Deconstructing neutrinos
"The view taken here is that the
reality of quarks was the upshot of particle physicists’ practice, and not the
reverse." [1]
When Andrew Pickering wrote the above statement in the preface of
his book, Constructing Quarks, he
certainly cast a shadow on the discovery of the quark, inferring that its
existence has more to do with the way that physicists practice their craft than the reality that it exists.
And we believe there is very good evidence that this could also be applied to the discovery of the neutrino.
Like the quark, the neutrino has never been directly
observed. Rather, it is implied based on
experimental results that could be caused by other physical phenomena. There is nothing unique about the
neutrino. There is nothing it does that
couldn’t be explained by some other particle interaction. So how did it become established science?
Pickering contended that the emergence of quark theory had a
lot to do with both theoretical precedent and human politics. That theoretical precedent was quantum
electrodynamics, or QED. And according
to Pickering:
"the
methods and techniques of quantum electrodynamics were part of the common theoretical
culture of HEP [high energy physics]. Thus the expertise in the analysis of composite systems and, albeit
to a lesser extent, quantum electrodynamics constituted a set of shared
resources for particle physicists. And,
as we shall see, the establishment of the quark and the gauge-theory traditions
of theoretical research depended crucially on the analogical recycling of those
resources into the analysis of various experimentally accessible phenomena."[2]
In other words, the physicists weren’t exactly thinking out
of the box when they came up with quark theory.
They were sampling heavily from quantum electrodynamics.
Were they just being unimaginative? Set in their ways? More likely to get published? Or were they right on the money, as most physicists
now believe?
Neutrino theory followed the same pathway and was itself
heavily sampled from quantum electrodynamics. QED, which proposes that photons mediate the
interaction of charged particles, was reengineered into the explanation of how
particles transition into other particles, that is, the theory of the "weak
force".
This was the equivalent of putting a square peg into a round
hole, but the theoretical physicists got it in there. But not on their own. They had a lot of help from the
experimentalists. As Pickering noted:
"the observation reports on neutral
currents which emanated from CERN in the 1960s and 1970s were all grounded in
interpretative procedures which were pragmatic and, in principle, questionable...the communal decision to accept one set of interpretative
procedures in the 1960s and another in the 1970s can best be understood in
terms of the symbiosis of theoretical and experimental practice."[3]
And with regards to neutrinos, we shall discuss several examples
of how the theoretical and experimental physicists worked together to cover
their respective asses. As one gets deeper
into the weeds of several pivotal neutrino experiments, things aren’t as pristine
as the layman literature generally portends.
Indeed, there is a funniness surrounding many of the neutrino
experiments, along with the omnipresent stench of politics. But how much has ambition and personal agenda
tainted the study of the neutrino?
We believe quite a bit, starting with the mysterious recalibration
of the neutrino cross section in the embarrassing reporting of the famous Cowan-Reines
Savannah River experiment.
We will also discuss the famous Raymond Davis Homestake Mine
experiment and the invention of the "solar neutrino problem", which magically occurred
without benefit of ever even detecting a statistically significant neutrino.
We will also analyze the mysterious floating neutrino flux and
data mismatch between the IMB and the KamiokaNDE
collaborations, and the "atmospheric neutrino anomaly".
In all the experiments we evaluate, there were post hoc
adjustments made in defining exactly what constituted a detectable neutrino
event. And those post hoc adjustments not
only show the considerable uncertainty neutrino experimentalists have with
their own data, they also were the most politically expedient. It doesn’t take much convincing to get the
neutrino experimentalists to change their analytical methods after the experiment
has produced its first results.
But it isn’t just a wacky non-physicist like me casting
aspersions on the behavior of the neutrino physicists. We are fortunate to have an insider’s
perspective on the Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven (IMB) and KamiokaNDE
neutrino collaborations, Dr. John LoSecco.
LoSecco noted the internal politics
in a talk he gave[4]
about the history of the neutrino and his participation in the IMB collaboration:
"Senior members had very strong
control. Careers could be ruined."
"Senior members had been involved
in recent, very public mistakes."
Serious accusations indeed, and while LoSecco
doesn’t explicitly say it, he might be referring to Dr. Frederick Reines, among
others. And it interesting to note that
Dr. Reines was also involved in some funny business in the Cowan-Reines
Savannah River experiment.
Again, I must caution the reader, I’m just a layman. I have no background in physics other than my
private research. I could easily be a
crackpot waiting for my children to put me in the closet and throw away the
key. But unlike the neutrino physicists,
I have no skin in the game. I make no
money off this. I have no career or
vested interest in the outcome of any neutrino debate.
And at one time, I was all in on the neutrino. I thought it had to exist, because so many physicists
believed in its existence. I consumed a
lot of layman literature on the subject, with glowing reviews of the intrepid neutrino
physicists that sacrificed much of their lives to understand the ghostly
neutrino, against all odds.
But as I dove deeper and began studying the experiments, I can’t
say for sure that neutrinos exist. And if
they do exist, are they detectable at all?
It’s possible that they are completely undetectable and that
the neutrino experiments haven’t properly understood background noise. After all, neutrino signals are very weak and
require assumptions to be made about the experimental apparatus and the
environment around it, the most famous example being the Cowan-Reines flub of
the theoretical neutrino cross section.
As we said before, there’s nothing unique about neutrino
events. Some other particle interaction
can look just like a neutrino event. It
would be nice if there was something unique to neutrinos, that is, if they did
something that could not be emulated by some other physical process.
So many of the neutrino experiments show deficits in the expected
rate of detection. This has given rise
to the theory of "neutrino oscillations", which was originally a proposal of Dr.
Bruno Pontecorvo, a one-time assistant to Enrico Fermi, and one of the most imaginative
neutrino theorists to ever live.
If you were an experimentalist and having a problem finding
neutrinos, Pontecorvo had your back. The
fact that Pontecorvo was on point for the very novel approach of using a large
volume of chlorine to detect neutrinos certainly provided him the motivation
for looking for a reason why the results fell far short of his expectations.
But if the neutrino oscillated, that is, changed into
another undetectable neutrino, then that problem was solved, and both the
experimentalists and theorists were right all along. Neutrino oscillation, politically, was a win-win
for the experimentalists and the theoreticians.
To say that physicists are political is to say they are
human. They are not immune from placing
agenda above all else, and we will show clear examples of this in the history
of the neutrino.
As Pickering said:
"And this implies the possibility,
even the inevitability, of the ‘tuning’ of experimental techniques - their pragmatic
adjustment and development according to their success in displaying phenomena
of interest....But if one abstains from realism, tuning
becomes much more interesting. Natural phenomena
are then seen to serve a dual purpose.
As theoretical constructs they serve to mediate the symbiosis of theoretical
and experimental practice (and hence to make realist discourse retrospectively
possible); and, at the same time, they sustain and legitimate the particular
experimental practices inherent in their own production."[5]
Please send comments to Charles Brack at brack@wtfphysics.com
------------
[1] "Constructing
Quarks", Andrew Pickering, University of Chicago Press, 1984. P. X.
[2]
Ibid. P. 12.
[3]
Ibid. P. 188.
[4] History
of Neutrino Conference, 2018, Paris.
Poster: http://neutrinohistory2018.in2p3.fr/talks/losecco-poster.pdf
[5] Pickering (1984) P. 14.
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