I forgot the most interesting part of the neutrino puzzle. That there is a mass difference was discovered indirectly by observations of neutrinos emitted by the Sun due to fusion reactions in the Sun. There were only about 30% as many neutrinos observed as was predicted from standard solar and nuclear physics. No one could find a flaw in either the measurements or the theoretical prediction, so finally some theorists came up with the idea that the neutrinos emitted by the Sun were in a superposition of states, oscillating between electron and muon types, and this idea has been confirmed by experiments at particle accelerators on Earth. The explanation for the "missing solar neutrinos" is that the detectors were only sensitive to neutrinos in the electron state, and those in the muon state weren't seen
Here's the kicker. If the tiny difference in the tiny masses of the electron and muon neutrinos had been something different, it could have been the case that the distance from Sun to Earth would have been such that nearly all neutrinos would reach Earth at the right time to be in the electron state, in which case we would have been satisfied that the neutrino flux was consistent with the predictions of solar physics, and there would have been no puzzle to engage our interest. Bruce On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 4:07 PM, Bruce Sherwood <[email protected]>wrote: > Here's my own hopefully amusing version of this: Some years ago when they > were popular my wife and I enjoyed playing the "Myst" type of computer > adventure game, where you go around in a beautifully rendered world looking > for clues to solve puzzles. What are the criteria for a good game? From our > experience, the puzzles need to be organic to the game (a chess puzzle is > intrusive in a game that has nothing to do with chess), and, as with good > pedagogical practice, the puzzles need to be at just the right level of > challenge. If the puzzle is too easy, it's not interesting, and if the > puzzle is too hard, it's just too frustrating. > > If we're in a good game/simulation, we should be encountering puzzles that > are organic to our world, and which are at the right level of challenge. It > struck me as suggestive that we humans were able to discover that the > identity of neutrinos emitted by the Sun fluctuates sinusoidally on their > way to Earth between electron-type neutrinos and muon-type neutrinos, with > a wavelength of the oscillation determined by the extremely small mass > difference between these two kinds of neutrinos. If the mass difference > were much smaller, the oscillation wavelength would be too long for us to > notice the effect, and if the mass difference were much larger we would > have noticed the effect much more easily (too easily?). Perhaps that mass > difference has been carefully chosen by the gamemaster to represent an > interesting challenge for us humans. > > We might try to catalog how many such puzzles have been constructed with > just the right level of challenge. If there are a lot of them, maybe we're > in a game. > > Bruce > > > > On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 3:50 PM, Robert J. Cordingley < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> This article showed up on my Google News today: >> >> http://www.foxnews.com/tech/**2012/12/17/what-if-reality-** >> were-really-just-im-universe/<http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2012/12/17/what-if-reality-were-really-just-im-universe/> >> >> that I thought raised interesting tho' philosophical questions. Why >> would anyone write a simulation that questioned it's own existence? Is it >> possible for a simulation to run an experiment that interacted with >> anything outside it's own simulated environment? >> >> Robert C > >
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