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Author Topic:   Einstein is rolling over in His Grave, or Cern makes a big mistake
crashfrog
Member (Idle past 1494 days)
Posts: 19762
From: Silver Spring, MD
Joined: 03-20-2003


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Message 7 of 74 (634593)
09-22-2011 11:46 PM
Reply to: Message 6 by Dogmafood
09-22-2011 10:00 PM


Do you mean that the path is shorter for the neutrino's?
Sort of; it's a little-known fact that photons don't just shoot straight out of the center of a star; it has to random-walk out as it is absorbed and re-emitted by the stellar gas. That's a function of the mean free path of a photon in a star. It's calculated that it can take a photon emitted in the center of the Sun as long as 170,000 years to reach the corona and be emitted into space.
Neutrinos only weakly interact with matter so they shoot directly out. The "mean free path" refers to the average distance a particle can travel within a medium before it interacts with another particle. For a photon, which will interact with anything, that's a very short distance. For a neutrino which interacts with almost nothing, that's a very long distance indeed.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 6 by Dogmafood, posted 09-22-2011 10:00 PM Dogmafood has seen this message but not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 9 by Larni, posted 09-23-2011 3:40 AM crashfrog has not replied

  
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