NEUTRINO MASS

© Harold Aspden, 1998

Research Note: 5/98: June 5, 1998

I am writing this after reading a Science Briefing item by Nigel Hawkes, Science Editor of the British newspaper: The Times. The article was entitled 'Mountain tests allow scientists to put weight on the neutrino'. It appeared at p. 10 in the June 5, 1998 issue of that newspaper.

I shall make a few quotations from the above article and add my own commentary.

"Neutrinos were produced in the Big Bang, which began the Universe, and are emitted by the Sun and all other stars. Theory says they should be a billion times more common than the particles that make up atoms."

Well, my theory, the one I am trying to get across in these Web pages, certainly does not support this statement. Indeed, in my theorizing about space, the universe and energy processes occurring in Nature, I have not, so far, ventured to probe the realm of the neutrino in my published work, simply because I think the word 'neutrino' was invented to avoid referring to the 'aether'. You see, one cannot have energy exchanges or fluctuations involving the aether unless there is something that explains balance of momentum and conservation of energy. So if you see a momentum imbalance in the way certain particles behave, typically where electrons, muons or taons are involved, then you need to say that either the aether is throwing its own weight around in the act or something else is discharging that task. That 'something else', in the language of accepted, but erroneous, physics is the neutrino.

I do not believe that the aether was created in a so-called 'Big Bang'. If I did I would not be able to sleep without dreaming about how things were a few seconds before the event of the Big Bang. The universe is so vast that to contemplate it ever having been created at one instant called a 'Big Bang' is just so irritating to any reasonable person, that it simply has to be discounted as utter nonsense.

Rest assured, if you even think that cosmologists might be right, that there exists some other way of interpreting what those cosmologists term the redshift. That and their assumption that there can be no frequency attenuation by light propagating through space, is all they have to support their hopes that there was a 'Big Bang'. They cannot be right, but even if they think they are, then they have yet to tell us what happened before the 'Big Bang'. The only answer I have heard on that reminds one of a tape recording played in an automobile, where, when the tape gets to the end of its play, it runs in reverse and can keep on playing music because there is no ending, nor need there be a beginning if all one knows about that automobile is based on hearing the music as played. So one reads of nonsensical ideas such as 'time runs backwards' once the current expansion cycle ends, meaning that we all turn around and head to that one point in space where the 'Big Bang' happened and, once there, we decide to get the whole act rolling again in the opposite time sense and so we evolve into another multi-billion year cycle with a new 'Big Bang'.

Well, the question now is: 'What is a neutrino?' and, if we can answer that, there is the question: 'Does it have a mass?' or rather: 'Do they have mass?', because neutrinos supposedly come in different varieties.

"Physicists announced today (presumably June 5, 1998) at a conference in Japan that they believe neutrinos, ghostly particles hitherto believed to be without mass, do weigh something after all. Since the universe is suffused with neutrinos in vast numbers, this means that they must make up a large part of the "missing mass" believed to be present in the universe but invisible to the eye."

Now I am not at all sure how scientists even know of such a thing as "missing mass" unless they are relying on their interpretation of how fast the universe is expanding and see it as expanding faster than it should from their estimates of the 'non-missing' mass. So, again, all they are saying is that: "We think the universe is expanding, because we cannot otherwise explain how empty space can attenuate signal frequency, but that leads us to think that the expansion is too fast and so there is some missing matter somewhere in space and that can only be what we call 'neutrinos' and, if we can prove neutrinos have mass, we can say that that accounts for that missing matter."

We have here an interesting situation. Empty space is supposedly filled with neutrinos. They have mass and so empty space has a mass density. So how is it that space cannot attenuate the frequency of those light waves we see as having a redshift? Given that it must attenuate those waves, then surely the 'missing mass' theory is wrong and we had best think about a steady state universe, rather than one that is expanding. In that case, to say that neutrinos can explain missing matter, is illogical.

So where do I come into this picture with my theory? Well, I have just posted Lecture No. 24 in these Web pages and it shows that in 1982 I published an article in Wireless World which explained how the aether can have structural form and fill all space whilst yet allowing passage of light waves with no frequency dispersion but having frequency attenuation such as one sees in the redshift.

I may also say that I have on published record in a scientific periodical a paper 1984e which discusses that same subject and goes on to deduce theoretically the actual frequency attenuation one can expect to measure. That is provided my theory is correct in saying that Nature everywhere in space is trying to create protons and electrons from the sea of virtual muons that provide the main sea of energy in the aether. In that paper I suggested that the transient existence of those attempts at matter creation could account for 'missing matter', but I confess that I have yet to be convinced that there is any need to recognize the existence of so-called 'missing matter'.

That said, I now wonder about the significance of this reported neutrino discovery:

"They (the neutrinos) pass unnoticed through the Earth, and through our bodies, all the time, which makes them very difficult to detect. The new results come from the first two years of data from Super-Kamiokande, a $100,000,000 experiment in a cavity under Mount Ikena near Kamioka in the Japanese alps. The detector is a million gallon tank of water."

"They have found fewer than expected muon neutrinos coming from great distances, and this deficit indicates that muon neutrinos disappear and reappear as they travel through the Earth. This in turn means they must have mass, since massless particles cannot change their form."

".... "Neutrinos cannot now be neglected in the bookkeeping of the mass of the universe. One only gets such great data once or twice in a professional lifetime, maybe never," said Professor John Learned of the University of Hawaii, one of the team responsible."

It was not stated in this report exactly what mass values had been assigned to the members of the neutrino family, but there was the statement that there are believed to be 500,000,000 neutrinos in every cubic metre of space, meaning that "a mass for the neutrino of even one millionth that of the electron - the figure suggested by earlier experiments - would be sufficient to make the total mass of neutrinos a significant, and perhaps a major, part of the total matter in the universe."

Well we shall have to see how all this provides us with information of value. I feel we know so little about how an electron moves through space or through matter and it does not take $100,000,000 to finance experiments detecting the behaviour of electrons travelling at their natural speed. Incidentally, the energy of a free electron in a metal conductor is said to be that given by its velocity as determined by Fermi-Dirac statistics, of the order of about one millionth of the mass-energy of the electron. Might it be then that the electron neutrino is the ghostly presence of the carrier of the kinetic energy of the electron in electrically conductive matter or even in that weakly conductive tank of water under Mount Ikena? In that case I would be inclined to look more closely at the theory governing electrons.

Also one needs to examine the theory as to how protons move through space. What form does its kinetic energy assume? Can it be that of the neutrino, albeit some combination of muon and tau neutrinos, if not simply electron neutrinos? In other words, I am suggesting that the 'neutrino' might be simply an artifact of Nature occasioned by the transient presence of the electron-positron pair or its counterparts in the muon family or taon family. The neutrino may even be a more subtle transient activity related to the aether itself, meaning those quons or lattice particles that I have referred to elsewhere in these Web pages.

In any event, since I did draft a paper on neutrino theory some time ago, but did not pursue it to publication, I will now edit that paper and bring it into these Web pages in the very near future.

Harold Aspden June 5, 1998