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Just now nuclear physicists are writing a great deal about hypothetical particles called neutrinos supposed to account for certain peculiar facts observed in ß-ray disintegration. We can perhaps best describe the neutrinos as little bits of spin-energy that have got detached. I am not much impressed by the neutrino theory. In an ordinary way I might say that I do not believe in neutrinos ... But I have to reflect that a physicist may be an artist, and you never know where you are with artists. My old-fashioned kind of disbelief in neutrinos is scarcely enough. Dare I say that experimental physicists will not have sufficient ingenuity to make neutrinos? Whatever I may think, I am not going to be lured into a wager against the skill of experimenters under the impression that it is a wager against the truth of a theory. If they succeed in making neutrinos, perhaps even in developing industrial applications of them, I suppose I shall have to believe – though I may feel that they have not been playing quite fair. Arthur Stanley Eddington, Tamer Lectures 1938 ‘The Philosophy of Physical Science’
Neutrinos: this invisible sea of particles is the lifeblood of the universe. Though the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman: Is the Universe Alive? Discovery 2017
Here is evidence of a neutrino caught on film. Brian Cox, The Big Bang Machine, BBC 2008
In a moment the harmonic resonance from the neutrino clouds will become synchronous. Star Trek: The Next Generation s2e10: The Dauphin, Wesley to bird
The neutrino: this is produced in atomic bomb explosions, so it would also have been produced in the Big Bang explosion. If it had a tiny mass of its own, it could be the dark matter. Stephen Hawking’s Universe: On the Dark Side, BBC 2002
Neutrinos stream through the universe at virtually the speed of light. Every second about a hundred trillion shoot straight through your body. ibid.
Neutrinos are believed to be fundamental to the way our universe works. ibid. Kathy Sykes
Neutrinos have been dubbed the ghost particle. ibid.
A neutrino detector ... We can show you it from the inside ... This giant acrylic globe ... Usually there is a thousand tons of [heavy] water in here. ibid.
The neutrino – if there was one particle that was going to break the rules it was this one. Marcus du Sautoy, Faster than the Speed of Light, BBC 2011
In June 1956 [Frederick] Rinus announced he had detected the neutrino. ibid.
As the neutrinos smashed into the lead nucleus they created charged particles which are detected as tiny flashes of light. ibid.
Nobody had anticipated what happened when they started measuring how long it took the neutrinos to arrive. They seemed to arrive early. Earlier than the laws of Physics allowed. ibid.
When the news broke it caused a sensation. ibid.
Einstein’s theory respects the relationship between cause and effect. ibid.
The MINOS neutrinos did seem to be moving faster than the speed of light. ibid.
Neutrinos, they are very small
They have no charge and have no mass
And do not interact at all.
The Earth is just a silly ball. John Updike, Cosmic Gall
This is now the smoking gun that we can now prove that neutrinos carry the energy of a supernova, and we detected it right on the Earth when we saw a supernova in outer space. Professor Michio Kaku
Neutrinos are ghost-like particles. Literally trillions of them are going through my body even as we speak. Professor Michio Kaku
I have had an idea for a desperate remedy. It ought to save the validity of the energy law. Wolfgang Pauli
We think that supernovae produce a stupendous sum of neutrinos when the core collapses to a neutron star. Professor Stan Woosley
There is a funny little particle called a neutrino: Italian for ‘little neutral one’. It has very little mass. Very small amount of matter. Almost nothing. But it has energy and it zips through space at close to the speed of light. These things are so non-interactive that if you imagine a light-year thickness of lead and you shine a beam of neutrinos toward it, half of those neutrinos would make it through that light-year thickness of lead completely unscathed. Alex Filippenko, University of California, Berkeley
Produced by nuclear reactions in the sun, the neutrino was originally thought to have no mass like a photon of light. But the new theories suggest the neutrino may have a small mass after all. So scientists are going to great lengths to measure it. Horizon: What Einstein Never Knew, BBC 1985
Catching these ghosts was one of the greatest challenges scientists have ever faced. Now experiments have revealed that they are even stranger than anyone thought. Could the tiny particles that are passing through you right now be the very reason we all exist? Horizon: Project Poltergeist, BBC 2004
For decades [Raymond] Davis and [John] Bahcall refused to give up, convinced that they were on to something important. This is the story of how an experiment which no-one believed has led to an astonishing discovery ... All through the eighties Ray continued to improve his detector, and year after year the results were the same: he could only find one third of the neutrinos John Bahcall had predicted. ibid.
On June 14th 1956 [Frederick] Reines and his colleagues announced the detection of the neutrino. ibid.
In this theory neutrinos would be constantly changing from type to type as they travelled through space. What started as an electron neutrino would later look like a muon neutrino ... Was this why Ray saw only a third of the neutrinos John said the Sun was making? ibid.
There was just one problem. It was all to do with Time. For anything to change, Time must pass. But the standard model said the neutrino was a massless particle travelling at the speed of light. And according to Einstein if you’re travelling at the speed of light, there is no Time. And therefore no change. ibid.
But then scientists made a discovery that completely transformed their ideas about the neutrino ... Contrary to all theory neutrinos did have a sense of Time. It was a bombshell. Scientists suddenly realised that the Standard Model had got neutrinos completely wrong. This did have mass. They could change flavour. ibid.
The answer was they were both right. It was the Standard Model that was wrong. ibid.
Everything indicates that this apparatus is accurate and can tell us how many neutrinos are coming from the Sun. But observation and theory don’t agree. There simply aren’t enough neutrinos, and that’s causing a great many raised eyebrows. Patrick Moore, Sky at Night, BBC 1983
But the detectors had yet to capture a single supernova neutrino. But luckily on 23rd February 1987 they did see them: two detectors, one beneath the city of Kamaka in Japan and the other under Lake Erie in Ohio captured a dozen of the illusive particles. For the first time ever scientists on Earth saw tangible evidence of the illusive particle the Neutrino generated in the core of an exploding star. The Universe s2e9: Supernovas, History 2008
About sixty billion solar neutrinos pass through our thumbnails every second. The Universe s3e10: Strange Things, History 2009
In addition to other particles and light vast numbers of neutrinos were released into the universe immediately after the Big Bang. Humans are the descendants of this primordial soup. ibid.
These neutrino observations are so exciting and significant that I think we're about to see the birth of an entirely new branch of astronomy: neutrino astronomy. Supernova explosions that are invisible to us because of dust clouds may occur in our galaxy as often as once every 10 years, and neutrino bursts could give us a way to study them. John N Bahcall, The New York Times 3rd April 1987
Neutrinos are trillions of times smaller than atoms. They’re created by all sorts of nuclear reactions, from nuclear power plants to bombs to exploding stars. How the Universe Works s1e5: Supernovas, Discovery 2010