December 10, 2005
Finally, a relatively quiet weekend! Last weekend was filled with a NOvA meeting, and the Einstein Conference at Francis Parker school in Lincoln Park, then the week was filled with preparations for the big MINERvA "Director's Review" which is finally about to arrive.
If these diaries are supposed to be records of "a year in the life" of a physicist, it seems unfair to write about things that are happening this year as a result of being one of the diarists. So far I've avoided that but I can't resist describing my morning (a week ago today) as a celebrity. I was asked to be on a panel to discuss or react to a talk that was to have been given by Mike Turner, famous cosmologist working at NSF these days who is also a very popular public speaker. He also happens to have taught a cosmology class I took a million years ago in graduate school, so I know him from there. Anyway, Mike's talk was supposed to be about "What would Einstein think was cool now in phsyics" and I originally was concerned about being on the panel because really I am no expert on Einstein so I figured I would be out of place. Also, when I looked at the list of the other folks on the panel with me, I realized I was by far the least famous of all of them.
After talking about my assignment with my friend Kevin, (who was also in that cosmology course) we realized that all I had to figure out was what Mike Turner would think was cool now in physics, and I could go from there. As Kevin predicted, Mike gave a great talk that morning about how physicists today are using measurements of outer space (Hubble Space Telescope, or the WMAP survey of the galaxies) to understand what happened in the very first moments after the Big Bang.
So in my five minutes of commentary/rebuttal I got to say that Mike only told part of the story--Einstein would also think it's amazing that we are also looking inward, using neutrinos to study the first moments of the universe after the Big Bang. Einstein certainly would not have guessed that there are three flavors of neutrinos, or that they can change from one flavor to another. The funny thing about how they change is that it is simply a macrosopic application of Quantum Mechanics--people usually think of Quantum devices as microscopic entities, yet here is a particle which based on its flavor will react with a neutron to make a particle that can cross meters of steel (a muon) or a particle that goes only a few centimeters in steel (an electron) or microns (a tau). Start with one kind, you end up with a mixture of all three.
By studying the way neutrinos (and antineutrinos) change flavors, we may one day find out that neutrinos are the reason that matter didn't just annihilate with the antimatter that was created in equal number at the Big Bang. We know that something had to favor matter over antimatter since there's no antimatter left, yet when we look at the particles that make up protons and neutrons (quarks) we see that most everything looks the same when you switch all the quarks to anti-quarks. Something had to tip the scales in favor of matter over antimatter, and we may find out yet that neutrinos were that something!
After figuring out a way to say all this in public and feeling like a celebrity in the process (with my very own reserved parking spot in Lincoln Park), I was much more inspired to drive back out to the Western suburbs of Chicago and attend the rest of the NOvA meeting and get ready for the big MINERvA review. The reality is that we need both MINERvA and NOvA if we're ever going to get to seeing neutrinos and antineutrinos changing flavors differently.
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