Weekend Diversion: Neutrinos on your radio computer!

Posted by Ethan on November 27, 2011
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“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.” -Albert Einstein


Long superseded by television and the internet, the radio perhaps is better seen today as a symbol of nostalgia than as one of paramount relevance to modern life. You can perhaps get a feel for this from Josh Ritter‘s live performance (from Dublin Castle) of his song,

Golden Age Of Radio.
But this weekend, while the world bombards you with the traditional end-of-year advertising blitz, why not take the time to have your deepest neutrino questions answered for free?

Image credit: NASA, ESA, K. France, P. Challis and R. Kirshner.

From the latest OPERA results to the neutrinos made in supernovae, this is your biggest opportunity to ask me whatever you want about neutrinos live!

Want to know just how the OPERA experiment works, in all its gory detail?

Image credit: National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Italy.

Want to know what should happen if neutrinos really are moving faster than light, and why we’d expect them to slow down? (Hint: it’s the same reason that nuclear reactors glow blue!)

Image credit: McMaster University's research nuclear reactor.

Want to watch a real-time interview with me unfold and ask your questions live on the show? Then come by Skeptically Speaking’s UStream.tv channel at 6 PM Mountain Standard Time tonight, which is 8 PM EST / 5 PM PST / 1 AM (tomorrow, 28 Nov) Universal Time! Guest host Rachelle Saunders is set to interview me live for the Edmonton-based show!

Go and ask your questions any time between now and the interview, and if you miss the live recording (or prefer the polished, edited version), go and download the entire episode here anytime after Friday, December 2nd, in podcast form.

So enjoy all the modern interactivity of our tech-savvy world while you sate your nostalgia for — at least if you live in the US — fair and factual information on the radio! And no mater what you do, enjoy the rest of a great weekend!

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  1. #1 Sinisa Lazarek
    November 27, 2011

    Am in Europe so shame we won’t be able to participate :( But will surely listen to podcast afterwards. Good luck!

  2. #2 bibliovore
    November 27, 2011

    Can we ask our questions here? Because I have one. Or two.

    I attempted to read and didn’t understand the Cohen-Glashow paper that states “superluminal neutrinos would lose energy rapidly via
    the bremsstrahlung of electron-positron pairs” (arXiv:1109.6562v1 [hep-ph]). If this claim is true, I imagine it can be experimentally confirmed by searching for those electron-positron pairs during neutrino production. Are there experiments underway to do this? And is anyone looking at prior data to rule out the possibility that other interaction products may be initially superluminal but dump their energies via the same process?

  3. #3 Ethan Siegel
    November 27, 2011

    bibliovore,

    You’re free to post them here, but the show’s host will never see them, and you’ll be relying on me to bring the topics up and work them in to the interview.

    You’re most welcome to head on over to the show’s homepage, and submit your questions there:

    http://skepticallyspeaking.ca/episodes/140-speedy-neutrinos

  4. #4 ScarecrowJack
    November 27, 2011

    They didn’t get a chance to give you my question on air but it was: if neutrinos can oscillate between each other and you say they have different weights. How can they change weights from 3500 times heavier then a electron to 200 times heavier? As they change?

  5. #5 uglybb
    November 27, 2011

    My problem with your statement of what should happen Ethan is it is correct if we know what is actually hapening.

    Remember we have seen superluminal light before as demonstrated by L. J. Wang, A. Kuzmich & A. Dogariu back in 2000 and that was done via gain assisted media.

    What I would say is if the nuetrinos are going superluminal it is not in the conventional way we expect as eplained by the Cohen-Glashow paper but it is not proof they are not using another mechanism.

  6. #6 phayes
    November 27, 2011

    @uglybb

    “Notes added on how this model evades the Cohen-Glashow constraints”

    http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.6296

  7. #7 uglybb
    November 28, 2011

    Your creating Lorentz-violating models which would be completely new physics.

    L. J. Wang, A. Kuzmich & A. Dogariu superluminal observation was done by preping a special media
    (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v406/n6793/abs/406277a0.html)

    This is not a theory its readily done and no it doesn’t break any laws of general relativity.

    Our little nuetrinos are passing through matter from CERN to OPERA they are not travelling through a vacuum.

    So it is quite possible nuetrinos see matter as a media and that changes everything.

  8. #8 Robert S.
    December 8, 2011

    Sorry for the thread necromancy

    Here is a nice little response to the nature paper that is in arxiv. A lot of the surrounding data seems to have been on a web page that doesn’t exist anymore, but give this was more then 10 years ago, and we aren’t receiving messages from our future yet I think history has spoken.
    http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0209/0209012.pdf

  9. #9 abdullah
    February 29, 2012

    الموضوع يفتقر الى صور المفاعلات النووية بأنواعها نرجو الرد على عنواني