SCIENTISTS are the organised sort, putting together charts and lists of the constituent parts of the natural world in a bid to make sense of it. Chemists have the periodic table, which outlines all the chemical elements. For physicists, things remain a bit more tentative: they have the Standard Model, a recipe listing all the particles and forces (except gravity, which has its own rules) from which the universe is made. On that list are three slippery characters: the neutrinos. Although few facts are known about them, perhaps the most important is that they have mass. It is such a striking finding, in fact, that Sweden's Royal Academy of Science granted this year's Nobel prize in physics to Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur McDonald of Canada, for having proved it.
Neutrinos, meaning "little neutral ones" in Italian, were proposed in 1930 as a way to balance out the equations of nuclear decay. Once physicists agreed that they existed, it became clear that there must be a great many of them. They seep from the Earth's core, stream from the sun, and scoot across the galaxy from far-flung supernovae. Yet they are exceptionally disinclined to interact with any of their other...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1j3IJmY
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