Something Is Wrong With the Particles Passing Through You

🔴 Support the channel and get exclusive content:   / meridianlabs   Right now, about 100 trillion neutrinos are passing through your body every second, and a measurable fraction of them are no longer the particle that left the core of the Sun eight minutes ago. They changed identity in mid-flight. Not their speed. Not their direction. What they fundamentally are. That single fact won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics, and it quietly broke the Standard Model, because for a neutrino to change what it is, it has to have mass, and the Standard Model was built on the assumption that its mass is exactly zero. The experiments that confirmed it are famous. The man who predicted it has been almost entirely erased. Decades before the giant detectors under the mountains, an Italian physicist named Bruno Pontecorvo, Enrico Fermi's youngest protégé, the boy the others called the puppy, worked out that the most abundant matter particle in the universe has no fixed identity. He published it. He developed it for the rest of his life. Then, in the autumn of 1950, he vanished from a family holiday in Italy and defected to the Soviet Union, and the word spy attached itself to his name and never let go, even though, seventy years later, no one has ever proven it. This is the full story of neutrino oscillation and the man history left out. Fermi and the Via Panisperna boys in Rome. The neutron-logging method Pontecorvo invented for oil prospectors in Oklahoma. The 1946 chlorine-argon detection idea that became Ray Davis's Homestake experiment, 615 tons of dry-cleaning fluid nearly a mile underground, which caught only one third of the neutrinos John Bahcall's model of the Sun predicted and launched a mystery that sat unsolved for 30 years. The 1957 prediction. The 1969 Gribov-Pontecorvo paper that solved the solar neutrino problem on paper the year after it appeared, and was largely ignored in the West because of who wrote it. Super-Kamiokande in 1998 and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in 2001 finally proving that neutrinos change flavor, and therefore have mass. The 2002 and 2015 Nobel Prizes went to other men. Pontecorvo died in Dubna in 1993, five years before the first confirmation, and the Nobel is never awarded to the dead. His will divided his ashes between Rome and Dubna, a man never fully claimed by either side of the border he crossed, buried in two places at once, the way the particle he understood is never fully one thing. This is a two-hour descent into forbidden physics, Cold War erasure, and the idea that identity itself is not fixed at the deepest level of matter. Not for a neutrino. And maybe not for you. Sources and further reading B. Pontecorvo, Mesonium and Anti-mesonium, Soviet Physics JETP, 1957. B. Pontecorvo, Soviet Physics JETP, 1958. V. Gribov and B. Pontecorvo, Neutrino Astronomy and Lepton Charge, Physics Letters B, 1969. B. Pontecorvo, Neutrino Experiments and the Problem of Conservation of Leptonic Charge, Soviet Physics JETP, 1968. B. Pontecorvo, Chalk River Laboratory Report PD-205, 1946. R. Davis, D. S. Harmer, K. C. Hoffman, Search for Neutrinos from the Sun, Physical Review Letters, 1968. F. Reines and C. L. Cowan, Detection of the Free Neutrino, Science, 1956. Z. Maki, M. Nakagawa, S. Sakata, Progress of Theoretical Physics, 1962. Y. Fukuda et al. (Super-Kamiokande), Physical Review Letters, 1998. Q. R. Ahmad et al. (Sudbury Neutrino Observatory), Physical Review Letters, 2001 and 2002. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Scientific Background on the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics. Frank Close, Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy, 2015. Simone Turchetti, The Pontecorvo Affair, University of Chicago Press, 2012. Freeman Dyson, Scientist, Spy, Genius: Who Was Bruno Pontecorvo?, The New York Review of Books, 2015. #Neutrinos #Physics #Pontecorvo #ParticlePhysics #NeutrinoOscillation #ColdWar #ScienceHistory #NuclearPhysics #StandardModel #NobelPrize #SolarNeutrinos #SuperKamiokande #Fermi #QuantumPhysics #ScienceDocumentary #HistoryOfScience #Dubna #Documentary