Some Recent Advances in Neutrino Physics

Abstract

One answer to questions concerning the subject matter of elementary particle physics and its position within the physical sciences is that particle physics is the study of creation. To justify this idea, at least in part, consider the “big bang” model of creation of the universe. In that model the primeval fireball involved very high temperatures, estimated to be greater than 1011 degrees Kelvin (°K), which is to be compared with the interior temperature of the sun at about 107 degrees Kelvin. We believe the sun to be a nuclear furnace, generating its energy by individual nuclear interactions in the million electron volt (MeV) energy range. In the “big bang” the energies involved in the individual particle interactions would have been more than 104 times larger than in the sun, and thus in the tens of giga-electron volts (GeV). This is precisely the energy region of present-day high energy or elementary particle physics laboratory experiments. In this sense, then, laboratory experiments that study, even indirectly, lepton-lepton scattering or quark-quark interactions are revisiting creation.