What Happened To All The Neutrinos?

you do not see

the real world

your eyes

are lying to you

or more precisely

your brain

in 2011 scientists at new york

university ran a study which showed that

we may perceive threatening objects to

be closer than they really are

in january this year researchers at the

university of california found that in

an effort to create a continuous image

our vision is stuck up to 15 seconds in

the past as do youtube videos so our

brains need time to buffer

and finally

the sun

is green

at a young age we learn we mustn't ever

look directly upon it but those that

dare perhaps to witness the fleeting

beauty of a sunrise gaze upon a warm

yellow orb that gives life to most

species on earth this colour is not a

trick of the eye but a trick of the air

molecules of nitrogen and oxygen scatter

blue light away from us more making the

sun look redder than it truly is

but escape the bounds of the atmosphere

and to the human eye the sun would

appear the purest white a combination of

every wavelength of colour it emits in

different quantities

and this is the lie the colour white

created in our minds

objectively the sun is of all colors

green emitting more green photons than

any other wavelength

[Music]

and that is not the only way our eyes

deceive us in regards to our closest

star

ultraviolet rays that tan our skin

infrared that warms our faces when we

step out on a sunny morning radio waves

which can be picked up by our technology

our sun is constantly producing massive

amounts of photons that stream around

and through us at wavelengths our eyes

simply did not evolve to perceive

these limitations mean we bathe in a

constant wash of particles that we

simply cannot see

and this hidden world is not only made

up

of light the sun also produces massive

waves of particles that are so

unresponsive as to have been completely

undetected or even conceived of until

the 20th century and yet are so numerous

that across the universe they outnumber

the particles that make up ordinary

matter

a billion to one

it is with these neutrinos we may be

able to answer some of the deepest

questions about our cosmos

the oldest light in the universe the

cosmic microwave background is 380 000

years younger than the big bang itself

before that the universe was too hot and

too dense for light to travel freely but

if the oldest images of the cosmos are

still 380 thousand years old how could

we ever know what happened

before

what if we want to know what the

universe was like not just in its first

year

but its first

second

our telescopes cannot tell us they have

reached an opaque barrier they cannot

penetrate

yet astronomers have found a way to pull

back

the veil

to uncover these early moments in time

pushing back the clock to the most

ancient map of the cosmos there is

but to do that they will first have to

probe the secrets of these cosmic ghosts

secrets that challenge our very

understanding of how the universe

works

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education on youtube

why would you build a telescope

inside an airplane

it is the morning of december the 1st

2010. at the end of its 10 hour flight a

retrofitted boeing 747 returns to an air

force runway in palmdale california

one change is instantly noticeable

peering out a retractable door at the

rear of the plane rests the 20-ton 2.7

meter wide mirror of the sofia infrared

telescope

when the weather warms it flies south

for a second winter from palmdale to

christchurch new zealand the annual

migration allows access to an entirely

different part of the sky during its

observation periods as many as 100

flights a year sophia flies at an

altitude of 12 or so kilometers not all

that higher than most commercial flights

and in doing so it captures a light that

the air beneath it would block

water it not only forms clouds which

block visible lines of sight while it

looks clear to us in small quantities

entire oceans reveal its true nature it

appears blue because it absorbs red

light and it also absorbs invisible

infrared light infrared light that holds

the universe's most distant secrets as

the universe expands light stretches and

after enough time much of it arrives to

the infrared

sofia flies 99 of the planet's water is

beneath it the telescope can catch

wavelengths of light that would never

make it to other equipment on the ground

wavelengths that denote the births and

deaths of stars the formations of

planets and even dust surrounding

supermassive black holes at the heart of

galaxies

for more than a century humanity has had

to use technology to overcome the limits

of our perception

telescopes can reveal to us the massive

made insignificant through distance

microscopes magnify what is under our

very noses the smaller the object of

study the smaller a wavelength of light

you need in order to study it in detail

today electron microscopes can achieve

resolutions 4 000 times smaller than any

optical microscope

but how do you study or even detect the

smallest known particle

in the universe

a particle so small we don't actually

know how small it is

[Music]

in late 1951 frederick reigns and clyde

l cowan jr began project poltergeist the

first experiment in neutrino physics

two decades prior the physicist and

mathematician wolfgang pauli had

proposed the concept of the neutrino he

sought to balance an equation governing

the process of nuclear decay in some

unstable nuclei a neutron will

spontaneously transform into a proton

and an electron the exact amount of

energy was based on the principle of

balance add up all the energy in the

particles at the start of a reaction and

it should equal the total energy of all