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How Did the Universe Survive the Big Bang?
In This Experiment, Clues Remain Elusive
By KENNETH CHANG
Published in New York Times April 12, 2007

An experiment some hoped would reveal a new class of
subatomic particles, and perhaps even point to clues
about why the universe exists at all, has instead
produced a first round of results that are
mysteriously inconclusive. "What we got was
intellectually interesting," said Janet M. Conrad,
professor of physics at Columbia University and a
spokeswoman for a collaboration that involves 77
scientists at 17 institutions. "We have to figure out
what it is."

Dr. Conrad and William C. Louis, a physicist at Los
Alamos National Laboratory, presented their initial
findings in a talk yesterday at the Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory, outside Chicago, where the
experiment is being performed. The goal was to confirm
or refute observations made in the 90s in a Los Alamos
experiment that observed transformations in the
evanescent but bountiful particles known as neutrinos.
Neutrinos have no electrical charge and almost no
mass, but there are so many of them that they could
collectively outweigh all the stars in the universe.

Many physicists remain skeptical about the Los Alamos
findings, but the new experiment has attracted wide
interest. The Fermilab auditorium was filled with some
800 people, and talks were given at the 16 additional
institutions by other collaborating scientists. That
reflected in part the hope of finding cracks in the
Standard Model, which encapsulates physicists' current
knowledge about fundamental particles and forces. The
Standard Model has proved remarkably effective and
accurate, but it cannot answer some fundamental
questions, like why the universe did not completely
annihilate itself an instant after the Big Bang.

    [The answer is quite simple/elegant: There
    never was a "Big Bang." The universe is the
    result of an evolution--and as with any
    evolution, there is always enough time
    allowed for all the factors involved to bring
    about the overall harmony and consistency
    which eventually gives the impression to
    those who believe (like those who believe
    that the universe erupted magically from the
    Big Bang Bean), those who believe that all
    the problems HAD to have been solved from the
    start... and that therefore the only possible
    answer is An Infinitely Informed Creator (in
    other words, one cannot argue a Big Bang
    without it arguing a God).]

    'The solution has been available for everyone
    to read it since the last century now on the
    internet. You can find it at:

             http://physics.sdrodrian.com

    What the "neutrino results" described below
    are actually hinting at is the fact that the
    universe is a LOT older and considerably more
    extensive than heretofore "conventionally"
    suspected. SDR]

The birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago
created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Since
matter and antimatter annihilate each other when they
come in contact, that would have left nothing to
coalesce into stars and galaxies. There must be some
imbalance in the laws of physics that led to a slight
preponderance of matter over antimatter, and that
extra bit of matter formed everything in the visible
universe.

The imbalance, some physicists believe, may be hiding
in the dynamics of neutrinos: Neutrinos come in three
known types, or flavors. And they can change flavor as
they travel, a process that can occur only because of
the smidgen of mass they carry. But the neutrino
transformations reported in the Los Alamos data do not
fit the three-flavor model, suggesting four flavors of
neutrinos, if not more. Other data, from experiments
elsewhere, have said the additional neutrinos would
have to be "sterile" - completely oblivious to the
rest of the universe except for gravity.

The new experiment is called MiniBooNE. (BooNE,
pronounced boon, is a contraction of Booster Neutrino
Experiment. "Booster" refers to a Fermilab booster
ring that accelerates protons, and "mini" was added
because of plans for a second, larger stage to the
research.) MiniBooNE sought to count the number of
times one flavor of neutrino, called a muon, turned
into another flavor, an electron neutrino. The
experiment slams a beam of protons into a piece of
beryllium, and the cascade of particles from the
subatomic wreckage includes muon neutrinos that fly
about 1,650 feet to a detection chamber, a tank 40
feet in diameter that contains 250,000 gallons of
mineral oil. Most of the neutrinos fly through
unscathed, but occasionally a neutrino crashes into a
carbon atom in the mineral oil. That sets off another
cascade of particles, which is detected by 1,280 light
detectors mounted on the inside of the tank. From the
pattern of the cascades, the physicists distinguish
whether the incoming neutrino was of muon flavor or
electron. To minimize the chances of fooling
themselves, they deliberately did not look at any of
the electron neutrino events until they felt they had
adequately understood the much more common muon
neutrino events. They finally "opened the box" on
their electron neutrino data on March 26 and began the
analysis leading to their announcement yesterday.

For most of the neutrino energy range they looked at,
they did not see any more electron neutrinos than
would be predicted by the Standard Model. That ruled
out the simplest ways of interpreting the Los Alamos
neutrino data, Dr. Conrad and Dr. Louis said. But at
the lower energies, the scientists did see more
electron neutrinos than predicted: 369, rather than
the predicted 273. That may simply mean that some
calculations are off. Or it could point to a subtler
interplay of particles, known and unknown.

"It's tantalizing," said Boris Kayser, a Fermilab
physicist not on the MiniBooNE project. "It could be
real. But this remains to be established." Dr. Louis
said he was surprised by the results. "I was sort of
expecting a clear excess or no excess," he said. "In a
sense, we got both."


S D Rodrian
http://poems.sdrodrian.com
http://physics.sdrodrian.com
http://mp3.sdrodrian.com

All religions are local. Only science is universal.