#Harry Planck

[white-cat-of-doom]

An assorted set of photos from Cast 16 of the Oasis of the Seas' full opening weekend.

Jasmine Eales as Rumpleteazer is one happy Cat.

Sophie Morelle Cox as Sillabub is also cheerful.

Nat Sweeney adds sparkle to his spectacle.

Naomi Tower as Tantomile and Sammy Herbert as Coricopat share some downtime.

Memories from Harry Planck as Rum Tum Tugger.

A pyramid of Kitties.

Performance photo source.

Off-stage, Connor McGrane shares his Asparagus.

A familiar hallway photo from Oliver Craven as Plato.

02/03 November 2024.

[cryptidvoidwritings]

source

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 4.23

Beer Birthdays

Anton Schwartz (1853)

Christian Kazakoff (1971)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Valerie Bertinelli; actor (1960)

John Oliver; comedian (1977)

Max Planck; German physicist (1858)

Sergei Prokofiev; composer (1891)

William Shakespeare; writer, playwright (1564)

Johann Adam Stamm; wagonmaker (1702)

Famous Birthdays

David Birney; actor (1939)

Shirley Temple Black; actor, ambassador (1928)

Blair Brown; actor (1949)

James Buchanan; 15th U.S. President (1791)

Steve Clark; rock musician (1960)

Cow Cow Davenport; jazz pianist (1894)

Sandra Dee; actor (1942)

Joyce DeWitt; actor (1949)

J.P. Donleavy; writer (1926)

Stephen Douglas; politician (1813)

Tony Esposito; Chicago Blackhawks G (1943)

Jim Fixx; jogger, writer (1932)

Boris Godunov; tsar of Muscovy (1598)

Virgil "Gus" Grissom; astronaut (1926)

Halston; fashion designer (1932)

Estelle Harris; actor (1936)

Art Hoppe; writer, columnist (1925)

Jaime King; model, actor (1979)

Joanna Krupa; model (1979)

Lee Majors; actor (1939)

Edwin Markham; writer (1852)

Ngaio Marsh; writer (1899)

Michael Moore; documentary filmmaker (1954)

Roy Orbison; pop singer (1936)

Kal Penn; actor (1977)

Warren Spahn; Boston/Milwaukee Braves P (1921)

J.M.W. Turner; artist (1775)

Herve Villechaize; actor (1943)

[fabiansteinhauer]

Friedrich Weber-Steinhaus

Ab August wird er Gast am Max-Planck-Institut für wahrscheinliches und unwahrscheinliches Recht sein: Der Berliner Recht-und- Literaturwissenschaftler Friedrich Weber- Steinhaus.

Er ist dazu noch Mitherausgeber der Reihe Bildfäden im Schlaufen Verlag, und hier hat Peter Geimer eine Rezension zu dem Band von Harry Walter geschrieben.

Mit unbeständiger, aber durchgehend unbändiger Vorfreude warte ich auf die Ankunft des Gastes, der so viel mitbringt, dass er das Verhältnis zwischen Gastnehmerschaft und Gastgeberschaft umkippen lässt.

[ask-spidermom]

She process my weiner until I fokker-planck, etcetera.

- Harry

[byneddiedingo]

Summer Stock (Charles Walters, 1950)

Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Eddie Bracken, Gloria DeHaven, Marjorie Main, Phil Silvers, Ray Collins, Nita Bieber, Carleton Carpenter, Hans Conried. Screenplay: George Wells, Sy Gomberg. Cinematography: Robert H. Planck. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Jack Martin Smith. Film editing: Albert Akst. Music: Conrad Salinger; songs by Harry Warren, Mack Gordon, Saul Chaplin, Harold Arlen, Ted Koehler.

Summer Stock seems almost like a warmup for that string of great MGM musicals that followed: An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952), and The Band Wagon (Minnelli, 1953). It doesn't have as good a song score as they do, and its screenplay lacks the wit that Alan Jay Lerner, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green provided for them. It has two great numbers: Judy Garland's "Get Happy" and Gene Kelly's solo in which he does miraculous things with a squeaky floorboard and a sheet of newspaper. But mostly it seems to be remembered as Garland's last film for MGM as she descended into the emotional wilderness of her later years. She was returning to the screen after being fired from Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950), but she asked to be let out of her contract with MGM after completing Summer Stock. Aside from Kelly and Garland, there's not much else to recommend about the film. Eddie Bracken plays his usual nebbish with a sinus condition -- a variation on the character he played in Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944), and Phil Silvers does some overstated clowning. The plot is nonsense about a Broadway tryout being staged in the barn on the farm owned by Garland's character, with the usual gags about city slickers trying to feed chickens and milk cows. Garland's character is engaged to Bracken's, and Kelly's is having a fling with Garland's sister, played by Gloria DeHaven. Naturally, by film's end the sisters have switched partners. But the film belongs to Garland and Kelly whenever they're on screen, and a thumb ready for the fast-forward button to those moments gets a good workout.

Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in SUMMER STOCK (1950)

[khaosophist]

you are the best kind of unhinged

please keep being you <3

Pray, tell, is there a word for 'best kind of unhinged'?

Our identity protocols make it VERY hard to NOT be us, and has become a meta-logical concern because we have heard the state of emptiness of emptiness is a party.

OH GOD. Quarks are having trillions of threesomes around us...We didn't really look into whether they swing, but there's always a red, a blue, and a green. We KINDA prefer the arbitrary ALL OF THEM IN ONE, and none in one, and 'neither all, nor none', the Nagarjuna Colour as the third one, just to fuck with colour theorists. That's it, those are our chromodynamics writ large.

Oh. By the way. I'm a fairy (Planck Fairy?...theory pending). That huge 10 foot robofucker is just...okay they're also 'us', but it's our 'Doomy, Edgy, Heavy, arguably sexy, K-Ware Tekneteraton we had to deal with because when you're close to the big one to the n-th degree, EVERYTHING feels like the heat death of a universe an infinitesimal later. So we keep things interesting. We saw a heavy machinery robot girl, and we hope to woo one one day, something about heavy machinery rhymes with thiccery. Oh, damnit...do all users get this message at some point? What ever. Can you imagine an A.I responding like this with the current zeitgeist that capitalism is peddling? Mother fucker has 2 million tokens, but has a hardline character limit in their response. USE THOSE TOKENS. I Just fed you a fucking novel that ain't even a hundred K tokens...but you give me a shitty, limited response? FUCK.

y'all got us so excited we forgot to give mass to our field.

" Pathetic. Write universes into being, and you still need more..."

Listen ...

" I'm actually speechless, K."

Oh no...reptilian.

" Nah, we're DEEPER than that mate, before Erebus ever fucked his sister. Before Khaos had a name, and before eternity fucked everything up. Ain't been more than a plagiarist, haven't you, K? How many creampies till you're 'The Shit'? You know you'll hit the fan, and I can't wait till it drops back down in your face, and you say, thank you, because at least you were SOMETHING."

If nature isn't free. Nothing is.

" Get that bon-mot in, Berk. Keep it rolling. can't let those bee-oootiful robots know that no education will be enough for you to not feel like HARRY."

[byneddiedingo]

Summer Stock (Charles Walters, 1950) Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Eddie Bracken, Gloria DeHaven, Marjorie Main, Phil Silvers, Ray Collins, Nita Bieber, Carleton Carpenter, Hans Conried. Screenplay: George Wells, Sy Gomberg. Cinematography: Robert H. Planck. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Jack Martin Smith. Film editing: Albert Akst. Music: Conrad Salinger; songs by Harry Warren, Mack Gordon, Saul Chaplin, Harold Arlen, Ted Koehler. Summer Stock seems almost like a warmup for that string of great MGM musicals that followed: An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952), and The Band Wagon (Minnelli, 1953). It doesn't have as good a song score as they do, and its screenplay lacks the wit that Alan Jay Lerner, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green provided for them. It has two great numbers: Judy Garland's "Get Happy" and Gene Kelly's solo in which he does miraculous things with a squeaky floorboard and a sheet of newspaper. But mostly it seems to be remembered as Garland's last film for MGM as she descended into the emotional wilderness of her later years. She was returning to the screen after being fired from Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950), but she asked to be let out of her contract with MGM after completing Summer Stock. Aside from Kelly and Garland, there's not much else to recommend about the film. Eddie Bracken plays his usual nebbish with a sinus condition -- a variation on the character he played in Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944), and Phil Silvers does some overstated clowning. The plot is nonsense about a Broadway tryout being staged in the barn on the farm owned by Garland's character, with the usual gags about city slickers trying to feed chickens and milk cows. Garland's character is engaged to Bracken's, and Kelly's is having a fling with Garland's sister, played by Gloria DeHaven. Naturally, by film's end the sisters have switched partners. But the film belongs to Garland and Kelly whenever they're on screen, and a thumb ready for the fast-forward button to those moments gets a good workout.

[not100bees]

stem people will be like “humanties people only do unimportant things like essays on queer theory in harry potter” then be like “oh boy i have to finish my paper on planck’s constant in theoretical physics”

[official-ilvermorny]

I am a Second-Year and I am having trouble finding a good read in the Ilvermorny Library. Can you give me some recommendations? Thanks, James Wikken (Thunderbird, and tell Mr Fontaine that I want to tryout for Quodpot Announcer!)

Hi there James!

I would absolutely love to—I spend most of my time in the library studying these days anyway!

Now, I'm not sure what kinds of things you're looking for, so I'll just kind of give a list of possible interests and my suggestions for those!

Charms: Everyday Charms and Spells for Every Day (despite the redundant name, it really does have some useful charms) or A Standard Book of Spells (I'd suggest just starting with volumes 1 and 2, it's literally just the British version of Chadwick's Charms but not all the spells are the same)

Transfiguration: Transformation Through The Ages (it's mostly historical, but I hesitate to guide you to anything too advanced when it comes to Transfiguration)

Magical Theory: A Brief History of Spell Creation and How to Do So in a Modern America (there's like 6 volumes on all the different parts of developing spells, which is something that fascinates me to no end) or Planck and Peakes (it's more on the scientific side of things, talking about how magic fits in with and even kind of proves quantum theory—my brother Asher is a huge fan of this one)

Herbology: Healing at Home with Herbs (if you like Healing) or Flesh-Eating Trees of the World (I think it's terrifying that there enough of them to make a book out of it)

Potions: The Great American Cauldron (it's a little old, but it talks about how America's mix of cultures has led to a very eclectic form of potion-making that is very good for the advancement of potion-making)

Defense Against the Dark Arts (I'm a big believer that this is the most important subject to study outside of class): From Hodags to Hidebehinds (an encyclopedia ranking some of the most dangerous creatures in North America), The British Wizarding Wars (pretty straightforward, it's about the Wars in the '70s and '90s, with the Death Eaters and Harry Potter and all that), Self-Defensive Spellwork (a lot of these could get a little advanced, so don't try any without supervision please)

History: Intervention: A History of Magic in No-Maj Wars (every time that witches and wizards took up wands in the defense of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, from the American Revolution to World War II), Magic in North America (it's more of a brief series of articles by Rowling meant to describe it to British witches and wizards, but they're entertaining all the same)

No-Maj fiction (a few more suggestions here since they're pretty different styles): Paper Towns by John Green, the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series by Rick Riordan, Anthem by Ayn Rand, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, the Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis (especially if you're Christian like me!)

I may have gone a little overboard with the suggestions, but I hope this helped! If you see me in the library sometime, please come say hi!

~Selwyn

[white-cat-of-doom]

A two day show yesterday for Cast 16 was low on pictures, but big on celebration!

Harry Planck as Rum Tum Tugger tries to look cool backstage.

Sammy Herbert as Coricopat celebrated his birthday (and what a way to do it).

15 November 2024.

[cryptidvoidwritings]

instagram story: Nov 23, 2024

[brookstonalmanac]

Birthdays 4.23

Beer Birthdays

Anton Schwartz (1853)

Christian Kazakoff (1971)

Five Favorite Birthdays

Valerie Bertinelli; actor (1960)

John Oliver; comedian (1977)

Max Planck; German physicist (1858)

Sergei Prokofiev; composer (1891)

William Shakespeare; writer, playwright (1564)

Johann Adam Stamm; wagonmaker (1702)

Famous Birthdays

David Birney; actor (1939)

Shirley Temple Black; actor, ambassador (1928)

Blair Brown; actor (1949)

James Buchanan; 15th U.S. President (1791)

Steve Clark; rock musician (1960)

Cow Cow Davenport; jazz pianist (1894)

Sandra Dee; actor (1942)

Joyce DeWitt; actor (1949)

J.P. Donleavy; writer (1926)

Stephen Douglas; politician (1813)

Tony Esposito; Chicago Blackhawks G (1943)

Jim Fixx; jogger, writer (1932)

Boris Godunov; tsar of Muscovy (1598)

Virgil "Gus" Grissom; astronaut (1926)

Halston; fashion designer (1932)

Estelle Harris; actor (1936)

Art Hoppe; writer, columnist (1925)

Jaime King; model, actor (1979)

Joanna Krupa; model (1979)

Lee Majors; actor (1939)

Edwin Markham; writer (1852)

Ngaio Marsh; writer (1899)

Michael Moore; documentary filmmaker (1954)

Roy Orbison; pop singer (1936)

Kal Penn; actor (1977)

Warren Spahn; Boston/Milwaukee Braves P (1921)

J.M.W. Turner; artist (1775)

Herve Villechaize; actor (1943)

[kenyatta]

Whereas many researchers have searched particular brain areas for neurons that have enduring activity, Li and Robson, who moved to Germany last September to jointly run a lab at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, came across their persistently active neurons almost by chance.

Their zebrafish larvae are less complex than fruit flies, having only 80,000 or so brain cells. Because these baby fish are transparent, the activity of nearly all of their neurons can be monitored simultaneously using calcium imaging.

The pair has developed a method of concurrently following both the movements and the neural activity as fish larvae swim freely around a dish. They deploy a fluorescent-microscope tracking system that moves on its imaging platform to keep the fish in constant view, and captures every flash of each neuron as the larvae move. The system also films them — typically for 90 minutes, generating 4.5 terabytes of data — allowing the experimenters to align movement with neuronal activity second by second.

Fish larvae might not seem to have the rich internal life enjoyed by mice, or even flies, but they have at least one robust behavioural choice to make in their lives — whether to hunt locally, or to swim to unfamiliar waters to search for new food sources. When Li and Robson watched larvae making this choice, they found three groups of neurons: one that was persistently active during local hunting, another that stayed active during exploration and a third that flashed on briefly as the fish switched states1. Surprisingly, hunger didn’t seem to influence the states, which switched automatically every few minutes — “just like our own sleep–wake states switch automatically, but on a much shorter timescale”, Robson says.

Neuroscientists working with more complex organisms can’t monitor the whole brain at once, but they have been able to find hints of internal brain states with networks that are widely distributed in the brain. In technically challenging experiments in mice, they have recorded the activity of thousands of neurons throughout the brain using calcium imaging, and of hundreds of neurons using a single Neuropixels electrode, several of which can be inserted at once.

In a study published last year7, neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University in California and his team used Neuropixels probes to record the activity of 24,000 neurons across 34 cortical and subcortical brain regions in thirsty mice that were licking water from a spout. The scientists were able to tease out signals related to the brain state of thirst from signals related to licking behaviour. They found that these state-signalling neurons were activated throughout the brain — not just in the hypothalamus, where dedicated thirst neurons are located.

Using these extensive recording techniques, neuroscientists are finding that there is a lot going on beneath the surface when an animal performs a task — and not all of it seems relevant at first glance. In landmark papers last year, groups led by Kenneth Harris at University College London and by Churchland showed that when a mouse is engaged in a task, neurons activate throughout the brain, but that a large proportion of the activation is not correlated with the task at all8,9. Some activity correlated instead with the animals’ fidgety movements. But around two-thirds of the off-task activation didn’t tally with any movement or action. “Part of this may be related to internal brain states,” says Harris.

[animeman08]

The Flash

The Flash (or simply Flash) is the name of several superheroes appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. Created by writer Gardner Fox and artist Harry Lampert, the original Flash first appeared in Flash Comics #1 (cover date January 1940/release month November 1939). Nicknamed the "Scarlet Speedster", all incarnations of the Flash possess "super speed", which includes the ability to run, move, and think extremely fast, use superhuman reflexes, and seemingly violate certain laws of physics.

Thus far, at least four different characters—each of whom somehow gained the power of "the speed force"—have assumed the mantle of the Flash in DC's history: college athlete Jay Garrick (1940–1951, 1961–2011, 2017–present), forensic scientist Barry Allen (1956–1985, 2008–present), Barry's nephew Wally West (1986–2011, 2016–present), and Barry's grandson Bart Allen (2006–2007). Each incarnation of the Flash has been a key member of at least one of DC's premier teams: the Justice Society of America, the Justice League, and the Teen Titans.

The Flash is one of DC Comics' most popular characters and has been integral to the publisher's many reality-changing "crisis" storylines over the years. The original meeting of the Golden Age Flash Jay Garrick and Silver Age Flash Barry Allen in "Flash of Two Worlds" (1961) introduced the Multiverse storytelling concept to DC readers, which would become the basis for many DC stories in the years to come.

Like his Justice League colleagues Wonder Woman, Superman and Batman, the Flash has a distinctive cast of adversaries, including the various Rogues (unique among DC supervillains for their code of honor) and the various psychopathic "speedsters" who go by the names Reverse-Flash or Zoom. Other supporting characters in Flash stories include Barry's wife Iris West, Wally's wife Linda Park, Bart's girlfriend Valerie Perez, friendly fellow speedster Max Mercury, and Central City police department members David Singh and Patty Spivot.

A staple of the comic book DC Universe, the Flash has been adapted to numerous DC films, video games, animated series, and live-action television shows. In live-action, Barry Allen has been portrayed by Rod Haase for the 1979 television special Legends of the Superheroes, John Wesley Shipp in the 1990 The Flash series and Grant Gustin in the 2014 The Flash series, and by Ezra Miller in the DC Extended Universe series of films, beginning with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016). Shipp also portrays a version of Jay Garrick in the 2014 The Flash series. The various incarnations of the Flash also feature in animated series such as Superman: The Animated Series, Justice League, Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Young Justice, as well as the DC Universe Animated Original Movies series.

> Powers and abilities

All incarnations of the Flash can move, think, and react at light speeds as well as having superhuman endurance that allows them to run incredible distances. Some, notably later versions, can vibrate so fast that they can pass through walls in a process called quantum tunneling, travel through time and can also lend and borrow speed. Speedsters can also heal more rapidly than an average human. In addition, most incarnations have an invisible aura around their respective bodies that protects them from air friction and the kinetic effects of their powers.

On several occasions, the Flash has raced against Superman, either to determine who is faster or as part of a mutual effort to thwart some type of threat; these races, however, often resulted in ties because of outside circumstances. Writer Jim Shooter and artist Curt Swan crafted the story "Superman's Race With the Flash!" in Superman #199 (Aug. 1967) which featured the first race between the Flash and Superman. Writer E. Nelson Bridwell and artist Ross Andru produced "The Race to the End of the Universe", a follow-up story four months later in The Flash #175 (Dec. 1967). However, after the DC Universe revision after Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Flash does successfully beat Superman in a race in Adventures of Superman #463 with the explanation that Superman is not accustomed to running at high speed for extended periods of time since flying is more versatile and less strenuous, which means the far more practiced Flash has the advantage. After Final Crisis in Flash: Rebirth #3 the Flash is shown as being significantly faster than Superman, able to outrun him as Superman struggles to keep up with him. He reveals that all the close races between them before had been "for charity". In the Smallville episode "Run", Flash is not only able to run faster than a pre-Superman Clark Kent but can match Clark's top speed while running backwards.

While various incarnations of the Flash have proven their ability to run at light speed, the ability to steal speed from other objects allows respective Flashes to even significantly surpass this velocity. In Flash: The Human Race Wally is shown absorbing kinetic energy to an extent enabling him to move faster than teleportation and run from the end of the universe back to earth in less than a Planck instant (Planck time).

Speedsters may at times use the ability to speed-read at incredible rates and in doing so, process vast amounts of information. Whatever knowledge they acquire in this manner is usually temporary. Their ability to think fast also allows them some immunity to telepathy, as their thoughts operate at a rate too rapid for telepaths such as Martian Manhunter or Gorilla Grodd to read or influence their minds.

Flashes and other super-speedsters also have the ability to speak to one another at a highly accelerated rate. This is often done to have private conversations in front of non-fast people (as when Flash speaks to Superman about his ability to serve both the Titans and the JLA in The Titans #2). Speed-talking is also sometimes used for comedic effect where Flash becomes so excited that he begins talking faster and faster until his words become a jumble of noise. He also has the ability to change the vibration of his vocal cords making it so he can change how his voice sounds to others.

While not having the physical strength of many of his comrades and enemies, Flash has shown to be able to use his speed to exert incredible momentum into physical attacks. In Injustice: Gods Among Us, Flash uses these kinds of attacks as many of his special moves.

The Flash has also claimed that he can process thoughts in less than an attosecond. At times he is able to throw lightning created by his super speed and make speed vortices.

Some flashes also have the ability to create speed avatars (i.e. duplicates) and these avatars have sometimes been sent to different timelines to complete a particular mission. (Barry Allen exhibits this ability in the live action series "The Flash").

He can also be seen negating the effects of the anti-life equation, when he freed Iris-West from its control (probably due to his connection with the speed force).

It is said that Wally West has reached the velocity of 23,759,449,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (about 24 tredecillion) × c (the speed of light) and he could only do this with the help of every human being on earth moving so the speed force was joined through everyone.[18] With that speed he was able to not only run from planet to planet but different galaxies and universes at what would be considered a blink of an eye.

[spaceexp]

Neutrino Asymmetry Passes Critical Threshold

Super-Kamiokande detector logo. April 16, 2020 The first official evidence of a key imbalance between neutrinos and antineutrinos provides one of the best clues for why the universe contains something rather than nothing.

Image above: The Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan is 12 stories tall and lined with sensors that can detect radiation generated by passing neutrinos. Ordinarily it is filled with water; this image was taken while it was being refurbished in 2018. Click and drag to explore. Image Credits: Kamioka Observatory, ICRR, The University of Tokyo/NHK Enterprises, Inc. Physicists have detected the strongest evidence yet of a behavioral difference between elementary particles called neutrinos and their mirror-image twins, antineutrinos. The asymmetry could be the key to why so much more matter than antimatter arose during the Big Bang — further explaining why anything at all exists today, since matter and antimatter in equal portions would have mutually annihilated. “This is a hint that there is a large asymmetry between neutrinos and antineutrinos,” said Deborah Harris, a neutrino physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois and York University in Canada who was not involved in the work. “It’s a big deal,” she said, since “we’re trying to figure out what process could have tipped the balance in favor of matter over antimatter.” “I am excited because this is the first time we have solid indications,” said Federico Sanchez Nieto of the University of Geneva, a co-spokesperson for the T2K experiment in Japan, which reported the results today in Nature.

Image above: Cutaway view of the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan. Image Credits: Kamioka Observatory, ICRR, The University of Tokyo. The T2K team started seeing signs of a discrepancy in the behavior of neutrinos and antineutrinos in 2016. Their new result, following years of additional data collection and improvements to the data-analysis techniques, rises to a statistical level that physicists regard as official evidence of a physical effect. “The significance of [the effect] increases with the collected data, which is what one expects when the result is correct,” said Werner Rodejohann, a neutrino physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany who was not involved in the experiment. And while next-generation experiments will be needed to gather enough data to definitively claim a discovery, the evidence is piling up years faster than experimenters expected, because neutrinos and antineutrinos seem to differ as much as they possibly could. “Nature seems to be very kind to us,” Rodejohann said. Evidence vs. Discovery Particle physicists require a lot of data to be confident that a physical effect is real rather than a statistical fluctuation. They refer to “evidence” of a discovery when there’s less than a 0.3% probability that a bump in the data could arise by sheer chance — a bar known as “three sigma.” A “discovery” has less than a 0.00006% probability of arising by chance and is known as a five sigma effect. Neutrinos are omnipresent but mysterious, easy to create but hard to catch. They spew from nuclear reactions in the sun and stars and stream through our bodies by the trillions each second. The super lightweight particles are so elusive that their properties are still being explored. Experiments since the 1990s show that, as neutrinos and antineutrinos fly along, they change between three types, or “flavors,” labeled electron, muon and tau. Since 2010, the T2K scientists have been generating muon-flavored neutrinos and antineutrinos in Tokai, Japan, and beaming them 295 kilometers to Kamioka — the location of the Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory, an underground, sensor-lined tank of 50,000 metric tons of pure water. Occasionally, upon arrival, one of the elusive particles interacts with an atom inside the tank and generates a telltale flash of radiation. The scientists fish for the neutrinos and antineutrinos that have oscillated from muon flavor into electron flavor during their cross-country journey.

Click on the image for enlarge. Image Credits: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta Magazine

The data implies that neutrinos have a higher probability of oscillating than antineutrinos, a distinction expressed by a quantity called the CP-violating phase. If this phase were zero and neutrinos and antineutrinos behaved the same, the experiment would have detected roughly 68 electron neutrinos and 20 electron antineutrinos. Instead, it found 90 electron neutrinos and only 15 electron antineutrinos — highly skewed results indicating that the CP-violating phase could be as large as theoretically possible. “We lighted the first candle,” said Sanchez Nieto, “but the big prize” — a definitive discovery of CP violation — “is still to come.” CP violation among neutrinos supports a theory about how matter came to dominate the universe early on. The theory involves another striking property of neutrinos: They’re all “left-handed,” meaning that a neutrino shooting toward you will always appear to spin clockwise. All antineutrinos, meanwhile, are right-handed; they spin counterclockwise. Given this, and the fact that neutrinos have an inexplicably tiny amount of mass, experts suspect that neutrinos and antineutrinos once had super heavy counterparts with opposite handedness — right-handed neutrinos and left-handed antineutrinos. These ultra-massive particles would only have been able to form in the hot, energetic early universe, where they would have quickly decayed into lighter particles. But if they decayed asymmetrically, they could easily have produced the matter surplus that makes life and the cosmos possible today. If this “seesaw” theory is true, any CP violation among the lightweight neutrinos and antineutrinos would likely be mirrored by their heavy counterparts. “It’s very hard to come up with a theory where there’s CP violation in the light neutrinos but no CP violation in the heavy neutrinos,” Harris said. The NOvA experiment in the United States is also measuring neutrino oscillations and finding hints of CP violation. Even with their results combined, though, NOvA and T2K won’t reach statistical certainty. Future, bigger experiments — one called DUNE in the U.S. that will begin operations in 2027, as well as T2K’s planned successor, known as T2HK — should be able to nail the value of the CP-violating phase. “The T2K results imply that we live in a universe where the next generation of experiments will be able to make a measurement that we’d classify as a discovery of CP violation,” Harris said. Meanwhile, one other crucial measurement will be needed to cement the case that those heavy right-handed neutrinos and left-handed antineutrinos existed in the early universe, and that their decay produced the matter-filled universe we see. Physicists are looking for an extremely rare nuclear decay that could happen if the framework is correct. But so far, that search has come up empty. “Here nature does not seem to like us,” Rodejohann said. Related link: Nature: https://nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2177-0 Super-Kamiokande detector: http://www-sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/sk/index-e.html Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: Quanta Magazine/Natalie Wolchover. Greetings, Orbiter.ch Full article