Welcome to Carl’s School
Tell me about neutrinos
Neutrinos are the most elusive particles in the universe. While you are reading this sentence billions and billions of neutrinos passed through you; you didn’t sense anything at all.
Why should anyone care about neutrinos?
Neutrinos can tell us about the origin of the Universe. For those neutrinos which were a part of the Big Bang, called “relic neutrinos”, information may be available about the Big Bang after about 1 second has elapsed. For photons, those relic photons do not escape from the confines of the Big Bang until about 380,000 years.
However, extracting useful information from relic neutrinos will not be easy, because the neutrino family members are so elusive.
Another interesting property of neutrinos is that, unlike in the original model proposed by Enrico Fermi and others in the 1930’s, it is now known that neutrinos have a very small mass, about one-millionth the mass of an electron, or billions of times lighter than the proton (or neutron). Because there are so many neutrinos in the Universe, they are a significant portion of the mass of the universe.
What are protons, neutrons, electrons? Neutrinos??
If you are interested in learning more about neutrinos, see the course I am preparing on teachable.
Last modified May 12, 2023