Elusive, baffling neutrinos, and unknown physics

Halbhh

Everything You say is Life to me
Supporter
Mar 17, 2015
17,173
9,191
catholic -- embracing all Christians
✟1,152,895.00
Country
United States
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Married
In this context the primordial cosmic neutrinos are slow.
Since neutrinos are now known to carry mass their kinetic energies depend on temperature.
The theoretical cosmic neutrino background is around 2K and it's possible they now travel at non relativistic speeds.
As a result they have extremely low energies, lower than solar neutrinos and are beyond the range of our current neutrino detectors.
As a far as being a possible constituent of dark matter the same problems apply; in the early universe the kinetic energy of the cosmic neutrinos was too high for the neutrinos to clump and cannot explain the rotation curves of spiral galaxies which require the clumping or concentration of dark matter.
Yes, I was just reading yesterday an article I'd not read about trying to reconcile the many seeming contradictory observations (as laid out in the article) by using some newer ideas, including a solution by theorizing heavier new kinds of neutrino (which is dark matter, then). See link in recent post above.
 
Upvote 0

sjastro

Newbie
May 14, 2014
4,855
3,890
✟273,856.00
Faith
Christian
Marital Status
Single
Yes, I was just reading yesterday an article I'd not read about trying to reconcile the many seeming contradictory observations (as laid out in the article) by using some newer ideas, including a solution by theorizing heavier new kinds of neutrino (which is dark matter, then). See link in recent post above.
With regards to Wolfgang Pauli's quote (who evidently was a nasty individual who made Newton by comparison seem like a nice guy);
When Wolfgang Pauli postulated the existence of the neutrino in 1930 to explain where energy was disappearing to during radioactive decay, he called it a “desperate remedy.” His theoretical construct had no mass or electric charge, making him doubt an experiment could ever detect it. “It is something no theorist should ever do,” he wrote in his journal at the time. But in 1956, in an experiment not unlike LSND, there the neutrino was.
There are comparisons with the state of affairs of gravitational waves in the 1980s when I was a student in applied mathematics.
We were taught that after about a decade of failure of detecting gravitational waves using weights hanging off springs is was highly doubtful any experiment was capable of detecting them.
Interferometers were portable units found in laboratories, the idea of using interferometers spanning kilometers was considered science fiction at the time.
From the theoretical side the predicted waveforms were beyond the scope of general relativity.
Mathematicians had to violate the "mathematical beauty" of general relativity by coming up with a linearized version of the theory which took it outside of the realm of physics into the field of computer science and algorithms.
Even then success was dependent on brute force computer power in coming with up convergent solutions of the linearized field equations.
As it happened by 2006 computers had become sufficiently powerful to come up with convergent solutions and the predicted waveforms were used by LIGO with its 4 km long interferometer arms to detect gravitational waves nine years later.

The moral of the story is I am an optimist as history has shown we resourceful and sometimes smart enough to eventually overcome the scientific problems of our time.
 
Upvote 0