My favorite science, and the story of the neutrino

“We are made of star stuff. For the most part, atoms heavier than hydrogen were created in the interiors of stars and then expelled into space to be incorporated into later stars.” ~Carl Sagan

I wasn’t one of the lucky kids who had cable TV. No mere rabbit ears for us, though. We were rockin’ a 12 foot wide roof mounted TV antenna. We dialed in those four precious channels with the precision of Apollo flight controllers.

Depending on the weather, of course. Even NASA would have struggled to tune in ABC during a clear cloudless night in northern Michigan.

Unless there was a storm system moving in, the easiest channel to tune was PBS. Public Broadcasting Service.

Commercial free, documentary filled, occasionally boring, and home of the most influential television series of my life: Cosmos.

A soothing, gentle piano is the last thing we expect to hear at the start of an epic production. Back in 1980 though, it was a cue. Grab your snack, run to the living room, sit yourself down and don’t make a sound for the next hour.

Sagan’s Ship of the Imagination was the ultimate in hokey. Still, to an 8-year-old in the Cronkite Era, a simple desk and chair facing a “windshield” was pretty damn neat. Sure, there was no CGI. HD? Hell, no!

But, a wide open imagination... check.

In 1930, an Austrian physicist named Wolfgang Pauli had a problem.
He was measuring neutrons, and he found that parts of them were... disappearing.

Fundamental particles cannot disappear. Things don’t just go poof. It’s The Law.

Pauli was studying a nuclear reaction known as Beta Decay. When a neutron decays, it emits an electron and then becomes a proton. Pauli measured the three components of the initial neutrons:

• Mass
• Energy
• Momentum

When he measured the post-decay electrons and protons, he found that the total mass was unchanged. Oddly though, the second measurement showed less energy and less momentum.

1 + 1 + 1 was not equaling 3.

1. Spooky Voodoo
2. Invisible, undetectable, weightless particles with no electrical charge whatsoever that travel at the speed of light and do not interact with matter must be carrying away the missing energy and momentum.

Number 2 kinda sounds like a “science-y” way of saying spooky voodoo, don’t ya think? Lots of scientists thought so too. At first.

Pauli proposed the existence of particles so small that they had no mass, yet contained large amounts of energy and momentum. Imagine the Invisible Man running laps around the gym. At light speed. In zero gravity.

The mystery particles were named neutrinos. The Little Neutral Ones.

Aww, they’re cute.

Throughout the 30’s and 40’s, physicists noodled with the seemingly impossible idea. Science-y voodoo is worth exploring when the only alternative is flat out spooky.

After 25 years of theory and experiment, two American physicists at last detected real, live, honest to goodness neutrinos that were produced by nuclear reactions at the Savannah River Reactor in South Carolina. Nobel Prizes for all.

We need imagination and skepticism both.

Neutrinos, the impossible particles, are actually so common in our universe that in the blink of your eye, one trillion of them ripped right through your body.

Oh, there they went again. Again. Stop blinking.

If you had a chunk of lead that was 100 light years long, that chunk of lead would absorb only 1 out of every 3 neutrinos that pass through its entire length.

We figured out how to detect them just the same.

(Cue the choked up nerd.)

Add to that the funky world of physics, and there you have it: my favorite science.

Why? Because I was one of the lucky kids who didn’t have cable TV.