NEUTRINO MASS
© Harold Aspden, 1998
Research Note: 5/98: June 5, 1998
I am writing this after reading a Science Briefing item by Nigel Hawkes, Science
Editor of the British newspaper: The Times. The article was entitled
'Mountain tests allow scientists to put weight on the neutrino'. It
appeared at p. 10 in the June 5, 1998 issue of that newspaper.
I shall make a few quotations from the above article and add my own
commentary.
"Neutrinos were produced in the Big Bang, which began the
Universe, and are emitted by the Sun and all other stars. Theory says they
should be a billion times more common than the particles that make up
atoms."
Well, my theory, the one I am trying to get across in
these Web pages, certainly does not support this statement. Indeed, in my
theorizing about space, the universe and energy processes occurring in Nature, I
have not, so far, ventured to probe the realm of the neutrino in my published
work, simply because I think the word 'neutrino' was invented to avoid referring
to the 'aether'. You see, one cannot have energy exchanges or fluctuations
involving the aether unless there is something that explains balance of momentum
and conservation of energy. So if you see a momentum imbalance in the way
certain particles behave, typically where electrons, muons or taons are
involved, then you need to say that either the aether is throwing its own weight
around in the act or something else is discharging that task. That 'something
else', in the language of accepted, but erroneous, physics is the
neutrino.
I do not believe that the aether was created in a so-called
'Big Bang'. If I did I would not be able to sleep without dreaming about how
things were a few seconds before the event of the Big Bang. The universe is so
vast that to contemplate it ever having been created at one instant called a
'Big Bang' is just so irritating to any reasonable person, that it simply has to
be discounted as utter nonsense.
Rest assured, if you even think that
cosmologists might be right, that there exists some other way of interpreting
what those cosmologists term the redshift. That and their assumption that there
can be no frequency attenuation by light propagating through space, is all they
have to support their hopes that there was a 'Big Bang'. They cannot be right,
but even if they think they are, then they have yet to tell us what happened
before the 'Big Bang'. The only answer I have heard on that reminds one of a
tape recording played in an automobile, where, when the tape gets to the end of
its play, it runs in reverse and can keep on playing music because there is no
ending, nor need there be a beginning if all one knows about that automobile is
based on hearing the music as played. So one reads of nonsensical ideas such as
'time runs backwards' once the current expansion cycle ends, meaning that we all
turn around and head to that one point in space where the 'Big Bang' happened
and, once there, we decide to get the whole act rolling again in the opposite
time sense and so we evolve into another multi-billion year cycle with a new
'Big Bang'.
Well, the question now is: 'What is a neutrino?' and, if we
can answer that, there is the question: 'Does it have a mass?' or rather: 'Do
they have mass?', because neutrinos supposedly come in different
varieties.
"Physicists announced today (presumably June 5, 1998) at a
conference in Japan that they believe neutrinos, ghostly particles hitherto
believed to be without mass, do weigh something after all. Since the universe
is suffused with neutrinos in vast numbers, this means that they must make up
a large part of the "missing mass" believed to be present in the universe but
invisible to the eye."
Now I am not at all sure how scientists
even know of such a thing as "missing mass" unless they are relying on their
interpretation of how fast the universe is expanding and see it as expanding
faster than it should from their estimates of the 'non-missing' mass. So, again,
all they are saying is that: "We think the universe is expanding, because we
cannot otherwise explain how empty space can attenuate signal frequency, but
that leads us to think that the expansion is too fast and so there is some
missing matter somewhere in space and that can only be what we call 'neutrinos'
and, if we can prove neutrinos have mass, we can say that that accounts for that
missing matter."
We have here an interesting situation. Empty space is
supposedly filled with neutrinos. They have mass and so empty space has a mass
density. So how is it that space cannot attenuate the frequency of those light
waves we see as having a redshift? Given that it must attenuate those waves,
then surely the 'missing mass' theory is wrong and we had best think about a
steady state universe, rather than one that is expanding. In that case, to say
that neutrinos can explain missing matter, is illogical.
So where do I
come into this picture with my theory? Well, I have just posted Lecture
No. 24 in these Web pages and it shows that in 1982 I published an article
in Wireless World which explained how the aether can have structural form and
fill all space whilst yet allowing passage of light waves with no frequency
dispersion but having frequency attenuation such as one sees in the
redshift.
I may also say that I have on published record in a scientific
periodical a paper 1984e
which discusses that same subject and goes on to deduce theoretically the actual
frequency attenuation one can expect to measure. That is provided my theory is
correct in saying that Nature everywhere in space is trying to create protons
and electrons from the sea of virtual muons that provide the main sea of energy
in the aether. In that paper I suggested that the transient existence of those
attempts at matter creation could account for 'missing matter', but I confess
that I have yet to be convinced that there is any need to recognize the
existence of so-called 'missing matter'.
That said, I now wonder about
the significance of this reported neutrino discovery:
"They (the neutrinos) pass unnoticed through the Earth, and
through our bodies, all the time, which makes them very difficult to detect.
The new results come from the first two years of data from Super-Kamiokande, a
$100,000,000 experiment in a cavity under Mount Ikena near Kamioka in the
Japanese alps. The detector is a million gallon tank of water."
"They have found fewer than expected muon neutrinos coming from
great distances, and this deficit indicates that muon neutrinos disappear and
reappear as they travel through the Earth. This in turn means they must have
mass, since massless particles cannot change their form."
".... "Neutrinos cannot now be neglected in the bookkeeping of the
mass of the universe. One only gets such great data once or twice in a
professional lifetime, maybe never," said Professor John Learned of the
University of Hawaii, one of the team responsible."
It was not
stated in this report exactly what mass values had been assigned to the members
of the neutrino family, but there was the statement that there are believed to
be 500,000,000 neutrinos in every cubic metre of space, meaning that "a mass for
the neutrino of even one millionth that of the electron - the figure suggested
by earlier experiments - would be sufficient to make the total mass of neutrinos
a significant, and perhaps a major, part of the total matter in the
universe."
Well we shall have to see how all this provides us with
information of value. I feel we know so little about how an electron moves
through space or through matter and it does not take $100,000,000 to finance
experiments detecting the behaviour of electrons travelling at their natural
speed. Incidentally, the energy of a free electron in a metal conductor is said
to be that given by its velocity as determined by Fermi-Dirac statistics, of the
order of about one millionth of the mass-energy of the electron. Might it be
then that the electron neutrino is the ghostly presence of the carrier of the
kinetic energy of the electron in electrically conductive matter or even in that
weakly conductive tank of water under Mount Ikena? In that case I would be
inclined to look more closely at the theory governing electrons.
Also one
needs to examine the theory as to how protons move through space. What form does
its kinetic energy assume? Can it be that of the neutrino, albeit some
combination of muon and tau neutrinos, if not simply electron neutrinos? In
other words, I am suggesting that the 'neutrino' might be simply an artifact of
Nature occasioned by the transient presence of the electron-positron pair or its
counterparts in the muon family or taon family. The neutrino may even be a more
subtle transient activity related to the aether itself, meaning those quons or
lattice particles that I have referred to elsewhere in these Web
pages.
In any event, since I did draft a paper on neutrino theory some
time ago, but did not pursue it to publication, I will now edit that paper and
bring it into these Web pages in the very near future.
Harold Aspden
June 5, 1998