Project Poltergeist

 

Statue of Bruno Pontecorvo (left)
in Dubna outside Moscow

"Particles Unknown" is a 2021 NOVA documentary about neutrinos. It starts off rather badly by forgetting the neutron when describing the atomic nucleus?! OK, apparently the neutron wasn´t yet discovered when the search for the neutrino began, but they should have mentioned it anyway. Or is the Swedish version badly narrated? 

The neutrinos are super-tiny sub-atomic particles, with hardly any mass at all, that can "pass through" our bodies, indeed our entire planet, due to this fact. They are difficult to catch and observe, despite the fact that countless of them are bombarding Earth all the time, produced inside the sun or by cosmic radiation in the upper atmosphere. Some of the machinery used to catch neutrinos look like something from a science fiction film! One of the scientists doing early reaserch on these "ghost particles" also proved very elusive. The Italian Bruno Pontecorvo defected to the Soviet Union in 1950 after a dramatic escape from Italy. Or "disappeared behind the Iron Curtain", as one of the interviewees put it. It´s still not clear whether Pontecorvo was actually a Soviet spy, or an innocent man with Communist sympathies wrongly pinpointed by the FBI and British intelligence...

But back to mainframe. It seems that the neutrino has created problems for the "standard model" of the universe ever since said model was conceived. Why do they exist at all? How come they have mass, when they shouldn´t? Why do they come in three different "flavors"? The biggest mystery is that the neutrinos seem to be affected by some outside force, a force even more elusive than the particles themselves.

The scientists interviewed argue that perhaps there is a fourth kind of neutrino, known as sterile neutrino, a kind of ultimate ghost particle that can affect matter without ever being seen (unless we can somehow detect its presence indirectly through its effects on the flavored neutrinos). While this would create even larger problems for the poor standard model, scientists probably want the sterile neutrinos to be real. The reason? Dark matter (and its close cosmic cousin dark energy). The standard model only describes - wait for it - five percent (5%) of the universe. The other 95% is unaccounted for. (Some model.) Hence "dark" matter or ditto energy. If the sterile neutrino is dark matter, maybe that entire problematique will finally unravel and make quantum physicists happy forever after (and get new Nobel prizes). And then, maybe not. What if the dark matter *doesn´t exist at all*?

Of course, popular science shows keep telling us that science knows everything. Everything...save the 95% ghost particles. 

Happy hunting, boyz and girlz. Time for me to disappear behind the epistemological iron curtain...