back to article Boffins quietly cheering possible discovery of new fundamental particle: Sterile neutrino

It needs more sigmas, but Fermilab boffins in America are carefully speculating that they may have seen evidence of a new fundamental particle: the sterile neutrino. The suggestion follows tests conducted by the MiniBooNE (Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment) instrument, located near Chicago. Its mission is to detect neutrino …

  1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Windows

    This is not making physics any easier

    So now neutrinos "oscillate" from one type to another ? And they do it fast enough to be emitted as one type and switch twice before hitting something (much) less than an Earth's diameter away ?

    Can we just admit that quantum physics is batshit crazy now ?

    1. John Smith 19 Gold badge
      Thumb Up

      This is not making physics any easier

      True.

      But it does make it more interesting.

      Now if only there were some actual uses for this information.

      Thumbs up for what has been a very long hunt and congratulations that something has definitely been found, although it's not quite clear what that "something" is.

    2. Lusty

      Re: This is not making physics any easier

      Or maybe our detection methods are so primitive they are all actually the same thing anyway and just look different. History is full of people explaining away the things they don't yet understand, and then other people proving them wrong. This sort of thing shows we're nudging in the right direction though.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: This is not making physics any easier

      Can we just admit that quantum physics is batshit crazy now ?

      Or that Douglas Adams was right.

    4. Rich 11

      Re: This is not making physics any easier

      So now neutrinos "oscillate" from one type to another?

      'Now'? This has been known for fifty years and suspected for ten years longer. Do keep up!

      1. Michael H.F. Wilkinson Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: This is not making physics any easier

        Quantum physics has always been batshit crazy. Even general relativity is seriously weird, for that matter (both still make more sense than current politics, or most of what goes on on FaceBook and Twitter, and the like). Doesn't mean quantum physics and relativity are wrong, however. We just happen to live in a batshit crazy and seriously weird universe. Once you realize that, it makes life a lot easier

        1. DavCrav

          Re: This is not making physics any easier

          "We just happen to live in a batshit crazy and seriously weird universe."

          We have to. (Ferro)Magnetism is impossible in a classical physics theory.

          1. handleoclast
            Coat

            Re: This is not making physics any easier

            (Ferro)Magnetism is impossible in a classical physics theory.

            Indeed. It is a failure to comprehend quantum theory and therefore insisting upon a classical physics analysis that results in questions like this.

          2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
            Coat

            (Ferro)Magnetism is impossible in a classical physics theory.

            Shhhhh.

            Don't tell the magnets this. They might stop working.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: This is not making physics any easier

          "We just happen to live in a batshit crazy and seriously weird universe. "

          Don't agree. The universe is a perfectly normal universe. It is what it is. It's just that a species of anthropoid has gone from scratching its head over why the sun rises to scratching its head over how the sun exists in the first place. We laugh at the cosmologies of earlier people (the sky is the underside of a big cow? Really?). One day perhaps people - or something - will laugh at our ignorance.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Boffin

      Re: This is not making physics any easier

      Neutrino oscillation has been known about for a fairly long time. It's a critical result for two reasons.

      Firstly it means that the Sun hasn't gone out, which is a good thing for the long-term future of life on Earth. Fusion in the Sun's core produces electron neutrinos, in huge numbers. Based on the Sun's luminosity (ie how bright it is!) we can estimate what the rate of fusion in the core must be, or in fact what the rate must have been some time ago, as the energy from processes in the core takes a long time to get to the surface where we can measure it. Knowing the rate of fusion means we can predict the neutrino flux passing the Earth. From the 1960s it became possible to detect these solar neutrinos, and it became apparent there was a serious problem: there weren't enough, by a factor of 1/2 to 2/3.

      There are two possible reasons for this (three if you include experimental error, but multiple experiments saw the same problem). The terrifying one is that fusion could be stopping in the Sun: because neutrinos escape from the core immediately they tell you the rate of fusion in the core now (or a few minutes ago, in fact), while the Sun's luminosity tells you the rate thousands of years ago. So if fusion had stopped, or dramatically decreased, this would explain the result. It would also mean that stellar models were terribly wrong and that life on Earth had no future as the Sun was going out. The other possible reason is neutrino oscillation: the Sun emits electron neutrinos, and we detect electron neutrinos. But if neutrinos oscillate between three flavours -- electron, muon and tau -- then, between being created in the Sun and us observing them, the oscillation would mean we see only about 1/3 of the neutrinos we naively expect to see, as 2/3 of them would have leaked away into muon or tau neutrinos, which we don't detect.

      Well, there are other ways of estimating what is going on in the Sun's core, and they predicted that fusion has not stopped. A bunch of other experiments with neutrinos were also done, including some which showed neutrinos produced in the experiment, at known rates, changing flavour. So neutrino oscillation turns out to be the right explanation, and the Sun has not gone out. The 2015 Nobel prize for physics was awarded for this work.

      Secondly it means that neutrinos have mass. This is a lovely result because it comes straight from relativity. Massless objects travel at the speed of light, and thus along 'null curves', which are the curves (straight lines in the absence of gravity, curves in its presence) which light follows. But these curves have zero proper length, which means that objects following them experience no time: for a photon, or any other massless particle, everything happens at once. But this means that if neutrinos are massless then they can't oscillate, because they have no time to oscillate as everything happens at once for them: they experience no time between production in the Sun and detection in Earth.

      But they do oscillate, and thus they must have mass. That's a lovely result because it follows so immediately from basic physics, but also because the standard model of particle physics -- the bits of theory we think we understand well -- predicts that neutrinos are massless. That means that the standard model is wrong and there is new physics we don't understand, and physicists (conspiratards notwithstanding) love that.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: This is not making physics any easier

        @tfb - although what you say about the length of time required for energy released by fusion in the Sun's core to reach its surface is true, there is a much quicker way of knowing that fusion in the core hasn't stopped: radiation pressure. If there was no on-going radiation pressure Sol would collapse due to gravity relatively quickly, in the order of a few seconds, iirc. We'd get the news about eight minutes later.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: This is not making physics any easier

          Is that right? It smells like it should be, since that kind of collapse is what happens in supernovae, but on the other hand if you imagine turning off the fusion in the Sun what you'd have in the short term would be a core that was just as hot and thus emitting as much thermal radiation, so nothing woukd change, perhaps, except it would slowly start to cool. My argument I guess is that the thermal photons are the radiation pressure and it takes them a long time to fade away. I think that is probably wrong though, and obviously I could find out by reading about it rather than making up handwaving arguments (so in particular I'm not claiming I'm right!).

          However it is true that one of the suggestions to explain the deficit of Solar neutrinos was that fusion had stopped, I am oretty sure.

        2. onefang

          Re: This is not making physics any easier

          "If there was no on-going radiation pressure Sol would collapse due to gravity relatively quickly, in the order of a few seconds, iirc. We'd get the news about eight minutes later."

          And we would begin crapping ourselves nine minutes later. Whether we would finish crapping ourselves coz our crap has frozen, before the panic babies get born, is something I'm not equipped to calculate, but my moneys on no panic baby births. Many other things would kill us all off before that nine months elapses.

      2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: This is not making physics any easier

        "new physics..., and physicists ... love that."

        It keeps them in work.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: This is not making physics any easier

          It keeps them in work.

          Not many of them: the great majority of people work on thngs whose fundementals are understood already.

    6. Twanky

      Re: This is not making physics any easier

      Niels Bohr was more eloquent: 'If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.'

      But 'batshit crazy' is probably what he meant.

      1. Terje

        Re: This is not making physics any easier

        Granted the following quote from him (Niels Bohr) I'm quite sure that batshit crazy is about correct.

        "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough."

      2. handleoclast

        Re: This is not making physics any easier

        Niels Bohr was more eloquent: 'If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.'

        Richard Feynman said "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

        He probably also meant 'batshit crazy.'

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: This is not making physics any easier - Feynman

          At the time there was an ongoing debate (or agreement to differ) between the physicists who wanted to understand the physical implications of quantum mechanics, and the ones who argued that, in effect, it wasn't comprehensible and could only be mathematically described, not visualised. Hence Feynman's comment; physicists went with what worked for them but without really believing that was the "reality" that could be understood. In a sense, they were in the position of the back end people in the bank reconciling the trades but not having any idea what the traders did all day. You can reconcile to the cent stuff the uncertainty in whose value is currently millions of dollars. (I chose this example because of the embarrassing infinities that had to be jiggered out.)

          Another analogy would be someone who can drive a car and so thinks they understand how cars work.

          So - not batshit crazy. Merely an awareness that we can see a bit of the picture but have no handle on what is "really" going on.

    7. hammarbtyp

      Re: This is not making physics any easier

      "Can we just admit that quantum physics is batshit crazy now ?"

      No, what it says is our ability to perceive the real world out there is limited by the paucity of our sensory apparatus.

      What we perceive as the "real" world is only a construct we use to make sense of it. It is a bit like a creature living in a 2-d world meeting a 3-d object for the 1st time. It can make measurements, construct mathematical models about the object, but the concept of a 3-d world will always appears "bat-shit" crazy just because it has no way of perceiving what it is actually seeing

    8. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

    I presume that public money is spent on this.

    ...So I wonder how we decide how much needs to be spent?

    Are we spending too little? Or too much? Does the only way to make a sensible decision involve asking the few people who understand this kind of thing (and who obviously have an interest in gathering as much money as possible for it) and just taking their word?

    Or do the physicists simply wait for the crumbs that fall off the bigger table where the politicians apportion pork to all the voters they want to keep happy?

    I just wonder.....

    1. John H Woods Silver badge

      Re: I presume that public money is spent on this.

      Money doesn't just disappear from an economy.

      If you give researchers, or any normal citizens, money to do stuff, you'll get some back immediately in tax. The rest will be spent on goods and services, and more tax will come back, ad infinitum.

      The only way to "disappear" money is to give it to the people who are equipped to move it out of the country where it escapes national taxation. And where, even if it is used, none of that money comes back because even if it is subjected to taxation, it now benefits other national economies.

      1. Chris G

        Re: I presume that public money is spent on this.

        "Money doesn't just disappear from an economy."

        It does however, 'Just appear into an economy' that's the wonder of fiat currency.

        Probably more batshit crazy than quantum weirdness.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: I presume that public money is spent on this.

          And it can also disappear of course. That's the wonder of currencies: more of them can be made as an economy grows. Imagine a 'currency' where there were only, say 21 million pounds and no more could be made, ever. What happens to those pounds between, say, 1100 and today?

          What the original comment meant, of course, is that money doesn't just disappear: it requres a central bank to do that.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Big Brother

      Re: I presume that public money is spent on this.

      You vote for a government. They decide what to fund from taxation. If enough people disagree, another government gets elected. If you want a grey utilitarian nightmare, vote for the grey utilitarian nightmare party who will stop all funding which can not be immediately justified.

      1. Aladdin Sane

        Re: I presume that public money is spent on this.

        "It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."

        "You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"

        "No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."

        "Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."

        "I did," said Ford. "It is."

        "So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"

        "It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."

        "You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"

        "Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."

        "But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"

        "Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"

        "What?"

        "I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"

        "I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."

        Ford shrugged again.

        "Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happenned to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."

        "But that's terrible," said Arthur.

        "Listen, bud," said Ford, "if I had one Altairian dollar for every time I heard one bit of the Universe look at another bit of the Universe and say 'That's terrible' I wouldn't be sitting here like a lemon looking for a gin."

        ― Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish

  3. JimmyPage Silver badge
    Stop

    Wasn't this predicted in "2012" (the film) ?

    "The neutrinos ... are mutating"

  4. Roj Blake Silver badge

    Possibly a Stupid Question...

    But if neutrinos oscillate between different flavours, then how could the sterile ones be what makes up the dark matter halos around galaxies? Why wouldn't they sometimes flip into non-sterile types and therefore be detectable?

    1. Nick Ryan Silver badge

      Re: Possibly a Stupid Question...

      Dark matter and dark energy are constructs to try and explain deficits in the current theories. With a bit of luck the theories will be improved and research such as this will probably help.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Possibly a Stupid Question...

        Dark matter and dark energy are constructs to try and explain deficits in the current theories.

        People love saying that but that doesn't mean there really isn't dark matter and dark energy. Though personally I think the explanation may be more simple - when presented with the idea of gravity spacetime is always shown as a flat sheet, with a planet or star 'weighing down' the sheet and thus curving spacetime.

        But who says the sheet is flat in the absence of matter? If is wrinkled, you'd get the clumpy/stringy large scale matter map we've observed - the "dark matter" is pre-existing wrinkles in spacetime, and the gravity of those wrinkles are what drew matter in and caused galaxies and clusters of galaxies to form in there.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Possibly a Stupid Question...

          "But who says the sheet is flat in the absence of matter? "

          Er.. Einstein

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Possibly a Stupid Question...

            Er.. Einstein

            Where does he say that? AFAIK his equations don't require a perfectly smooth spacetime with no ripples or wrinkles - that's a detail of cosmology that wasn't captured in his equations though he probably would have taken that for granted.

            Anyway, the reason we have "dark matter" is because his equations don't work for observed galactic motion. Is this because there is unobserved matter that if plugged in would make his equations work, or is it because he made an assumption that spacetime wouldn't be "flawed" like a piece of paper that got jammed in a laser printer's feed?

            If we assume our universe is but one in a greater multiverse, there's no reason to believe our spacetime must be perfectly smooth and without flaw, nor that there aren't external forces that can change its rate of inflation (i.e. dark energy)

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Boffin

              Re: Possibly a Stupid Question...

              The equations of GR have, essentially, matter on one side (in fact energy-momentum, which includes matter, radiation &c) and spacetime curvature on the other. So yes, they do strongly constrain the spacetime curvature in the absence of matter. Spacetime certainly can not contain arbitrary ripples or wrinkles, as you claim. However it's also not the case that all vacuum solutions (which is what such solutions are called) must be flat: there are a bunch of different families of them, including, for instance, the Schwarzschild solution and lots of things including gravitational waves. None of these make much sense as a way of explaining dark matter.

              (The flip side of this is dark energy, and GR has no problem there: dark energy just appears as a 'cosmological constant' which was initially present in the equations, then removed by Einstein for reasons which turned out not to be very good, and has now been put back. The cosmological constant only explains certain sorts of dark energy and I don't know if what we observe agrees with what GR predicts although I think it does. There remains the problem of trying to understand why it has the value it does, and I think that's a problem.)

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Possibly a Stupid Question...

              "Anyway, the reason we have "dark matter" is because his equations don't work for observed galactic motion."

              Nor do Newton's based on our estimate of the amount of matter; GR isn't needed.

              "If we assume our universe is but one in a greater multiverse, there's no reason to believe our spacetime must be perfectly smooth and without flaw, nor that there aren't external forces that can change its rate of inflation (i.e. dark energy)"

              I can't see the connection. What has a multiverse got to do with the idea you seem to be putting forward that spacetime may be discontinuous? Spacetime has ripples and wrinkles - gravitational waves and distortion due to matter. But it is still smooth in the sense of being continuous. Either I'm stupid or perhaps you need to explain what you mean in somewhat greater detail.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: Possibly a Stupid Question...

                I'm talking "ripples and wrinkles" that are large enough to have attracted matter to them shortly after the Big Bang so they account for the clumpy/stringy distribution of mass we have observed in the universe. And are relatively permanent in that they survive to this day and account for odd situations like how galaxies seem to have a lot more mass than what we can observe.

        2. onefang
          Boffin

          Re: Possibly a Stupid Question...

          "But who says the sheet is flat in the absence of matter? If is wrinkled,"

          So you are saying the universe is a wrinkled sheet like on a recently slept in bed, and we are just waiting for the cosmic housekeeper to make the bed, and straighten out physics until the heat death of the universe makes us all go to sleep once more? So the real question is, will humans be sent to bed without supper, or can we stay up late watching the more confusing episodes of Doctor Who?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Possibly a Stupid Question...

      This result may show part of the problem. Some of them are only interacting via the gravity. That, and I assume, if sparse enough plasma in the spaces between Galaxies, we would not be able to detect the temperature difference/emissions from our current telescopes.

      As with the current 3 flavours. If our instruments are setup for detecting only 1, we need to make the other 2 instruments now! (Though I don't know how you detect the other 2 flavours :P )

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Possibly a Stupid Question...But if neutrinos oscillate between different flavours

      More research is needed because it may lead to an explanation of why the ice cream flavours in the local Tescos keep changing but you never see anyone buying any. Do Magnums oscillate between white and brown and occasionally mutate into Tesco's own brand? It would explain a lot.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No Way!

    I literally was considering if such a particle exists last night. Theorising that one has to, in the particle mode, due to the way force carrying occurs...

    However I had no idea how such a particle would be detected. So looking at the reports and science on it now!

    PS, in my musings, I came to the conclusion that a neutrino would need the mass of "one" unit. As in, the smallest possible mass. Though, I may of cause be wrong.

  6. Christoph

    "The sterile neutrino would support the “neutrinos have mass” hypothesis, partly because they only interact with the rest of the universe via gravity – and gravity only acts on mass."

    Gravity acts on light, which is massless but has energy - so would also act on massless neutrinos.

    1. hammarbtyp

      "Gravity acts on light, which is massless but has energy - so would also act on massless neutrinos."

      Not exactly.

      Mass affects the space-time universe, deforming it. Light travels through that space time and follows those deformations.

      1. Alan Johnson

        "Gravity acts on light, which is massless but has energy - so would also act on massless neutrinos."

        Photons have no rest mass but they have mass proportional to their momentum/frequeny. Anything with no rest mass must move at the speed of light.

        With general Relativity gravity does not act on anything but rather distorts space and time in a way that we interpret as a force.

        The fact that neutrinos oscillated and therefore must have mass has been known for a long time. Sterile neutrinos may or may not be the explanation for the experiment described but this sort of thing is beyond my level.

    2. Loyal Commenter Silver badge

      Gravity acts on light, which is massless but has energy - so would also act on massless neutrinos.

      Well technically, gravity doesn't act on light, which always goes in a straight line regardless of how much gravity is about. Gravity does act on space-time, though, affecting what a 'straight line' is.

      If you think of light as a car with no steering travelling in a straight line, then eventually, it will travel all the way round the planet (assuming it doesn't crash) because the planet is curved (assuming, again, that the Earth isn't flat. Which it isn't). Not a perfect analogy, admittedly.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Boffin

        Gravity does act on light, and in particular the energy-momentum of light does curve spacetime. There is a famous idea in General Relativity called a 'kugelblitz' which is that, if you can get enough radiation into a small enough space, then its effect on the spacetime curvature will be sufficient to form an event horizon, and you'll get a black hole, one whose precursor was pure electromagnetic radiation, or light in other words. This is probably unlikely to happen in practice, but itks a very strong demonstration that light does indeed contribute to curvature.

        1. Claptrap314 Silver badge

          So the wikipedia page on kugelblitz said that such an event would be hotter than the Planck temperature. But the average density of a black hole goes down with its size. Hmm....

          1. Aladdin Sane

            Re: But the average density of a black hole goes down with its size.

            Leads to my favourite black hole fact - the average density of a black hole the size of the universe is the same as the average density of the universe.

            1. Claptrap314 Silver badge

              Re: But the average density of a black hole goes down with its size.

              Which somehow doesn't prove that we are in a black hole, but rather that the universe is flat?

              Okay. I'll trust the physicists on that...

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Boffin

                Re: But the average density of a black hole goes down with its size.

                Well, it's easy to tell that we're not inside a black hole in two ways.

                First of all the universe is expanding, not contracting, so if anything it would have to be a white hole, not a black hole.

                Secondly it looks the same in all directions, and this would only be true for either a black or white hole solution if we were in a very privileged position (ie at the centre). That seems implausible and I think in either case the universe would look very different if it turned out to be true (ie if we were at the centre it would not look like it does)..

                So instead we must be living in some other kind of solution, and indeed we can find such solutions which in general are called Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker solutions -- FLRW metrics for short. These describe universes which do look like ours: for instance they are homogeneous (the same everywhere), isotropic (the same in all directions) and either expanding (this is ours) or contracting (this isn't). It's by looking at these, and in particular by looking at their average density, that we conclude that the universe appears to be spatially flat, and hence infinite.

    3. DavCrav

      "Gravity acts on light, which is massless but has energy - so would also act on massless neutrinos."

      Light is not massless. Light at rest is massless, but at the speed of light it has energy, and therefore mass, according to E=mc2. Since it has mass it can be affected by gravity. Or, under general relativity, move along geodesics in a suitable hyperbolic space.

      1. Aladdin Sane
        Gimp

        Imagine space as a rubber sheet...

        1. Loyal Commenter Silver badge

          ...and your mother as a large mass...

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Reply Icon ...and your mother as a large mass...

            The usual context of mothers and rubber sheets is surely in hospital giving birth. What's the analogy here? I hope we're not suggesting anything kinky, other than spacetime.

          2. onefang

            "...and your mother as a large mass..."

            ...who is eyeing off the mess you made on the rubber sheet and shaking her head. Expect a cosmic hosing off soon.

  7. simonb_london

    Yeahh!

    This particle must think its something special... like a "HIggs Bozon". But it isn't. It's just a lousy old "Sterile Neutrino".

    1. onefang

      Re: Yeahh!

      At least this sterile neutrino wont be giving birth to other egotistical particles.

  8. StrangeEntities

    The Answer to Everything is Nothing

    Hawking confirmed that the pos. and neg. mass-energy of our Universe add up zero, and the average Vacuum energy is also zero.

    However Vacuum density can be shown to be ten to the power of 94 grams per cc, a fantastic amount of energy (and information, both constantly interacting with our "material world" and quantum consciousness world) coming from and going back to zero as virtual energy (The Uncertainty Principle).

    Only waves exist: particles are impossible (again the Uncertainty Principle).

    If electrons and positrons are actually half-developed photon waves then even neutrinos may be some resonant system of light yet to be understood.

    Electrons and positrons creating gamma rays (and vice versa) is a clue to the probability that All/Everything that we know began as the mother of all waves: Quantum Stuff, that was once quantum entangled in infinite Quantum Superpositions of all possible properties.

    Our mass-energy Universe appeared from nothingness (again our "Godlike" Uncertainty Principle),

    similar but not identical to the many Planck-scale Black Holes appearing and vanishing perpetually from Vacuum everywhere including our neurons, storing all information (quantum information is proven to be indestructible, as it is non-material and space-time-energy independent).

    Even one electron phase can store the Encyclopedia Britannica and more, so maybe neutrinos can store almost Everything: these discoveries about the flavours of such a tiny wave entity may be simply scratching the surface of reality.

    Since "Quantum Stuff" requires no creation (it is neither space-time nor energy) then I can only assume that it "simply exists" so a before-and-after is irrelevant.

    We experience time as Planck Time Units involving change and entropy of the fermionic world.

    Some of my thoughts can be perused for free at StrangeEntities.com and my ambition is to know how our non-material selves connect to the huge information matrix of the Vacuum.

    Each and every electron in our bodies is constantly interacting with Vacuum (observed in spectral Lamb Shifts).

    So our Universe is essentially non-material and our illusion of solidity arises when fermionic waves repel and form stable patters/processes.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like