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Don't Make Them Feel Self-Conscious

Published by swansont on June 28, 2010 03:00 am under Journalism, Physics

Weird Antimatter Particles Discovered Deep Underground

Don’t call them weird — they aren’t. They violate parity, but that makes them special. As far as I can tell (and it isn’t easy, because the press releases and web pages do a kinda crappy job of this), the so-called geoneutrinos are electron neutrinos, given off in decay chains of heavy elements in the earth’s interior. More specifically, they would be antineutrinos, since the decay chains typically involve alpha and beta-minus decays, and the latter give off electron antineutrinos.

In other words, the particle is not new. The name distinguishes them from solar neutrinos, but I think it also adds confusion to the mix, especially when the distinction isn’t made clear. Unnecessary jargon isn’t a good thing.

What is interesting is that the scientists are trying to use this as a diagnostic for learning about the earth’s interior.

The researchers hope that by studying geoneutrinos, they can learn more about how decaying elements add to the heat beneath Earth’s surface and affect processes like convection in the mantle. Whether radioactive decay dominates the heating in this layer, or merely adds to the heat from other sources, is an open question.

1 Comment so far

  1. Uncle Al on June 28th, 2010

    What universal symmetry breaking would allow neutrinos and antineutrinos not to be symmetric states yet not violate prior observation? A Weak interaction neutrino possesses strict left-helicity and, being relativistic, left-handed chirality. A Weak interaction antineutrino possesses strict right-helicity and, being relativistic, right-handed chirality. There is a difference! How can it be exploited?

    Observed: The vacuum is isotropic toward massless photons. There is no observed vacuum anisotropy, refraction, dispersion, birefringence, dichroism, or gyrotropy over laboratory or cosmic pathlengths. arxiv: 0706.2031, 0905.1929; 0912.5057, 0801.028.

    Assumed: The vacuum is also isotropic toward chiral mass. This is untested. Physics cannot quantify or construct inverse geometric parity (opposite chirality along all coordinate axes) macroscopic test masses.

    The illusion of knowledge: Extrinsic, extensive, emergent scale observables (e.g., chirality) cannot be fundamental. Chirality is an inserted symmetry breaking (New Year’s Day 1957). Parity-odd gravitation, teleparallelism, is Officially unnecessary. THEREFORE…

    Do opposite shoes vacuum free fall identically?

    Do chemically and macroscopically identical, inverse geometric parity atomic mass distributions violate the Equivalence Principle? A powerful massed sector chiral vacuum background at the Big Bang, whose false-vacuum decay powered cosmic inflation and diluted to present-day trace remnant value, challenges physics’ illusion of knowledge. Neutrinos and antineutrinos would be oppsite shoes nonidentically fitting a vacuum left foot. Their rest masses are so small that the diatereotopic increment would be significant.

    http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/erotor1.jpg
    Parity Eotvos experiment. The worst it can do is succeed.

    Somebody should look.

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