Follow Up On Solar Neutrinos and Radioactive Decay 183
An anonymous reader writes "A few days ago, Slashdot carried a story that was making the rounds: a team of physicists claimed to have detected a strange variation in radioactive decay rates, which they attributed to the mysterious influence of solar neutrinos. The findings attracted immediate attention because they seemed to upend two tenets of physics: that radioactive decay is constant, and that neutrinos very, very rarely interact with matter (trillions of the particles are zinging through your body right now). So Discover Magazine's news blog 80beats followed up on the initial burst of news and interviewed several physicists who work on neutrinos. They are decidedly skeptical."
According to TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Wait till the religion fanatics hear this. (Score:1, Interesting)
It could swing the other however and we could say maybe the earth is more than 4.5 billion years old.
Data is data (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't care who might abuse the data in what way -- As Doctor Gregory Sullivan (a skeptic of these results) said in the Discover article, "Data is data. That’s the final arbiter." If nuclear decay rates are varying, I very strongly doubt neutrinos are doing it.
I think it was Isaac Asimov who said that major scientific revolutions generally don't come with a scientist shouting "Eureka!" They generally start with a scientist looking at the data and saying "That's funny..." If other researches look at the nuclear decay rates, and also see this sort of variability... That would be really, really funny -- something Really Really Big that we are, at the moment, completely clueless about.
I'm quite confident that the effect, if any, won't much change the dating of fossils, which is what the 4004 BC type creationists want.
Paper, gold - (Score:3, Interesting)
There are several papers posted on the arXiv.org by Jenkins and Fischbach, this one [arxiv.org] is my favorite. It's about measurements done on samples of a radioactive isotope of gold - the samples are shaped differently and this alters, presumably, some aspect of their interaction with neutrinos.
Re:Wait till the religion fanatics hear this. (Score:2, Interesting)
No matter how 'useful' it is, though, the radiocarbon method is still not capable of yeilding accurate and reliable results. There are gross discrepancies, the chronology is uneven and relative, and the accepted dates are acutally selected dates. This whole blessed thing is nothing but 13th century alchemy, and it all depends upon which funny paper you read.
--Robert E. Lee (not the general, but the evolutionist)
And there have been nothing suggesting otherwise since then.
I don't even care to argue who's right overall, anyone can believe whatever they want, just know that Carbon dating is BS.
I don't see the problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
We already know that some radioactive decay results in the release of a neutrino or anti-neutrino. The release of a neutrino is the same as the absorption of an anti-neutrino and vice versa. Ergo, it should be expected that variations in total numbers of neutrinos of the specific energy linked to that specific type of decay event would result in a change in the number of decay events recorded. I simply do not see where this impossibility claim comes from, unless they are claiming that neutrinos of the wrong type/energy are involved.
We also already know that what appears random is often the result of never being able to have enough data and never being able to make the step sizes infinitely small in the calculations; that randomness, per-se, is actually pretty rare in nature. (Indeed, randomness would seem to violate the requirement that information cannot be created or destroyed. An event is information and physics prohibits information simply "happening".)
It then follows that radioactive decay almost certainly cannot be a totally random event and therefore almost certainly cannot be absolutely invariate.
(Indeed, plenty of other people claim to have altered radioactive decay rates, so the claim itself isn't that revolutionary. I'm shocked that the scientific community is so ignorant as to what it itself has been saying for decades. If publishing papers is that important, then reading them must be just as important.)
Re:Wait till the religion fanatics hear this. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I don't see the problem. (Score:3, Interesting)
I simply do not see where this impossibility claim comes from
From the article: "'They’re looking for something with a very much larger effect than the force of neutrinos, but that doesn’t show up any other way,' he says."
That is, your inability to see is a result of your innumeracy. You have said "X effects Y" without any reference to the quantitative, numerical size of the effect.
The people who actually work on these things for a living have an excellent sense of the magnitudes without having to do a detailed calculation, and know that if the variation in neutrino flux caused by a 3% change in orbital distance was such a big deal then there would almost certainly be all kinds of other evidence for very large effects due to small variations in neutrino fluxes.
Those effects are not seen, ergo the odds of this effect being due to neutrinos is very small.
Your post looks like nothing so much as an argument by a medieval, pre-scientific philosopher. It is time to stop trying to pass off innumerate argument as reasoning and enter the modern age.
The Up side (Score:5, Interesting)
Variability in half life/decay rates is unlikely, and this data is not nearly enough to prove a significant effect. Because of the massive amount of research done on radioactive decay as part of various nations bomb making projects, looking for ways to get a hyper-fast reaction with less material or get criticality at all from some borderline case substances, this data would have to be supported by a quality new major research project to be taken at all seriously. Probably, the study would have to get a similar 33 day cycle for the same isotopes as these reports, AND find the same cycle for a bunch of others, AND rule out some of the possible alternate causes by doubleblind testing.
If that's done by some place such as MIT or one of the national labs, and the data glitch persists, then it starts counting as very significant. For just one reason, Supersymetry theories predict short lived supersymetric particles such as the Selectron and the Sneutrino. The supersymetric versions of particles have substantially more rest mass than the regular versions. Neutrinos that couple more strongly to neutron cross section of a nucleus could arguably actually be Sneutrinos. To live long enough to cross the 8 light minute gap between Earth and Sun, they would have to be moving at incredibly close to the speed of light, much more so than for regular neutrinos, which are already very close (around 99.0%). Somewhere around 99.97% of C, you get enough time dilation on Sneutrinos that they could routinely make it across the gap.
So, solar emission models for this effect could be predicting both a way to experimentally validate Supersymetry AND the existence of a reaction deep inside the solar core that produces such incredibly energetic particles. Furthermore, you could derive the energy of the initial solar reaction by sending a space probe outward towards Mars and perhaps beyond, and having it run constant testing on a radioactive isotope sample on-board to see if/when the effect falls off. Such an experiment could be incorporated into an existing planned mission, say another Mars Observer or Cassini to Saturn style probe.
That's why this is interesting - it may be a 10,000 to 1 longshot, but a. If it's true, it's a major step for both subatomic physics and astrophysics, and b. if it's true, it makes some predictions where we can do further experiments and refine the theories, and some of these should be in a reasonable cost range compared to alternates (such as building a particle accelerator from the Earth to the Moon to possibly get a little closer to proving/disproving Supersymetry).
Re:Wait till the religion fanatics hear this. (Score:3, Interesting)
Depends on the energy. (A more detailed energy slicing won't be necessary) Low energy neutrinos order of few KeV, come mostly from the sun. High energy neutrinos Above the few KeV threshold mostly comes from Cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere. As for cosmic neutrinos, well good luck with that! I work in a neutrino experiment (ANTARES) , and I wish that we can detect cosmic neutrinos with abundance, it's just that there isn't enough to influence anything.
What I meant were those caused by transient and relatively nearby events like supernovae or gamma-ray bursts -- things that haven't happened since we had detectors for neutrinos or even knew what neutrinos were. We haven't had a supernova that was visible to the naked eye in Earth's night-time sky in quite a long time, yet when an extremely energetic event like that does happen it may affect the cosmic neutrinos we receive.
Or maybe someone knows a reason why it couldn't possibly do that. My intented point was, once your realize that this set-in-stone constant isn't, it calls into question how steady, uninterrupted and unaltered the current conditions have been throughout geological periods of time. That does tend to raise questions about methods of dating based on nuclear decay, but as other posters have pointed out, the observed difference (as it stands now) would actually tend to make things a little older than we previously thought.
Re:Wait till the religion fanatics hear this. (Score:3, Interesting)
We haven't had a supernova that was visible to the naked eye in Earth's night-time sky in quite a long time
1987 [wikipedia.org] wasn't very long ago.
SN 1987A was a supernova in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. It occurred approximately 51.4 kiloparsecs from Earth,[1] close enough that it was visible to the naked eye. It could be seen from the Southern Hemisphere. It was the closest observed supernova since SN 1604, which occurred in the Milky Way itself. The light from the supernova reached Earth on February 23, 1987. As the first supernova discovered in 1987, it was labeled "1987A". Its brightness peaked in May with an apparent magnitude of about 3 and slowly declined in the following months. It was the first opportunity for modern astronomers to see a supernova up close.
[...]
Approximately three hours before the visible light from SN 1987A reached the Earth, a burst of neutrinos was observed at three separate neutrino observatories. This is due to the neutrino emission (which occurs simultaneously with core collapse) preceding the emission of visible light (which occurs only after the shock wave reaches the stellar surface). At 7:35am Universal time, Kamiokande II detected 11 antineutrinos, IMB 8 antineutrinos and Baksan 5 antineutrinos, in a burst lasting less than 13 seconds.
Re:Wait till the religion fanatics hear this. (Score:3, Interesting)
Except that, for all it's vaunted ideals, science history in the real world is replete with examples where the establishment CONTINUED to ignore contrary evidence until a new generation of scientists emerged with a less dogmatic viewpoint.
The most recent example I can think of is the ongoing issue between MOND (or MOG) and Dark Matter, where the existence of Dark Matter is the establishment viewpoint.
The establishment has, for example, claimed the Chandra observations of the Bullet Cluster collisions definitely refute MOND as a hypothesis (which simply isn't true, but noone thought to ask the MOND people, or check the mathematics).
It also ignored the results predicted by Stacy McGaugh in the 1999 paper regarding the Power Spectrum distribution in the microwave background radiation. If Dark Matter existed, the second peak would be slightly smaller than the first, and if Dark Matter did not exist, the second peak would be tiny. When the experimental data arrived about a year later, the data indicated Dark Matter did not exist. And as I said above, this was pretty much ignored.
I've noted Slashdot has a hell of an establishment bias regarding Dark Matter, so don't be surprised if you've never heard of McGaughs paper.