Word: neutrino
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Rare Events. The experiment will generate no atomic blast, but if it pays off it may have an explosive impact on the new and booming subscience of neutrino physics. Neutrinos are littleknown particles that have no mass of their own and no electric charge. They have nothing much except energy; they interact hardly at all with known kinds of matter. They are generated copiously in the centers of stars, and they move with the speed of light as they slip out into space and pass right through any stars they happen to hit. It has been calculated that a stream...
...Although - together with Professor Simpson - I would be the first to admit that much sociological jargon resembles gibberish, it is an interesting comment upon the difference in status between disciplines that we do not criticize physicians for talking about pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, or physicists for talking about a "neutrino...
...atom smashers have grown larger and more powerful, the subatomic particles that scientists have been able to find have grown stranger and more elusive. Still, it hardly seemed probable that anyone would ever discover another bit of matter quite so peculiar as the neutrino, first detected near a nuclear reactor in 1956. So light that it weighs nothing at all, the neutrino is free of electric charge and can pass through the heaviest materials as if it were hurtling through empty space. But last week, a team of Columbia University physicists did the improbable: using 5,000 tons of battleship...
Guilty Particles. Hardly had the neutrino become established as a real particle when physicists noticed that pi mesons (middleweight particles, also called pi-ons, that are created by powerful atom smashers) disintegrate into slightly lighter mu mesons (muons) while an unseen particle carries away part of their energy. At first the physicists assumed that ordinary neutrinos were the guilty particles. Then they began to have their doubts. Maybe another kind of neutrino was stealing the pion's energy. But it had been hard enough to trap regular neutrinos; how were scientists to locate and study an even more evasive...
...hotter a star gets, says Dr. Chiu, the more neutrinos it generates. When the internal temperature reaches 6 or 7 billion degrees, neutrino production shows a sudden increase. Most of the particles escape with a rush, leaving the star's center almost empty. Then the star collapses and causes a gigantic explosion that sprays ordinary matter as well as neutrinos into space...