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Neutrinos have been detected at last! How big is this?


The very existence of neutrinos is something that admirers of The Big Bang Theory (the television show, not the actual theory) might think of in terms of a conversation between Leonard and Sheldon. 

The theoretical physicists (Sheldon Cooper's real-world colleagues) have been saying they exist for a long time now. Since a paper in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli. 

But the experimentalists (Leonard Hofstadter's tribe) have never been able to find one of the little buggers. 

Now, it seems they have. Leonard has reported this and Sheldon has said "I told you so." 

Heck, the Japanese built a huge facility specifically devoted to the detection of neutrinos, called the Super Kamiokande. In essence, it is a big tank of water with a lot of photomultiplier tubes in it. The tubes allow the physicists to watch for the predicted "Cherenkov radiation." Whatever that is supposed to be. It didn't help.

Now, the credit for the key experimental observation goes to the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. 

 The LHC generally works by colliding high-energy particle beams into one another. The energy of the impacts becomes matter in the form of exotic subatomic particles. 

In a particular recent run at the LHC, the experimentalists employed a new emulsion detector, made of metal plates interspersed with emulsion layers. This works like the film in old-school photography. (Kids, ask your parents.)  

Particles collided during the test, as planned, and this produced neutrinos which smashed into the dense metal of the plates, creating observable imprints in the emulsion. Not so much the neutrino as the wake of a neutrino. Still, a breakthrough. 

I do wish somebody would explain how big of a breakthrough this is. Assume I know nothing more about the assumption than Penny. How much if at all does this change what we know about how the world works that we can now be sure neutrinos exist? 

Somewhere on a cloud, the spirit of Wolfgang Pauli is smiling. He looks rather grim in the above photo, though. 

Elusive neutrino candidates detected in breakthrough physics experiment | Space

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