What is a Neutrino?

Explaining the weirdest little particle ever found

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Or Hey, did you know that there's a whole universe
of particles that exists all around us, passing through us,
and you can't feel any of it. You mean like
a like a ghost world. Yeah, like zillions of particles
and you can't see or touch or detect or really
could even know that they're there. So what do you
mean it's like a whole universe passing through me, Like
there's stuff but we can't see it or touch it.

(00:28):
I mean that there's a huge amount of stuff in
the universe that you can't detect. It's there, it's interacting,
it's doing things, but you can't notice it. You don't
only notice things with your senses. That doesn't access everything
in the universe. In fact, we have no idea what
for acting in the universe We can't see at all. Right,
there could be huge amounts of crazy, invisible purple monsters
that we can't touch and never will. Well, those that

(00:49):
can't see sometimes you know, yeah, sometimes we can see
a little hints of it, and that gives us a
clue that there are vast amounts of things happening in
the universe that we only rarely get to see. Whoa
WHOA is right. Hi, I'm je and I'm Daniel, and

(01:19):
this is Daniel and Jorge Explain the universe. The universe,
The Universe, the universe. Yeah, it's a podcast where we
try to talk about all the crazy and amazing things
that make up this universe we live in. We want
to take the whole universe, wrap it up in about
twenty minutes and make it digestible to you fitted inside
of your brain, through your ears, or you know, really,

(01:42):
maybe we could grind it up, dry it and you
could snort the universe. That'd be pretty That's what we
just say. Or however you consume your podcasts, that's very
important in whatever, in whatever form you smoke or snort
or listen to your podcasts. But on today's program, we're
gonna talk about something mysterious, something you can't eat, but
something which is all around you right now. Billions and

(02:03):
billions of them are passing through you right now. And
we're not talking about last night's pizza. I know. The
topic of today's episode is the neutrino called the ghostly particle, right,
that's right. Some two people call it the ghostly particle.
The word neutrino is Italian for little neutral one. It's
a nickname given to the particle well before it was discovered,

(02:27):
and it's a really weird little particle. So we thought,
let's break it down to explain to people what it
actually is, because it's a fascinating mystery. Yeah, I imagine
not a lot of people who have heard of I
mean maybe some people have heard of the neutron, but
the neutrino that may not be as well known. In
order to get a sense for what people knew about
the neutrino, I went out and I asked people around
campus that you see Irvine what they knew. So play

(02:49):
along at home, think to yourself, what do you know
about the neutrino? And then listen to these interviews. Here's
what people had to say. I don't watch about it,
but it's I often hear that got like a cosmic
some one of those cosmic race and people try to
detect using specialized tools. I heard of it, but I

(03:10):
don't exactly what it is. Great, I do not know
what that is now, um no, no, alright, I'm not
exactly sure. So like some kind of funk esdays and nutrition,
I don't know what is it? Alright? Not a popular particle. No,
Almost nobody on campus had any idea what the neutrina was.
One person thought it was some sort of fungus that

(03:31):
might grow on your toes, which you could still be
I mean, well, I mean, we don't know a lot
about it. Right well, it could have potentially contribute to fungi,
or you could could be accumulating in your toes right now, Daniel.
More likely somebody creates or just or discovers a new
form of fungus and names it after the neutrino right
after this podcast goes wild. But yeah, pretty much across

(03:53):
the board, everyone said I've never heard of this, And
let me tell you how deeply disappointing that is to
me as a particle physicist. Work you see, Irvine, and
let me tell you why. The reason is that the
guy who discovered the new trino and won the Nobel
Prize for it. Okay, and down at you See Irvine.
We have a few Nobel Prize winners. But it's not
like we have dozens and dozens. It's not like Berkeley

(04:14):
where they have a special parking lot for Nobel Prize winners.
Nobel Prize, Daniel, I do not have a Nobel Prize
as the recording of this podcast Breaking News, Breaking News.
You think that's something you would already know, because if
I had a Nobel Prize, I'd be wearing it around
my chest. Um So, so it was discovered by somebody

(04:34):
in your campus, right there, Fred Ryness. Yeah. In fact,
the building is now named after him. I work in
Ryness Hall, named after Fred Ryness, the discoverer of the
new Trino, and he won the Nobel Prize. This is
It's a pretty big deal around campus, and so you
think maybe somebody on campus here, you see Irvine, would
know that. What's one of the things that we're famous for?

(04:56):
Is it part of like the tours when people, you know,
people tour campuses and they say, this is where the
nutrina was discovered. Oh my god, don't even get me started.
It is part of the tour. But it drives me
crazy because every time they walk by my building and
they hear the tour and they say, oh, this is
the building named after Fred Ryan is so won the
Nobel Prize. Then they give a little spiel about the
neutrino and they get almost everything about it totally wrong.

(05:18):
And I'm tempted every time to step into the referende.
Excuse me, Actually, you're going to train our round run
with that voice. I love it. I know how that's
gonna go over. Nobody cares. But do you know I
feel like people visiting the campuses deserve a good explanation.
It might factor into their decision to go to u
c R. Vine. Let's record an excellent podcast about the neutrino,

(05:39):
and then it will make it required listening for all
the tour guides, and then I won't have to explain
it to every single one of them one aever. Well,
just just put it on a speaker. You'll stand outside
your building with a boom box playing the podcast, like
you to say anything that's right. Yeah, I definitely will
not get picked up by campus security to nanoseconds. Absolutely,

(06:00):
that's a great idea, Thank you, y. So let's break
it down. What is a neutrina all right? A neutrino
is a fundamental particle. What does that mean? Well, a
fundamental particle, as we see it, is a point in space.
It's a tiny dot, right, It's a place in space

(06:20):
where we think there might be electric charge, there might
be matter, there might be all sorts of quantum properties.
Other examples are the electron right or the corks. These
are all particles we think are not made of other
little particles. That's why we call them fundamental. So particles
are not like little balls. You're saying there's special points
in space. That's right. We're made out of atoms, which
are made out of particles and things we're made out of.

(06:43):
They're not little balls. They're actually just like little special
points in space. That's kind of your definition of a particle. Yeah, exactly.
And it's very tempting to think of particles a little
balls because, for example, cartoonists frea balls and slaggers. Shame
on them. Well, it's very difficult to draw a ball

(07:03):
that has no volume because it's literally not there. Right,
Any tiny point you draw is going to have a
left side and a right side, which means it has
a size right. But a particle is just a single
point in space. There's no extent to it. The left
side and the right side are at the same place
because there's no space there. It's a zero volume dot

(07:24):
in space with some quantum mechanical properties, electric charge, mass,
all sorts of stuff. So the universe is filled with
these little points that you call particles, and they're all different.
There's electrons, there, protons. The neutrino is one of these
particles that the universe likes to make, that's right. But
the proton is not one of them. Proton is not
a fundamental particle. Right, So let's review. You're made out

(07:46):
of atoms. Atoms have electrons and and then have a nucleus.
The nucleus is made out of protons and neutrons, and
the protons and neutrons are made out of quarks. So
all the atoms that build up you and me and
hamsters and ice cream are made out of quirks and electrons. Right.
So the up cork and the down cork make up
the proton and the neutron which gives the nucleus, and

(08:08):
the electron surrounds it. And that you can make any atom.
You can make uranium, you can make you know, hydrogen,
you can make lithium. Anything. It's just made out of
those three particles. So these are just things that the
universe likes to make. And there's not just the kind
that we're made out of. But there's more much more
than that, that's right. And uh, it's fascinating because most

(08:29):
of the stuff in the universe that we know about,
you know, gas and planets, whatever is made out of
these three particles up corks, down corks, and electrons. In fact,
that is the recipe for almost everything, and I was
thinking about it the other day. It's sort of incredible.
It's not just the recipe for everything, but it's everything
in the same proportions. That is, every atom that makes
up you has the same number of up corks and

(08:51):
down corks and electrons, and every atom that makes up
ice cream or lava or hamsters, it's the same number
of particles. Right, So we're getting off in a bit
of tangent here, but it's sort of fascinating because, I
mean it's like there's a similar list of ingredients in
the same proportions, not just similar, exactly the same. So
if you had a kilogram of hamsters, or a kilogram

(09:11):
of ice cream or a kilogram of Jorge, it would
be made out of the same particles. The only difference
is in the arrangement of them. I mean, some some
arrangements are more awesome than others. I mean, come on,
that's right. Ice cream is really pretty awesome. I totally.
The interesting thing is that, as you were saying, there
are other particles, right, there's not just those three particles.
You can make all this crazy stuff out of those

(09:33):
three particles, but there are other particles out there. And
that's the first mistake that's made. On the u c
I campus tour. They describe the newtrino as a sub
atomic particle, the smallest part of the atom. But the
neutrino is not part of the atom. It's not in there.
You take the atom apart, and there's only up corks,
down corks and electrons and neutrino. It's a particle. It's
in the universe, but you don't need it to make

(09:55):
hydrogen or lithium or uranium or any of the other eums.
But maybe they mean subpotomic in terms of its size,
like it's much much smaller than an atom in the
sense that particles have no size. That's true, yes, maybe
in the sense that it's false, it's true, right, Well,
every particle is subatomic, and from from that definition, fundamental

(10:18):
particles have no size. Yeah, but it's just as small
as the electron or the up cork or the down cork,
and then it has zero volume. But the interesting thing
about it is that it's not part of matter, right,
So it's like, why is it there? Um? But the
neutrino is weird in in a few ways. Right. Not
only does it not make up the atom, it also
doesn't feel a lot of the forces. Like the neutrino

(10:39):
can pass right through you without interacting. That's what we're
talking about, the top of the episode is that neutrinos
are passing through us all the time in great numbers
and we don't feel them at all, which isn't true
for electrons, right, it's a huge rain of electrons. You
would definitely feel them, and you would get cancer pretty quick. Yeah.
And it's interesting because pretty much anything has the capacity
to move through other things things, Right, Because if everything

(11:01):
is made out of point particles, which have zero volume
they're just little points in space, then technically, if you
take a whole bunch of nothing, you should be able
to pass it through another whole bunch of nothing. Right,
that's right, that's right exactly. So if you take a
bunch of point particles that don't interact with each other
at all, then they will pass through each other. There's
no chance that they will collide because they have zero volume.

(11:23):
So that's sort of overlapping area. What we call the
cross section particle physics is zero, right, you can't make
two things that have zero volume hit each other. It's vable,
And so yeah, you're right. You could have a huge
density of them and a new one can come along
and just pass right through it. Yeah, because like the
reason I can't go through the wall here, the reason
I can't pass through it like a ghost. It's not

(11:43):
that like my particles hit against the other particles like
they bump against each other. It's just like they want
to get closed. But then there's other forces that that
prevent me from going near them. Exactly. The particles that
make up the wall have no volume to them at all. Right,
It's like a it's just a bunch of dots, and
you're a bunch of dots, and so you should be
able to pass through it. Except, of course, the particles

(12:06):
that make up the wall are not just a disconnected
bunch of dots. They're bound very tightly together with forces,
and those forces hold them together into sheets and structures,
and also those forces repel other particles that feel those forces.
So when your finger is pushing against the wall, what's
happening is not that the ball particles in your finger
are bouncing off the ball particles in the wall, but

(12:28):
they're repelling each other using mostly electromagnetism. So the sensation
of touching things and holding things and standing on top
of things that it's really just like we're all kind
of magnets repelling each other. Yeah, they're electrostatic forces mostly
their chemical bonds, right. And so you can think of
like a surface of something is like a chain link fence, right,

(12:49):
lots of big gaps, but then there's links holding it together.
And you know, another chain link fence coming up to it,
which is also mostly air, can't pass through it because
they both have these links. So that's the thing is
that something can only touch you or affect you, or
you can only feel it if it's affected by electromagnetic forces.
That's kind of the key, right. Yeah, So there's two
elements of the universe, not just particles, but also forces, right,

(13:12):
and those are the basic building blocks of how we
do science and particle physics. We got the particles and
we've got the forces. I mean, another time we can
talk about quantum field theory. And for those listeners out
there who know that, you know that everything is actually
just a quantum field. But let's talk about particles and
forces today extra credit podcast. That's right. So at this
level that we say it's particles and they're connected by forces,

(13:32):
the forces are how the particles talk to each other.
And if my particles are talking to your particles, then
when you punch me in the face, then that's why
I feel it right now. If you say when, as if,
it happens often, I'm trying to make this a concrete
example for the listeners, you know, not abstract type of
if I slowly caress your cheek. Hold on. I noticed

(13:53):
that you made that an if, not a when. Um,
let's keep this PG. Imagine that you were built out
of particles. It felt different forces than me than when
we high fived. Our hands would pass right through each
other because those forces would not pay attention to each
other or tract or repell or anything. We would like

(14:13):
phase right through each other because the particles that make
us up don't interact, right, So it's all about interacting. Okay,
So the neutrino is one of these particles that doesn't
speak the same language that our particles speak. That's right.
The neutrino is neutral. It has no electric charge. That's
one of the reasons it's called neutrino. Neutrino is Italian

(14:33):
for little neutral particle. And so it doesn't feel electromagnetism
at all. And not only does it not feel electromagnetism
like the electron does feel it, but it also doesn't
feel the strong nuclear force that's the one that holds
the corks together in the nucleus and affects the proton
and the neutron. So it doesn't feel the two strongest
forces in the universe, the strong nuclear force and electromagnetism.

(14:56):
Generally just likes to avoid conflict. Yeah, well, it's kind
of snob mostly ignores everything. It's nay or shy. I
don't know. You could see it both ways, says the introvert,
right standing up for the introverted particle, aren't you. Well,
let's get it more into it, but let's take a
quick break first. Okay, So the neutrino is a particle

(15:27):
in the universe that's there. There's a lot of them
out there, but it just doesn't feel the same forces.
It doesn't speak the same language that you and I
and all the particles that make us speak or use right,
that's right. Yeah, it's like, um, you know, it's like
it's a it's deaf or something. You can walk through
the loudest bar, you know, with thump thump thump music, right,

(15:50):
and not even hear anything, not even notice it's there. Right,
it's not purposely ignoring you, it just does not hear it. Interesting.
I was thinking a good analogy could also be you
know how in the Internet today people communicated using Facebook
or Twitter, or Instagram or email. Those are all different
ways that people interact with each other on the Internet.
But what if there was somebody who said, you know what,

(16:11):
I'm not going to use Twitter or Instagram or Facebook.
I'm just gonna respond to people if they write me
a handwritten letter. That's right. Yeah, those people are social
media neutrinos. Yes, yeah, that's kind of what it is.
It's like everybody else is talking to each other in
one way, but this one particle just says, you know what,
I'm going to ignore those different ways to interact. I'm

(16:33):
just gonna do my thing. Yeah, and given the toxicity
of social media, that probably means the neutrino is the
happiest particle. Yeah, you know, they made. That's the key
we should all learn from newtrinos. Yeah. Um, So let's
remind people though, what the forces are. So there's the
strong nuclear force that ties the nucleus together. There's electromagnetism
that's responsible for electricity and magnetism and light and all

(16:55):
that kind of stuff. And then there's the weak nuclear
force that's the weakest of of these forces. And then
there's gravity. Everything with mass feels gravity, right, but in
the case of particles, we don't really think about gravity
very much because particles have hardly any mass at all,
and so gravity doesn't really affect them to really those
other three. So the corks, the corks, they feel the

(17:15):
strong nuclear force and electromagnetism and the weak force. Okay,
so they feel everything. Electrons, they feel electromagnetism, and they
feel the weak nuclear force. Neutrinos only feel the weak
nuclear force, which is called the weak nuclear force because
it's super duper weak, not because it takes a week
to act or something like that. So it doesn't just

(17:37):
ignore some of the forces that everybody else fields, but
it only it's like the one it chose to interact
with the rest of the universe is like the week
is one. It's like the most incossequential one, right exactly.
It's like, you know, if you could only interact with
somebody by sending them a letter to the south pole,
and the letters only go every six months or something, right,
And you know, if the neutrino didn't feel any forces

(18:00):
at all, then we would have no way to even
know it existed. There could be a whole set of
particles that speak even maybe a whole different set of forces. Yeah,
like people think about dark matter, right, dark matter, we
don't know if it feels any of these forces, and
that's what makes it so difficult to look for and
to understand. Dark amount, as far as we know, only
speaks gravity, which is why you can only study it

(18:21):
when there's like a galaxy sized blob of it. Neutrinos
do feel one of these forces, which is why we
can talk about them and study them. Well, let's talk
about some of these properties that I was reading about
the neutrino. I read that it has a mass that's
maybe one less than one million of the mass of
the electron. That's right. Neutrinos are super duper duper low mass,

(18:42):
and we don't understand why at all. You know, we
look at the mass of these particles, the electron, the corks,
the other ones. We have no idea why these particles
are different masses. We did a whole episode on how
they get their masses, which is about interacting with the
Higgs boson. Some of them interact a lot with the
Higgs boson and so they get a lot of mass,
and some them don't interact hardly at all, so they
get almost no mass. But we don't know why, Like,

(19:04):
why does this one interact with the Higgs a lot
and this one almost none. It's like a bunch of
parameters in the control panel the universe, and we don't
know if there's a pattern to it, or if they
just set randomly at the beginning of the universe. We
have no clue, but it seems like an important hint
that the neutrinos are so close to zero mass but
not actually zero. Yeah, so they are kind of tiny, right,

(19:26):
I mean, I know everything is a point mass mathematically,
but these things, I mean they're not just a point mass,
but they're a point mass that are really really really
really really almost no mass. That's right. But if again,
it doesn't affect their size right. Their physical size is
a different thing from their mass. Their mass is like
a quantum mechanical label, like electric charge. Right, it's not

(19:47):
like something with more mass. It is more stuffed to it.
But yeah, you're right. Neutrinos are weird because they have
almost no mass but not zero, like they're not the
lightest thing in the universe though. Right. Photons have no
mass exactly zero. They travel to speed of light. Neutrinos
just less than the speed of light because they have
just more than zero mass. These particles only choose to

(20:08):
interact with the rest of the universe using the weak force.
And the weak force is not just weak, but it's
also really short, meaning that it doesn't work over long distances.
You have to be within the diameter of a proton
just to feel this force. That's right. The weak force
is super limited, right, And not only is it weak,

(20:29):
as you're saying, but it's short range. And the reason
is that the particles that communicate that force. Remember, we
have particles that make up matter, and then we also
have forces, and the forces themselves are communicated using particles. So,
for example, electromagnetism is communicated using the photon, right, And
electromagnetism goes everywhere in the universe has infinite range, and

(20:49):
the reason is that the photon is massless. Right, the
photon has no mass. But the particles that communicate the
weak force, they're called the w and the z bosons
are really really v particles, sort of ironic. The lightest
particle of all the matter particles in neutrino uses the
heaviest force particles, which means that they don't go very far.

(21:09):
So this particle not only is it um ignoring a
lot of the forces, but the forces that it does
feel are super weak. And this particle is super light.
It's almost like it's almost not there, you know, like
what is the not at all? Not at all? In fact,
there's zillions of neutrinos. I mean, it's not there in
the sense that you can almost not tell that it's there.

(21:31):
But there are a huge number of neutrinos. Like if
you hold out your fingernail, it's approximately one square centimeter.
There are a hundred billion neutrinos passing through your fingernail
every second. D yes ten to the eleven neutrinos per
square centimeter per second. Let's count. So look at your

(21:52):
fingernail one one, two, three hundred billion neutrinos just went
in my fingernail, that's right, and ignored you. Right, And neutrinos,
I mean, not only can we not detect them, they
can't really detect us right to them, we are like
an invisible haze in the universe. Right then, don't even
know where I would exist, right, They hardly interact with.

(22:15):
A neutrino interact with the rest of the universe so
weakly that it can pass right through the Earth without interacting. Again,
not because it's small. It's not that it like wiggles
through cracks between atoms, right, It's that it doesn't interact.
It just doesn't care. It just yeah, it just flies
right through. Um. A neutrino can pass through a light
year of lead. Okay, So imagine a blob of lead

(22:38):
that's a light year long, which is how far light
travels any year, which is really really far, and lead
it's a really kind of like dense metal. Right, Yeah,
it's a huge amount of stuff. Right. Um, neutrino can
pass through a wall that thick and have about a
fifty percent chance of interacting. So it's just going through
the universe doing its own thing. Yeah, making us feel

(22:59):
even more insignificant. It's all about you, Jorge, It's all
about you. It's something insignificant. Is making us feel even
more insignificant. Well, we are pretty insignificant. Nothing we do
is important. Um, But it turns out that neutrinos are
not just ignoring us, they're also ignoring the whole Earth
and other suns and everything. And you might be asking, like,

(23:23):
why are there so many neutrinos? Where are they coming from?
And the answer is that they come from the Sun.
They're produced in the fusion reaction at the core of
the Sun. Well, I think the question that I want
to know is, if they're so light, so inconsequential, so ignoring,
how do we even know that it's there? And why
should we even care that it's there? All right? Great,
great question? How do we know that it's there? Well,

(23:46):
it does interact, right, so it can interact with our world.
And because there are so many of them, the big
number of how many there are and the small number
of the probability of them to interact actually balance out
to give us a reasonable number of times. And neutrinos
do interact with normal matter. And so if you set
up a big experiment. You can catch neutrinos right, because

(24:08):
there's a huge number of them. So out of the
hundreds of billions fault flowing through my fingernail, every once
in a while, one mom would be like, oh, hey,
what's this. It's a fingernail exactly. I don't know what
a fingernail is, but I just ran into it. Yeah.
So what you do if you want to catch new
trinos is you set up a big vat, for example,
of water underground, and you shield it from everything else,

(24:30):
so you make sure you don't get any background from
muans or anything else crazy, and you wait until one
of those atoms of water and gets bumped by something mysterious,
and there are ways to tell whether or not it
was bumped by something like a neutrino. And that's the
way that we measure neutrinos. Today. We have these huge detectors,
like the ones called super Comioconda in Japan that measure
neutrinos from the Sun and from other sources. And they

(24:52):
do about having these big tanks of heavy water and
waiting for one of them to get bumped by neutrino.
So that's how we know where they were there, like,
can definitely see them, You can definitely see them interacting. Yeah,
and that's how fred Ryan saw them. He signed neutrinos
bouncing off of protons and turning into a very characteristic
signal that you couldn't mimic with anything else. And so

(25:12):
I mean in that sense, he doesn't see the neutrinos
themselves directly. It's not like he captured one, put it
in the box, said ah ha, look here's my Nobel
Prize winning discovery. What he saw was something that happened
that only a neutrino could do. Well, I have more questions,
but let's take a quick break. So, I think a

(25:42):
lot of particle physics laboratories in the country and across
the world. Now there's kind of a renewed interest in
neutrinos now that we found the Higgs boson and and
a lot of these particles in the standard model of physics.
There's a lot of interest down the netrino. So why
is that, Well, why is the neutrino interesting or why
is it a big deal? Yeah, it's a big deal,
and not just because it's weird, but one of the

(26:04):
things we want to do in particle physics is understand
the universe at its smallest scale, right, understand the tiniest
little bits. And to do that, we need to look
not just at the kind of matter that makes us up,
but the kind of matter that's everywhere in the universe.
Because we're looking for ideas and patterns that go bigger
than humanity, right, that that are tell us something fundamental
and deep about the universe. So for that we need

(26:26):
to cast our net as widely as possible and understand
how this kind of matter works, how other kinds of
matter works. And so it's important to understand neutrinos because
they are there their clue somehow about how the universe
is put together. Right, And it could be and I said,
neutrinos are fundamental, that they're not made of other things.
That's our current state of knowledge. It could be the
neutrinos and corks and electrons and every particle we know

(26:49):
are actually made out of something smaller neutrinos. Neutrinos. To
answer your question, why should we study them, Well, they
give us clues as to how the whole principles working together. Right.
We wanted to get the big picture so we can
see all the patterns because those patterns give us clues
as to what's going on to underneath, what these things
are all made out of, and what the answers are.

(27:09):
But also because neutrinos themselves are really weird. They can
do things that other particles can't, Like they can change
from one type into the other. You know, for example,
an electron is an electron is an electron. It's never
going to change into a muan, but an electron neutrino.
Neutrinos come in three different flavors electron, muon, and taw.
They can switch from one to the other. So you

(27:31):
create one type in the Sun and as it's flying
to the Earth that has about a one third chance
to change into another kind of neutrino. That's really strange.
It's not something we've seen before, and it actually breaks
a pretty basic rule in the standard model of particle
physics that you can't switch from one kind of flavor
to another. So we don't know why that is when,
don't know what it means. Lots of possibilities. It's like

(27:54):
it's not only ignoring Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, it's
changing its address every three months, like it really doesn't
want to be found. That's right. Yeah, it's a pretty
weird little particle can do all sorts of things, and
so we're hoping that figuring out what he can do
and how it interacts and nailing down all these details
will give us a clue as to some of the
deeper mysteries. You know, how did all the matter come

(28:15):
to be? Why do we have the matter or not antimatter?
What are all these things made out of? We're hoping
that just nailing down and tying up the loose ends
and new trinos gives us clues to answer these other bigger,
deeper questions, because that's kind of how science works, you know, right.
I mean, science doesn't just study human beings and our biology.
Science also studies other animals and other organisms, because that

(28:37):
tells us a lot about why we're here, or what
the rules are for why we're here. Yeah, exactly exactly.
To understand humanity, you understand all of our closest cousins
and our distant relatives and the whole spectrum of life
on Earth to get the context. And so we want
to understand how particles work. We want to we need
to study all of them. Yeah, I mean, the weird
ones that don't want to be found. That's right, We're

(28:57):
going to ignore all of their preferences and study him anyway. Yeah,
I'm not a particle physicist. I'm a particle stalker. Yeah,
particle hunter. Isn't that what they sometimes they call you guys,
particle hunters? Particle hunters? Yeah, look, I found one, this
one right here. So what do you think learning about
this ghostly particle is going to teach us? Like, what

(29:19):
are the possibilities of things we can learn from it? Well,
we could learn that there are other kinds of particles
out there. Some people think that there might be four
kinds of neutrinos out there. There's a new kind of
of neutrino called the sterile neutrino, which doesn't even feel
the weak force. Right, people think that there there might
be this other kind of particle out there. Um, it
might tell us something about why we have matter and

(29:40):
antimatter because it it might be related to how things
switch back and forth. Um. But most likely I think
it's going to contain some surprises. You know, particle physics,
the history of us has been full of surprises. Do
you think think this is happening? Turns out bad's happening,
and the only way to dig into it is to
just explore, dig into it and figure it out and
see what nature has to tell us. The asked, he
would be neutral. That's right. And so I hope after

(30:04):
listening to this episode those folks out there, I'll know
now what a neutrino is. That's not a fungus on
your toneail, and that it's a tiny particle. Yes, And
also it was that it was discovered in the campus
of UC Berkeley, Irvine, UC Irvine. That's wait, it's not
UC Berkeley. Actually you know that. You just said that

(30:25):
to Ryan me up. All right, Well, thank you for
joining us. See you next time. Another piece of the
universe explained before. You still have a question after listening
to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd
love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter,

(30:48):
and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or
email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge dot com.