We’re all good at detection. We detect our bodies’ needs: “I’m hungry.” We detect children’s needs: “She needs a nap.” We detect our own and others’ financial, medical, and educational needs. There are many general conditions that we detect. Detection is necessary for survival. Some place feels dangerous? Some creature appears ready to attack? Someone appears ready for an angry outburst? From experience, we detect.
What we detect isn’t always very specific. I know, for example, that a small child might be hungry. I don’t necessarily know what the small child wants to eat. We offer food, sometimes futilely; the child accepts or rejects. The level of my detection is only general. Maybe the important condition lies in my ability to know “in general” that the child is hungry. That detection then sets up my sundry offerings: Crackers? Milk and cookies? PB & J sandwich? Ice cream? In our daily lives detection is often very general.
Think neutrinos. They are really tiny and very numerous. They are hard to detect regardless of their abundance. Consider that trillions of neutrinos produced by the Sun pass every second through an area the size of an office desk surface —and when I say “through,” I mean THROUGH. Neutrinos pass through you as though you are a mere ghost. They pass through Earth as though it isn’t there. Because neutrinos are capable of passing through solids without interacting with matter except on rare occasions, physicists use giant “detectors” that weigh many tons, detectors that they place in deep mines and the newest of which weighs 70,000 tons. They need very sophisticated and large detectors if they want to identify any one of the three kinds of neutrinos: Electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino. The process of neutrino detection is also complicated because neutrinos can change character just as a child might say “I want peanut butter and jelly” followed by “I don’t want this; I want milk and cookies” (Observe this especially unpredictable and frustrating ability in children to change character at restaurants).
Now a group under the name COHERENT* has devised a detector that fulfills the 1974 prediction of Daniel Freedman that experimental neutrino detection doesn’t necessarily require an expensive, 70,000-ton buried detector like the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). Instead, the group has a 32.2-pound device that “sees” neutrinos surprisingly frequently. But it has a limitation. It cannot distinguish among neutrino types. The little neutrinos are like little children—they allow us to detect their general hunger, but we have to go into something more complex to know their specific and often changing desire.
In physics as in life, we can detect generally. That’s easy, especially with a portable 32.2-pound neutrino detector and some commonly shared emotional experiences. Both general and specific detection are useful in both physics and life; however, we need very specific devices and methods to truly know and understand. For most of us the analysis of neutrino types is of little interest, but most of us need to analyze the nature of particular humans. Often, we assume that our general detection is sufficient as we deal with larger entities—adults. But the reality is that we’re all tiny "neutrino people" in a very big universe and that we pass through the lives of one another without detection in many circumstances all over the planet. Often, we don’t interact. We just pass through the lives of others the way neutrinos pass through us. Occasionally, however, we do interact; we bump into and make a change—either great or small. Is it strange that we don’t always know when we make such changes in others through our interaction? It takes some sophisticated detection to determine the exact nature of “neutrino people” and the products of their interactions. It also takes a very powerful detector to determine the exact nature of the changes that interactions cause. Not everyone who is hungry will be satisfied with PB & J sandwiches. Sometimes we have to keep trying to detect that which eludes us.
We don’t number in the trillions per second like neutrinos passing through an office desk. There are only seven billion of us. What we should realize is that lives are always moving through other lives. And the principle of passing through applies not only to the present, but also to the past and future. You encounter the remnants of lives of people you never personally knew, and you will affect the lives of future people. You did not acquire your culture and your knowledge in a vacuum. Plato, Buddha, Confucius, Christ, and a host of other people now long gone still pass through you as do a myriad of unknowns who have shaped the world into which you were born. They pass through just as surely as neutrinos from a distant supernova have passed through you, me, and the entire planet.
*ww.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/science.aao0990/DC1
Akimov, D., et al. Observation of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, Science, 03 Aug 2017, DOI: 10.1126/science.aao0990
What we detect isn’t always very specific. I know, for example, that a small child might be hungry. I don’t necessarily know what the small child wants to eat. We offer food, sometimes futilely; the child accepts or rejects. The level of my detection is only general. Maybe the important condition lies in my ability to know “in general” that the child is hungry. That detection then sets up my sundry offerings: Crackers? Milk and cookies? PB & J sandwich? Ice cream? In our daily lives detection is often very general.
Think neutrinos. They are really tiny and very numerous. They are hard to detect regardless of their abundance. Consider that trillions of neutrinos produced by the Sun pass every second through an area the size of an office desk surface —and when I say “through,” I mean THROUGH. Neutrinos pass through you as though you are a mere ghost. They pass through Earth as though it isn’t there. Because neutrinos are capable of passing through solids without interacting with matter except on rare occasions, physicists use giant “detectors” that weigh many tons, detectors that they place in deep mines and the newest of which weighs 70,000 tons. They need very sophisticated and large detectors if they want to identify any one of the three kinds of neutrinos: Electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino. The process of neutrino detection is also complicated because neutrinos can change character just as a child might say “I want peanut butter and jelly” followed by “I don’t want this; I want milk and cookies” (Observe this especially unpredictable and frustrating ability in children to change character at restaurants).
Now a group under the name COHERENT* has devised a detector that fulfills the 1974 prediction of Daniel Freedman that experimental neutrino detection doesn’t necessarily require an expensive, 70,000-ton buried detector like the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). Instead, the group has a 32.2-pound device that “sees” neutrinos surprisingly frequently. But it has a limitation. It cannot distinguish among neutrino types. The little neutrinos are like little children—they allow us to detect their general hunger, but we have to go into something more complex to know their specific and often changing desire.
In physics as in life, we can detect generally. That’s easy, especially with a portable 32.2-pound neutrino detector and some commonly shared emotional experiences. Both general and specific detection are useful in both physics and life; however, we need very specific devices and methods to truly know and understand. For most of us the analysis of neutrino types is of little interest, but most of us need to analyze the nature of particular humans. Often, we assume that our general detection is sufficient as we deal with larger entities—adults. But the reality is that we’re all tiny "neutrino people" in a very big universe and that we pass through the lives of one another without detection in many circumstances all over the planet. Often, we don’t interact. We just pass through the lives of others the way neutrinos pass through us. Occasionally, however, we do interact; we bump into and make a change—either great or small. Is it strange that we don’t always know when we make such changes in others through our interaction? It takes some sophisticated detection to determine the exact nature of “neutrino people” and the products of their interactions. It also takes a very powerful detector to determine the exact nature of the changes that interactions cause. Not everyone who is hungry will be satisfied with PB & J sandwiches. Sometimes we have to keep trying to detect that which eludes us.
We don’t number in the trillions per second like neutrinos passing through an office desk. There are only seven billion of us. What we should realize is that lives are always moving through other lives. And the principle of passing through applies not only to the present, but also to the past and future. You encounter the remnants of lives of people you never personally knew, and you will affect the lives of future people. You did not acquire your culture and your knowledge in a vacuum. Plato, Buddha, Confucius, Christ, and a host of other people now long gone still pass through you as do a myriad of unknowns who have shaped the world into which you were born. They pass through just as surely as neutrinos from a distant supernova have passed through you, me, and the entire planet.
*ww.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/science.aao0990/DC1
Akimov, D., et al. Observation of coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering, Science, 03 Aug 2017, DOI: 10.1126/science.aao0990
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