podcast audio
Anthony Chipoletti (podtail.com)
January 2007 Audio of Sue Grandys interview with me on her website Uncomfortable Questions
The tau neutrino and the century of science
This is graviton ring. I wanted to talk for a while about the tau neutrino and its place within the century of science, the nineteen hundreds, about seven years ago, scientists found the tau neutrino, which is a fundamental building block of matter. It is the final building block, bbc news called the tau neutrino a ghostly particle, partly because it took six million tries to find the four events that proved the tau neutrino exists. The magic number of building blocks of matter appears to be six, that is, there are six quarks and six leptons, the tau neutrino, which is a lepton was the last of the dozen, the tau lepton, which is what the tau neutrino becomes after hitting an atomic nucleus, such as iron, quickly disappears. The only evidence the tau lepton leaves is a one-millimeter track.
Not to worry, though, that tiny one millimeter track probably has many billions of smaller superparticles enough to keep scientists busy for at least a hundred years of searching. These superstrings might be the defining line between hard physicists who do not think they exist, or at least can never be proven to exist, and a more imaginative set of scientists, this imaginative set of scientists, perhaps we could call them string theorists, may need a different name for their type of science. Physics seems to be taken by hard matter. Superstrings are probably not what any one would call matter. They may be pure energy. A term that Spock used in the original star trek series, in fact superstrings might be locked up for ever in a world of science fiction. The quantum world where everything that can happen does and even that which cannot happen happens. I think this might be what motivated me to write my movie script, or at least the story-line for the script, I needed a professional ghostwriter to actually produce a screenplay.
The first lepton discovered was our old friend the electron about 1897. It took forty years to find the second lepton, a muon, and another forty years to find the tau lepton in 1976, the tau neutrino showed up about twenty-four years later in 2000. The tau lepton is the only one that can decay into hadrons. This might be a good point at which to say I do not have any actual knowledge of this type of evidence, I only know what I am told so I have included the links to these ideas and discoveries for anyone to follow their own trail of particle physics and string theories. Happy hunting, oh I almost forgot, hadrons are a mixed bag of matter and energy, fermions named for my hero, Enrico Fermi, and bosons, which I think were named after Bose, Einstein's friend from India, Bose and Einstein thought up the bose-einstein condensates, which appeared seventy years later in the laboratory, bosons, are considered to be virtual particles, maybe just an idea of how any type of energy becomes involved with matter. However, there is so much solid evidence of bosons that no one doubts they exist.
Photons, for example, which humans use to see nearly everything that exists, are considered to be virtual bosons, meaning they are probably fundamental, made out of nothing but pure energy. However, there are some characteristics of photons which also seem to divide scientists. The photon wave has been shown to travel over three hundred times faster than the photon itself. c is the speed limit that Father Einstein declared to be the fastest that the photon will ever move, the photon wave, however, might not have a speed limit, which is where the scientists start to divide themselves. Some sticklers for photons being stuck at c can never imagine that the photon wave which does move faster than c will ever carry information that we humans can actually use to send messages faster than c, but what exactly is a message? Is the human imagination limited in any way at all, of course, I believe we do have the ability to understand anything. However, we do seem to be limited in our ability to explain how or why anything happens the way it does, we all drink from the same fountain of wisdom, I'm graviton ring.
