Neutrinos: Much Ado About (Almost) Nothing Heinrich Päs is a particle physicist who loves his work, and it shows. That work mainly has to do with the elusive particles known as neutrinos, which have very little mass and no electric charge, and which travel very nearly at the speed of light, scarcely deigning to interact with any other particles as they zip not only through the universe but also through the solid Earth (and your body as well). Mr. Päs dubs the neutrino the outlaw particle because ofits bizarre properties. Why should we bother with it? Well, for a start, although every single neutrino weighs less than one millionth of the weight of the tiny electron . . . they are so abundant that altogether they contribute about as much mass to the universe as all the stars combined. A couple of years back, neutrinos made headlines when results from a European experiment suggested that they might actually travel faster than light (and therefore backward in time). The experiment turned out to be faulty—there was a loose cable somewhere. But Mr. Päs suggests, in what he confesses is a speculative extrapolation from the current standard model of physics, that neutrinos really might be able to travel in time. Yet that is merely the denouement of his intriguing story, which starts out with the ancient Greeks and carries us smoothly forward through the 20th-century development of particle physics to the present day frontiers of respectable speculation. The Perfect Wave: With Neutrinos at the Boundary of Space and Time provides a conventional but well-presented introduction to the mysteries of quantum mechanics, including the obligatory mention of Schrödingers cat, which is both dead and alive at the same time. Quantum aficionados will recall that, in 1935, Erwin Schrödinger devised this thought experiment in which a cat in a sealed room will die if a radioactive atom decays but will remain alive if the atom does not decay. According to the quantum rules, it remains suspended in an either/or state until someone looks to see what is going on. Like an increasing number of his contemporaries, Mr. Päs suggests that the best resolution to the puzzles of quantum theory (such as the mystery of Schrödingers dead-and-alive cat) lies in the so-called Many Worlds Interpretation, or the multiverse, in which all possibilities are realized. So, for example, there is one universe with a dead cat and one with a live cat—not a single reality in which the cat is dead and alive at the same time. These universes do not interact with one another, and there is no direct evidence to prove they exist. But the recent discovery of gravitational ripples from the dawn of time suggests to some cosmologists that the idea should be taken seriously, as these ripples are evidence for the theory that the universe expanded rapidly after the Big Bang. Mr. Päs explains various scenarios for such an inflation, including that of eternal inflation, in which new baby universes keep popping up like bubbles out of nothing. might be of interest to Jeffrey, Bill, Daryl, Etienne, Jeff, Darin, Tom
Posted on: Wed, 16 Apr 2014 19:11:53 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015