Man-Made Neutrinos Play Three Card Monte

The mystery of missing solar neutrinos was one of the greatest puzzles in physics during the past thirty years. These elusive subatomic particles should have been produced in known, measurable quantities by the Sun’s nuclear reactions and measurable on Earth, but no matter how hard physicists looked, the expected neutrinos just weren’t there. One of the possible solutions whispered among physicists was that the Sun had literally shut down on the inside and humanity was living on borrowed time, soon to be extinct as the oceans froze to ice. Fortunately the answer to the mystery turned out to be new physics discoveries, not a dead star, so there were Nobel Prize parties in 2002 instead of a worldwide wake. Turns out that neutrinos can unexpectedly “oscillate” and change into different forms on their long trip from the Sun to Earth. Early measurement experiments were simply looking for the wrong type of neutrino; despite their doctorate degrees, the scientists involved were basically betting on the wrong card in a cosmic version of three-card monte. Now an experiment reported last week verifies transforming oscillations occur in man-made neutrinos from nuclear reactors traveling over much shorter distances. The result is “vital confirmation of the real reason for the neutrino disappearance and flavour change seen by the other [solar] experiments,” says physicist David Wark of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England.