Word: muons
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...Georgia. The Harvard University Police Department (HUPD) officer didn’t smile at me just now. Everyone hates me. All I want is to be loved. I arrive in Vietnamese class. “Chào anh! Anh có khoe không? Anh có muon di ngu không?” Uh, what did he just say? Not only am I ugly, dirty and disliked by the masses, I’m also stupid...
...MUON Throws 30-year-old theory of the universe into doubt. Not bad for a subatomic particle...
...archeological project, the organization has linked several hundred amateurs with a team of professional archeologists excavating in the San Diego area. In another project, members measured muon flux--particles produced in the upper atmosphere when cosmic rays collide with molecules in the air--with Forrest Mims III, the legendary author of the Radio Shack Mini Notebooks electronics series...
Even so, the detection was indirect: what the physicists actually saw was flashes of light caused by fallout from rare but occasional collisions between neutrinos and water molecules. There were fewer flashes than expected from so-called muon neutrinos, suggesting that some of them had changed into another type, called tau neutrinos. Arcane theory dictates that neutrinos can't change form unless they have mass--though scientists can't say precisely what that mass...
...physicists eventually became intrigued with a third idea. Perhaps some electron neutrinos were switching identities, changing by a process called oscillation into muon or tau neutrinos (the two other varieties) en route to Earth. If so, existing detectors could never see them. And while some of the fine print in the laws of physics says that a massless neutrino can't change its stripes, a neutrino with even a tiny bit of mass might. If neutrinos have mass, they can change; conversely, if they can change, they must have mass, despite what textbooks have been saying for decades...