From apparently superluminal radio sources in deep space, to the neutrinos that were supposed to be arriving ahead of schedule at the Grand Sasso experiment in Italy, every apparent exception to Einstein's ultimate speed law has turned out to be a phantom.
If you take a particle down, past neutrinos, you get vortexes, little whirlpools of energy. This is amazing, because what it really means, is everything is the same. Everything is one of those, in various combinations.
Neutrinos alone, among all the known particles, have ethereal properties that are striking and romantic enough both to have inspired a poem by John Updike and to have sent teams of scientists deep underground for 50 years to build huge science-fiction-like contraptions to unravel their mysteries.
Every time four protons are turned into a helium nucleus, two neutrinos are produced. These neutrinos take only two seconds to reach the surface of the Sun and another eight minutes or so to reach the Earth. Thus, neutrinos tell us what happened in the center of the Sun eight minutes ago.
It never ceases to amaze me that every second of every day, more than 6,000 billion neutrinos coming from nuclear reactions inside the sun whiz through my body, almost all of which will travel right through the earth without interruption.
Neutrinos have mass? i didn't even know they're Catholic!" Robert to Vittoria
Neutrinos ... win the minimalist contest: zero charge, zero radius, and very possibly zero mass.
By the grace of AEC, BNL, God, Green and Hayworth (alphabetical order), we should see neutrinos.
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