Hey there! Got a minute? I’m Aaron and I’m
at the Space Hall in the Ontario Science Centre.
And I’d like to talk to you guys about Neutrinos.
In order to figure out how the sun works,
we have to look at the centre. And neutrinos, come directly from the centre.
Now when we tried to count all the neutrinos
that we were expecting from the sun, we were
missing about 2/3s of what we were expecting.
So someone came along and said well maybe
neutrinos were mixing between the sun and
the Earth.
So Sir Arthur McDonald built a new type of
detector and he found all the neutrinos from
the sun, but in three different types.
See neutrinos are supposed to be massless,
that’s the model that we have. But if neutrinos
from the sun are mixing by the time they get
to the Earth, that means that they have to
have mass.
Which means we understand how the sun works.
Yay! Unfortunately, it means we don’t understand
how particles in our Universe work.
What’s cool about that though, is that maybe,
someone like you, may be getting a Nobel Prize
for physics, by coming out with a new model,
one that explains all the particles in the
Universe, and how neutrinos have mass.
Time’s up! Thanks for watching.
