Draw a one centimetre square on your finger & hold it towards the Sun 👆
Now consider that some 60 billion neutrinos hit it every second, created by nuclear fusion in the solar core 500 seconds ago 🙀
Even if it’s nighttime & your finger has to point down through Earth’s surface – they don’t care 🙃
But if it makes you feel better, there are only about 2 solar neutrinos in each cubic centimetre of you at any given instant 🤷♂️
Well, plus another 300 from the Big Bang 😬
@FirefighterGeek I dunno – showing that they oscillate between types & thus have mass has given the Standard Model a bit of a shake-up, & won Kajita & McDonald a fair wallop of cash along with the 2015 Physics Nobel Prize.
But arguably the whole point of neutrinos is to make us feel useless & insignificant as they stream through us without a care in the universe. I'd say we need a bit more of that in our lives 🙂
@markmccaughrean Until I can use them to cook popcorn, they're dead to me.
-> This is the serious me acknowledging your point and the value of pure science, it's just not as funny <-
@FirefighterGeek It's the neutrinos that are laughing – almost every one of them will live forever, long after we & our popcorn have become dust blown in the wind of our dying Sun.
-> Momentary seriousness acknowledged in return <-
@FirefighterGeek @markmccaughrean
They most definitely are not useless. Supernovae are always preceded by a neutrino burst several minutes to hours before other emissions of the supernova become visible to us, giving us precious time to train a whole bunch of telescopes on that region of sky to catch it as it happens.
How are you defining "instant"? Planck time? Something longer?
Mark McCaughrean
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FirefighterGeek 
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