One of the other suggestions to solve the solar neutrino puzzle was that the neutrinos change identities.
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Mr Kajita said his work was important because it showed there must be a new kind of physics beyond the so-called Standard Model of fundamental particles, which requires neutrinos to be massless. They come from a variety of sources in the cosmos, on Earth and in Earth’s atmosphere.
They are like an electron but do not carry an electrical charge, so they are hard to control. In their separate experiments, Kajita and McDonald each showed that neutrinos change between certain flavors – a process called neutrino oscillation.
Japanese and Canadian scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for discovering a basic fact about tiny cosmic particles that whiz through your body by the trillions every second: They have mass.
Kajita was initially dumbfounded by the news that he would share this year’s highest honor in physics. With this type of calculations, we know much more about the nature of the universe, the structure of matter. It takes a lot of people and a long time.
Takaaki Kajita, director of the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, gestures during a news conference in Tokyo October 6, 2015. His work at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory demonstrated that neutrinos from the Sun don’t disappear on their way to Earth, but change form instead.
W.P. Norton is a lifelong journalist and editor with one foot in the legacy print newspaper business and one in corporate communications.
For particle physics this was a historic discovery. This is a discovery which prove that even these exotic, infinitesimally small particles still have a measureable amount of mass to them.
The answer to the question about the weight of this particles is still unknown. “Its Standard Model of the innermost workings of matter had been incredibly successful, having resisted all experimental challenges for more than 20 years”. What Kajita and McDonald found is that a single neutrino can switch back and forth between flavors. But if they would be transformed to muon-neutrinos or tau-neutrinos on their way to Earth, that would make the deficit of the captured electron-neutrinos understandable.
The prize went to three scientists who helped create the world’s leading malaria-fighting drug and another that has almost wiped out two devastating tropical diseases, saving millions of lives.
Michael Turner, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, tells Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson how this discovery has changed scientists’ understanding of the universe.
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In the coming days, the Nobel committee also will announce prizes in chemistry, literature, peace and economics.
