrate that this explanation is inadequate. It considered two entangled particles, referred to as A and B, and pointed out that measuring a quantity of a particle A will cause the conjugated quantity of particle B to become undetermined, even if there was no contact, no classical disturbance.
The basic idea was that the quantum states of two particles in a system cannot always be decomposed from the joint state of the two, as is the case for the Bell state [see link]
Heisenberg’s principle was an attempt to provide a classical explanation of a quantum effect sometimes called non-locality. According to EPR there were two possible explanations.
Either there was some interaction between the particles (even though they were separated) or the information about the outcome of all possible measurements was already present in both particles.
The EPR authors preferred the second explanation according to which that information was encoded in some ‘hidden parameters’.
The first explanation of an effect propagating instantly across a distance is in conflict with the theory of relativity. They then concluded that quantum mechanics was incomplete since its formalism does not permit hidden parameters.
Violations of the conclusions of Bell’s theorem are generally understood to have demonstrated that the hypotheses of Bell’s theorem, also assumed by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, do not apply in our world.[2]
Most physicists who have examined the issue concur that experiments, such as those of Alain Aspect and his group, have confirmed that physical probabilities, as predicted by quantum theory, do exhibit the phenomena of Bell-inequality violations that are considered to invalidate EPR’s preferred “local hidden-variables” type of explanation for the correlations to which EPR first drew attention.[3][4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox
Can we say that God doesn’t know the outcome of the dice before he throws them? Of course, God is used only metaphorically in this case. If quantum mechanics is weird because we don’t understand it, the creator of it must be even weirder.
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