Krauss on neutrinos and the Nobel Prize

October 9, 2015 • 1:15 pm

I’m jealous that Lawrence Krauss seems to have secured a regular gig as a New Yorker columnist. Don’t they need a biologist or anything?

However, you can’t fault him,  as the man writes a good column. His newest one, “What neutrinos reveal,” is straight physics, so presumably it won’t alienate anyone, even Edward “I Can Prove God With Philosophy” Feser. Here Krauss writes about neutrinos, or rather why Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that neutrinos have mass. It’s a very good short description of the work’s importance, and of the new questions it opens up. A snippet:

This is exotic and amazing stuff, but why should neutrino oscillations and neutrino masses be worthy of popular, or even scientific, interest? The reason is simple. In the standard model of particle physics, developed throughout the last fifty years of the twentieth century—the model which has correctly described every other observation that has been made in particle accelerators and other experiments, and which represents perhaps the greatest intellectual adventure that science has ever seen—neutrinos have to be massless. The discovery of a massive neutrino, therefore, tells us that something is missing. The standard model cannot be complete. There is new physics remaining to be discovered, perhaps at the Large Hadron Collider, or by means of another machine that has yet to be built.

20 thoughts on “Krauss on neutrinos and the Nobel Prize”

  1. the question is…..what does Deepak have to say about this new discovery in cosmic consciousness??

    lolz.

  3. The two books that got me fascinated by science as a kid were Martin Gardner’s writings on general relativity and Isaac Asimov’s book on the neutrino, both accessible to reasonably nerdy junior high school students.

    -=-=-

    The posting on Feser the other day piqeud my interest when I caught it re the Witherspoon connection.

    The Witherspoon Institute that Feser belongs to is named after John Witherspoon, the only clergyman (or college president) to sign the Declaration of Independence.
    I suspect they picked the name simply because they are in Princeton NJ, and Witherspoon was president of the school at the time (then College of New Jersey, now Princeton University).

    But Witherspoon was fairly progressive in his day, a champion of Enlightenment approaches to ethics and morality and a champion of scientific research, though he strove to accomodate this to Christianity.

    The far far more liberal (and religious) Witherspoon Society (now merged into Presbyterian Voices for Justice) with its focus on justice for gays, gender equality, environmental activism and many other worthy causes, is a better testament to the legacy of John Witherspoon that the W Institute with its focus on opposition to same-sex marriage using methodologically flawed pseudo-scientific studies.

    Actress Reese Witherspoon has claimed to be a direct descendant of JW but this has never been verified.

    1. Or, as has been said before, one years noise is another year’s measurement and a later year’s calibration standard.

    2. On the other hand, I suppose it’s possible that it all ends someday. Someone writes the last paper documenting the finishing off study putting a cap on human knowledge of the universe…the few remaining scientists, pushed into early retirement, like so many IBM engineers.

  6. I did not know that the Standard Model required neutrinos to have zero mass. I remember that they were proposed by Fermi (at Chicago, yes?) to explain some missing energy from atom smashing experiments. I guess I assumed they had mass, but I now realize that carrying away energy does not require mass. Still, I read a lot of popular physics (I’m in the natural sciences) and I don’t think a lot of those sources make it clear neutrinos with mass, which was established not long ago, is rather a problem for Standard Model.

    1. Hmmm.. on my reading the announcement of this Nobel Prize the report seemed to infer that unless some mass for neutrinos was found, the standard model wouldn’t allow for any such “oscillations”. It is rather sad that there is a branch of science so incomprehensible to the layperson that we have to take EVERYTHING on trust from experts in the field. If Krauss or his peers published findings that neutrinos were responsible for the flavor of taco sauce I would be forced to accept this as credible. Perhaps it is?

      1. Well, you can trust that if one expert in the field makes a claim that can be contradicted by experiment or evidence, another will call him/her on it.

  7. I know nothing about particle physics but am aware of the ‘big’ issues, via popular science media.

    However, this article sums up everything that is right, and good, about science. A long, cherished belief (well I assume it was cherished) has been shown to be wrong. Oh dear, surely we need to re-interpret the evidence, or even ditch it, make it fit what we want to believe. But no…the evidence is there and now scientists have to come up with a new model. And what’s really interesting is that they are excited about it.

    Ken Ham please note.

  8. I think the most exciting thing about the Standard Model…is that we know it’s incomplete!

    A century and a bit ago, physics was basically complete, with just a couple loose ends here and there to tie down — minor little inconsequential details, like an almost-unnoticeable deviation in Mercury’s orbit (presumably from an as-yet-undiscovered planet) and the nature of the atom.

    And then, as we kept pressing…Newton fell apart. And we got Quantum Mechanics and Relativity!

    Today, the Standard Model is on even firmer ground than Newton ever was (and, make no mistrake, Newton is still on ground as firm as what you’re on right now)…but it’s falling apart in much the same way. We know there’s dark matter and dark energy but don’t know what it is, we know neutrinos don’t have mass but don’t know how, and so on.

    At the same time as we’ve closed the books on quantum-, human-, and relativistic-scale physics (thanks to the discovery of the Higgs), we’ve opened the door to…what?

    Stay tuned…we’ll hopefully find out….

    b&

    1. A century and a bit ago, physics was basically complete, with just a couple loose ends here and there to tie down

      That was a claim that was made by IIRC Lord Kelvin, but not as far as I know by anyone else, and even at the time there were major cracks in the edifices of physics and the completeness which Kelvin thought he saw.
      IF I remember correctly, Kelvin made the claim in a turn of the century speech for someone like the Royal Society, but even at the time there were –

      The orbital eccentricity (literally) of Mercury, which had been known of for around 50 years, and despite the success with finding Neptune, nobody could find the damned elusive planet. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but failure to find something that should be there ought to be a strong warning to check one’s premises ;
      Radioactivity was in it’s infancy, but it was certainly known – Becquerel had discovered it, the Curies were well down the road to extracting polonium and radium, and Rutherford was on his way to take up a post in England where he really got a good grip on the subject;
      Lorentz and others working on the speed of light were getting results which didn’t add up with conventional physics, and were coming up with weird effects, the maths of which (Lorentz contractions – 1 /((1-v^2)/c^2) should appear suspiciously familiar from …
      A certain Swiss patent clerk was actually taking Kelvin’s own work seriously, and coming up with theoretical results in the electrodynamics of moving bodies which were well and truly weird (but probably too theoretical for a Nobel, so he also did some work on Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect, itself building on …
      Max Planck had been trying to calculate the so-called black body problem, and had to postulate that energy moved around in quanta, not as a continuum.
      Even while Kelvin (if it was him ; I’m pretty sure it was) made that frankly headline-grabbing claim, there were major cracks in the edifice of the physics that he was describing as complete, and he probably knew that they were there. But he indulged in a bit of headline grabbing nonetheless. I don’t think it was a carefully thought-out assertion.

    1. Their numbers might account for it, but I am curious if their distribution does, since they do not stop for pretty much anything.

    2. The upper bound on the mass of the three known varieties of neutrinos is low enough that they cannot contribute very much to the dark matter. They also wouldn’t be “cold” enough to cause galaxy and cluster formation.

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