I agree. And as far as I remember from grad school in the '80s,
physicists understood that that meant there was nothing fundamental
about the choice of zero for the neutrino masses, only Ockham's Razor at
best, and there would be nothing surprising about small non-zero
neutrino masses.
> There were good reasons to think neutrinos should be massless. The most prominent was that none had ever been seen to be right-handed, which eliminated both of the theoretical ways to describe particles; the Weyl and Dirac equations.
I don't think there was any expectation of finding right-handed
neutrinos, since only the left-handed component couples to the weak
interaction.
> Finding right-handed neutrinos would save the Standard Model, of course).
It's not in any danger on this point, unless someone found a /lot/ of
right-handed neutrinos. I think the Standard Model would have some
trouble with that.
> If that is shown not to be possible, Majorana may provide relief, but at the price of adding yet another "sterile" neutrino to look for, plus making neutrinos not actual fermions as such (or bosons for that matter) but members of another class of particle entirely, the anyon.
I don't think so. Majorana particles would be new and interesting, but
they're fermions, not anyons.
>>>> If this is just a confirmation of existing theory, I'm not convinced
>>>> that it deserves a Nobel prize. Developing a theory required a much
>>>> greater leap of imagination than confirming it.
>>>
>>> No, you miss the point; making up scientific theories is almost
>>> indistinguishable from philosophy. Consider string theory- it's elegant
>>> as all hell mathematically, explains damned near everything, and
>>> predicts all sorts of wonderful things. Trouble is that we have no idea
>>> how to go about testing it against the real world- it makes the same
>>> predictions that the Standard Model does at the energies we can reach.
>>> (Worse, string theory is actually a whole slew of theories that make
>>> slightly different predictions at energies just out of our reach, and we
>>> can't tell which one to try to test for.)
>>
>> Again, not really. The Standard Model is input for all string theories.
>> You really should keep track of what goes in and what comes out.
>
> I am aware of what is derived from what, but my point was that string theory is fundamentally different from the Standard Model in that the former is untestable, a characteristic it shares with philosophies.
Untestable so far, but testable in principle.
>>> Demonstrating that neutrino oscillations occur is tantamount to
>>> falsifying the Standard Model of particle physics (proving that it is
>>> wrong, or "false").
>>
>> Neither.
>> Neutrino oscillations show that the Standard Model needs to be enlarged.
>> (with some more free parameters)
>
> Sigh. We're trying to discuss particle physics in English.
>
>>> It's like falsifying anything considered really fundamental in the
>>> sciences, like say the periodic table of elements.
>>
>> That is indeed somewhat analogous.
>> Discovering a new element does not falsify the periodic table,
>> or anything else for that matter.
>> It merely adds another element.
>
> No, that's not what I meant. We are all made aware that atoms are slowly being added to it when Russian and American scientists argue about who gets to name one when its existence is confirmed. Seaborgium, Mendelevium, and so forth.
>
> To falsify the periodic table, we would need to find out that its fundamental structural concept (the periodic recurrence of similarity of chemical properties with certain integer increases in proton content) is just not an accurate way of describing what happens.
>
> The Standard Model makes certain assumptions derived from observation; that particles can be grouped according to their spins into fermions and bosons, that there are three "families" of leptons, and so on.
>
> Neutrinos have always been an oddity. They were the only fermions never seen to have (within the limits of experimental error) mass,
So since it was proved that they have masses, they're known to be less odd.
> they only seem to come in one kind of handedness, and have other characteristics that are uncharacteristic of fermions even though we were sure they had half-integer spin.
As I recall, the handedness thing is because they're produced by the
weak interaction, which doesn't conserve parity.
> Demonstrating that they have mass (even though we don't know what their masses are, only the difference between the squares of their mass eigenstates, by the way) shows that the Standard Model's rigid either/or partitioning of particles into bosons and fermions is just not an adequate description of reality.
I don't believe that in the slightest. Neutrinos with mass might be
fermions just like any others.
> If a new class of particles has to be added to it, it would be analogous to having to rearrange or add another layer to the periodic table.
>
>>> So yeah, it's worth the Nobel.
>>
>> Sure. Mainly because it is such a tour de force, experimentally,
>
> Yes, such a specific, unambiguous, groundbreaking tour de force.
It's very impressive, but the results didn't surprise anyone.
--
Jerry Friedman