Getting out of the solar core, neutrinos are speed demons, photons are slugs. h/t to Leif Svalgaard for the graphical annotation inspiration. Solar core image from NASA.
In August, WUWT carried a story that was rather shocking: some physicists published claims they have detected a variation in earthly radioactive decay rates, big news by itself, but the shocker is they attributed it to solar neutrinos.
The findings attracted immediate attention because they seemed to violate two known basic facts of physics:
1. Radioactive decay is a constant
2. Neutrinos very rarely interact with matter and are hard to detect when they do.
For example: trillions of the neutrinos are zipping through your body right now. So why would they interact with radioactive elements in a more detectable way?
WUWT carried a follow-up story, citing doubts. Now there’s confirmation via experiment that the initial doubt was a fluke.
From the NIST: Research Shows Radiometric Dating Still Reliable (Again)
Recent puzzling observations of tiny variations in nuclear decay rates have led some to question the science of using decay rates to determine the relative ages of rocks and organic materials. Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), working with researchers from Purdue University, the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Wabash College, tested the hypothesis that solar radiation might affect the rate at which radioactive elements decay and found no detectable effect.
Atoms of radioactive isotopes are unstable and decay over time by shooting off particles at a fixed rate, transmuting the material into a more stable substance. For instance, half the mass of carbon-14, an unstable isotope of carbon, will decay into nitrogen-14 over a period of 5,730 years. The unswerving regularity of this decay allows scientists to determine the age of extremely old organic materials—such as remains of Paleolithic campfires—with a fair degree of precision. The decay of uranium-238, which has a half-life of nearly 4.5 billion years, enabled geologists to determine the age of the Earth.
Many scientists, including Marie and Pierre Curie, Ernest Rutherford and George de Hevesy, have attempted to influence the rate of radioactive decay by radically changing the pressure, temperature, magnetic field, acceleration, or radiation environment of the source. No experiment to date has detected any change in rates of decay.
Recently, however, researchers at Purdue University observed a small (a fraction of a percent), transitory deviation in radioactive decay at the time of a huge solar flare. Data from laboratories in New York and Germany also have shown similarly tiny deviations over the course of a year. This has led some to suggest that Earth’s distance from the sun, which varies during the year and affects the planet’s exposure to solar neutrinos, might be related to these anomalies.
Researchers from NIST and Purdue tested this by comparing radioactive gold-198 in two shapes, spheres and thin foils, with the same mass and activity. Gold-198 releases neutrinos as it decays. The team reasoned that if neutrinos are affecting the decay rate, the atoms in the spheres should decay more slowly than the atoms in the foil because the neutrinos emitted by the atoms in the spheres would have a greater chance of interacting with their neighboring atoms. The maximum neutrino flux in the sample in their experiments was several times greater than the flux of neutrinos from the sun. The researchers followed the gamma-ray emission rate of each source for several weeks and found no difference between the decay rate of the spheres and the corresponding foils.
According to NIST scientist emeritus Richard Lindstrom, the variations observed in other experiments may have been due to environmental conditions interfering with the instruments themselves.
“There are always more unknowns in your measurements than you can think of,” Lindstrom says.
* R.M. Lindstrom, E. Fischbach, J.B. Buncher, G.L. Greene, J.H. Jenkins, D.E. Krause, J.J. Mattes and A. Yue. Study of the dependence of 198Au half-life on source geometry. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment. doi:10.1016/j.nima.2010.06.270
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wayne says:
September 27, 2010 at 3:54 am
If they can’t keep the sign correct, why worry about the rate at which neutrinos are being produced (more than 200 trillion trillion trillion per second) by the Sun, or, even more importantly, if we don’t give a darn about 12 orders of magnitude, why worry about relatively infinitesimal fluctuations in the rate at which neutrinos are being intercepted?
If we don’t worry about any of that, why worry about any “facts” or about whether the “facts” are real?
More at http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/public/neutrino.html
John A says:
September 27, 2010 at 3:40 am
“Radioactive decay is a quantum process which is entirely random.”
A random constant. That makes sense to you?
There are four observations I’m aware of that as of yet have no confirmed explanation. Anna V (this thread) mentioned gravity and time dilation as more likely than neutrino flux then half joked about passing through more or less dark matter. Might as well throw dark energy in there too.
We already know gravity and time dilation will do the trick. Atomic clocks in GPS system have to be corrected for slight changes in earth gravity on its ground path and for the difference in velocity between ground based clocks and satellite clock.
I wonder if there are any blips in GPS clocks that correspond with solar flares?
1) seasonal variation in measured decay rates
2) variation during a solar disturbance
3) unexpected performance curves in RTG power supplies of satellites that have left the solar system
4) unexpected deviation in RTG performance during slingshot maneuvers
The satellite power supply is the most interesting IMO because those things are hideously expensive in both manufacturing cost and mission influence because they take up half or more of the weight of the satellite greatly limiting the science objectives that can be acheived. Pretty much all the information about those RTGs is public information and they were exceptionally well modeled, engineered, and individually characterized to exacting standards prior to launch with decades of data on actual performance of the RTG. There are also unexplained deviations in RTG performance in slingshot maneuvers.
Anna V mentioned a possible space-time explanation
The elements are full of surprises. Thus, if the claim is that “the decay rate of silicon-32 and radium-226 seemed to show a small seasonal variation”, then one ought to test these isotopes for the seasonal variation, not gold-198 in a contrived setting. “What you don’t know that you don’t know” should be a warning sign taped above the screen of every scientist.
Well by golly there ARE unexplained cyclical variations in GPS clocks. 2008 paper by US Naval Research Laboratory:
Characterization of Periodic Variations
in the GPS Satellite Clocks
Just above the comments (there were 51 at the time) is a thumbnail image and the phrase “One blogger likes this post.” This seems to be a self-serving plug for this person’s blog and commercial services. As such, it is misleading.
anna v says:
September 27, 2010 at 12:45 am
-Atoms, if not ionized, are neutral.
-Atoms are elements.
-Elements are ordered in a table, after Mendeleev, which has proved to be extrapolated to find new elements of higher atomic numbers/weights.
-Neutrons and neutrinos are neutral.
-Then, by the same token, the table of the elements can be extrapolated, also, to those neutral bodies of lighter weight/lower number.
-Neutrons and neutrinos are elements of lower weigh/number than Hydrogen, the first element of the table of elements.
-Thus, a neutrinos’ table would include a series similar to the original table of the elements we know.
-We know, also, that, according to Planck’s law, the smaller their size, i.e.wavelength, the shortest its wavelength, the higher its frequency, the higher the energy.
-Now, we buy some popcorn and wait for some intelligent guys, here at WUWT, to provide us with a whole table of neutrons and neutrinos.
-Note: If somebody is interested in the extrapolation of the table of the elements to higher weights/numbers I would not recommend it, as that somebody would be doing politics. 🙂
Let’s hope the August ‘observation’ was correct, or not. Time will tell. One day, perhaps soon, we’ll have a better handle on this subject (and a few thousand others). Nothing is settled. (Well, not much;-)
WebMonk
September 27, 2010 at 5:45 am
Wow, way to bring out all the kooks, Anthony!
“Well maths proved the earth centric view of the solar system!”
#
I think you miss-understood the point that was being made by Grey Lensman. Math was indeed used in an attempt to prove terracentricity. It was an abuse of math, as math far more elegantly demonstrates the existence of a heliocentric solar system. Problem was, proponents of both views were still modeling orbits as circles. I am pretty sure Grey was trying to say that real data always trumps a model.
DesertYote says:
September 27, 2010 at 11:31 am
And orbits are still circles turned into ellipsoids by wave interference/emission field.
Perhaps, WebMonk could produce a description of an experiment that positively proves the existence of neutrino? I’d be interested in being enlightened on this subject.
Otherwise, I don’t understand, why moderators allow here infantile comments that make this site smell like a club of foul-mouthed teenagers. Openness and all-inclusive approach are good and well but we don’t want WUWT to look lie Yahoo or U-tube comment pages, do we?
” The team reasoned that if neutrinos are affecting the decay rate, the atoms in the spheres should decay more slowly than the atoms in the foil because the neutrinos emitted by the atoms in the spheres would have a greater chance of interacting with their neighboring atoms. ”
The team reasoned… Is that all ya got??
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
I’m sorry, but, where did they show any real connection between their reasoning and the experiment??
So, 2012 was just a movie? Neutrinos didn’t change character and start heating the Earth’s core like a microwave?
Inquiring minds want to know… http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091123080110AAjfNGW
jorgekafkazar says:
Certainly! Here at the Melvin Dumar Institute of Technology in Utah, we believe that orgone rays emitted from the sun interact with the ether, releasing radioactive phlogiston, which affects the decay rate. Robust. Unprecedented. QED.
Do I really need to add “sarc-off?”
I am realy just stating the obvious, Team 2 did not falsify the results of Team 1 they only found that the reason could not be neutrinoes. Your attitude and language is very unpleasant. If this was my blog I would definitely snip your comments…….
Enneagram
September 27, 2010 at 11:53 am
And orbits are still circles turned into ellipsoids by wave interference/emission field.
#
huh ???
The whole neutrino meme has worn too thin for me. The ‘almost’ mass-less undetectable particles originally only came in vanilla but now come in many flavours. Each new flavour props up a part of the standard model. I think it’s time to call B***S**T on the neutrino and start looking for the truth. Maybe they will discover another quark to prop it up again hiding with the hidden ocean warmth but I only have the snark quark for this now.
Sorry.
People who think neutrinos have not been measured, do not know what measurement means.
Each of us is sitting in a body “looking” out by the use of innumerable chemical and electromagnetic sensors. There is no guarantee that what we individually see is what all of us see. There is a convention that we see the same reality. Miraculously we managed to define quantities like distance, time, mass and to develop mathematical models to treat with them. Does the fact that everything ends up as a representation in our individual brains invalidate the common definitions?
Elementary particles are one extra level below the everyday level, but again their existence is established by measures we have defined that depend on proxies that allow their existence, like traces on film or complicated electromechanical systems. Neutrinos exist not by leaving traces, but by the necessity of conserving basic physics laws for the traces of the rest of the produced particles. This is just another proxy in the complicated system of the microcosm we are exploring.
The standard model is a self consistent mathematical system that describes measurements up to now. It is an elegant shorthand of summing measurements up to the present.
There might be new breakthroughs that would require a larger/different model, but that possible new model would encompass and incorporate the standard model.
I’m curious about that photon shown in the picture, the brown jiggly line representing a 200,000 years journey.
So, the photon starts off at the core of the sun, and after a while changed (…is forced to? What forced it?) course 180 degrees, so that it is returning to base, then it changed (see previous parenthesis) course about 100 degrees and so on….
Now, my question is, what caused this little photon, this fundamental particle, to change course?
Changing course should have resulted in it’s losing energy, but as, so we are told, it’s energy is minimum anyway, what is it’s new, post course-change, energy level?
This photonic energy depletion goes on for 200,000 years. How does the energy of the photon emerging from the sun’s surface compare with it’s original energy, in the sun’s core?
Replication
A layman’s opinion:
The best and most scientific way to refute the effect of variations
in decay rates of selective radioactive isotopes as reported by Jenkins
and Fischbach is to replicate the conditions under which the
data they used was originally generated by:
Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island and the Federal
Physical and Technical Institute in Germany for:
1. silicon-32,
2. radium-226,
using the same or similar equipment as those two labs;
And at Purdue by nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins, for
3. manganese-54.
Serious experimenters would attempt to match conditions similar
to the Perdue data acquisition:
A. Proximity of the earth to the sun on Dec 13, 2006,
B. During a solar flare of the same or greater strength as
occurred on Dec. 13, 2006,
C. Using the same or similar equipment as Jenkins.
The Brookhaven Nation Lab and the Federal Physical and Technical
Institute studies were essentially longitudinal in nature. The Jenkins
magnesium-54 data from Perdue was a short term (days) event
under specific astronomical conditions.
The NIST study of gold-198 indicates, “the researchers followed
the gamma-ray emission rate of each [of two] source[s] for several
weeks.”.
To date, nothing seems to have answered the question was/is the
effect “merely a glitch in the equipment used to measure the decay,
induced by the change of seasons, with the accompanying changes
in temperature and humidity?” at Perdue, Long Island, and Germany.
Why would the long term decay rate data from both Brookhaven
and Germany show seasonal variations?
So far, we’re seeing competent scientists make not-so-scientific
comparisons of oranges, pears, and golden apples of the sun.
anna v says:
September 27, 2010 at 3:15 pm
People who think neutrinos have not been measured, do not know what measurement means.
Thank you, Anna.
Anna V,
My late father, Abram Fet, was one of the founders of the so-called “standard model.” Back in the 1970s he developed, together with professor Ruhmer, the theory of the unitary symmetry of elementary particles, which is the basis of the modern “standard model.”
Whenever we talked about neutrinos, he would smile, saying that nobody really knows if such a thing really exists. “It’s just a name for an effect that we observe but cannot explain,” he would say, “calculation and theorizing cannot replace experimental results. Intuition tells me that they will never find a neutrino. It’s too convenient. Theoreticians prefer convenience; nature, on the other hand, usually is not as accommodating as they would prefer.”
Don’t make hasty conclusions about people — and about science. It just may be that others know much more than you expect or even imagine.
In the original WUWT story I expressed my skepticism of variation in radioactive decay, by my comment about April 1st.
I now coin the word Sciencedar, which does not appear to be in use yet.
Have you ever read one of those Scientific American spoofs with growing disbelief until you realise that it’s April 1st?
So how is your Sciencedar, readers? It’s very useful when reading about the latest of many things allegedly caused by Global Warming or whatever that is called this week.
I’m not convinced by the falsifying test:
Radioactive decay, I understand, is often triggered by Beta decay, where a neutron decays into an electron, a proton, and an anti-neutrino. This changes the proton/neutron makeup of the nucleus rendering it unstable and causing it to break up into more stable nuclei. In the sun, fusion involves the conversion of protons into neutrons. The by-products include positrons and neutrinos.
An anti-neutrino, which can only take a positive charge (and turn into a positron) will not interact with a neutron (except, rarely, by bouncing off). A neutrino, however, can take a negative charge and trigger beta-decay (except with a neutrino going into the reaction rather than an anti-neutrino coming out). Unless gold-128 has an abnormal decay-mechanism, I don’t think the effect of anti-neutrinos would tell us anything about the effect of neutrinos. I suspect to test this properly, we would have to sustain a fusion-reaction near a radioactive element that we measure.
This comment section is quite the illustration of Kuhn’s description of the nature of scientific revolutions. Particularly in the psychology of the defense of the dominant operant paradigm.
From what V and Feht are saying, it would appear that neutrinos are the equivalent (in a sense) of epicycles (not really fair to epicycles which are observable (but an artifact of perception)) – they are fudge factors to sustain the dominant operant paradigm. It is good to remember that. At some point some minor adjustment or major revolution will result in a more elegant description, one without fudge factors (and then discrepancies will be observed, and more fudge factors invented – such as dark energy and dark matter).
While the outcome of the original claim may be 100% wrong, this NIST study does not seem to come close to proving anything.
Whether the decay rate can change in the slightest may be laughable, I would think everyone would agree that the NIST expeiriment does not prove the original results are false.
Take this statement: my Toyota with throttle-by-wire accelerated out of control and I think the computer was at fault.
There are 3 statements made:
1. Fact – it was a Toyota with throttle-by-wire
2. Fact – it accelerated out of control
3. Opinion – the computer is the cause
You CANNOT say that 1 and 2 are false or did not happen by showing a Ford with throttle-by-wire did not accelerate out of control. It may be that it was not the computer and instead it was a floormat that caused the throttle to get stuck. However you will not be able to prove that by using a car from a different maker that has different floormats and computers.
NIST did not disprove anything from the previous report. Even those that say the previous report was completely wrong should be able to note that NIST is not doing what they say they are doing.
It seems to me that very few of the commentors here notice that disproving a guess of what caused the observation does not in fact disprove the observation itself or other possible causes other than measurement error (even if it was measurement error, you would think a group called “National Institute of Standards and Technology” would try much harder to figure out exactly what standard or technology was not working correctly and offer suggestions to fix it) .