What is a Neutrino?
A particle with very low mass, around that of an electron, and no electrical charge, the neutrino is an elusive subatomic particle. The neutrino is so shy that the duration between the theorization of its existence and its actual discovery was 25 years. Wolfgang Pauli, a famous quantum physicist, theorized the neutrino in 1931. It was discovered by Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan in 1956 at a neutrino observatory located adjacent to a nuclear power plant at Savannah River, South Carolina. Neutrinos travel at almost the speed of light, and many quadrillions of them penetrate your body every second. But because neutrinos have such low mass and interact only slightly with atoms, they can penetrate several light years of densely packed matter before interacting with an atom. For this reason they are very difficult to detect. Neutrinos are generated during an event known in physics as beta decay. It seemed hopeless to detect neutrinos until the advent of nuclear technology. Atomic bombs an
Other thing we are looking for are solar neutrinos. What is a neutrino? The neutrino is a light (some say massless), neutral (no electrical charge) particle virtually non-interacting with matter. Millions of millions of them are crossing the Earth at each second, but only very few of them would interact with the Earth. In practice you can say – they are invisible. So how can we detect them? Well – you can guess the answer by now – by building a very large detector and waiting long enough. The neutrino was detected for the first time about 40 years ago in 1956. The first observation of a neutrino was made by Frederick Reines, professor at UCI, who received the 1995 Nobel Prize for this work. The solar neutrino puzzle. The Sun is a neutrino source. One source of neutrinos are nuclear reactions. Inside our Sun nuclear reactions are occurring on a gigantic scale. Lots of neutrinos are produced. There is enough of them, that when they reach the Earth they can still be detected. The puzzle.
According to science, neutrinos are subatomic particles that exist throughout the universe, are in constant motion, invisible but ever-present, and act as a sort of balancing factor to all visible matter. When we first read about neutrinos, no one had ever seen one, yet scientists were certain that they must exist. The human soul or spirit is also something that most people claim never to have seen, and so think does not exist. But if neutrinos exist and can’t be seen, there must also be many other things that exist and can’t be seen. The neutrino is a symbol of all the unseen but nevertheless real parts of ourselves and the universe, which must be taken into account if we are to become whole and fully manifested. We have given the Neutrino name to our family band, The Flying Neutrinos; to our round-the-world raft crew, The Floating Neutrinos; and also to the Neutrino Movement, which is about getting free of all obstacles, internal and external, that block you from living your dream. A
Enrico Fermi, in 1934, theoretically described beta decay using Pauli’s neutrino idea. Fermi’s theory worked so well that physicists adopted the neutrino hypothesis. Physicists preferred these unlikely sounding elementary particles to thinking that the conservation laws had been violated. However at the time no experiments to discover neutrinos were possible.
The reason most people have never heard of neutrinos is because they pass through most matter like ghosts, only rarely interacting. Their elusiveness is a result of the fact that neutrinos are electrically neutral, and so are unaffected by the electro-magnetic force, and they also do not interact via the “strong nuclear force”. They interact only through the “weak nuclear force” and gravity, the two weakest of the four forces. A neutrino can pass straight through the earth without hitting anything, and they don’t pose a health risk to humans. This is actually pretty lucky for us, because neutrinos are everywhere around us, zipping past in all directions. If you hold out your hand, each second over a trillion neutrinos from the sun pass straight through it! In fact, if you could see each neutrino as a little black speck flying by, the world would look a lot like the picture on the right.
