Physicists Try to "Big-Mystery-Glamorize" Their Pigeonhole Pet Projects

 Scientists believe that when two very high-energy photons collide, they produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and that when matter collides with antimatter, it is converted into high-energy photons. Such a belief is based on what scientists have observed in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are accelerated to near the speed of light before they collide with each other. But such conclusions about matter, antimatter and photons lead to a great mystery as to why there is any matter at all in the universe.

Let us imagine the early minutes of the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, when the density of the universe was incredibly great. At that time the universe should have consisted of energy, matter and antimatter. The energy should have been in the form of very high-energy photons that were frequently colliding with each other. All such collisions should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. For example, a collision of high energy particles with sufficient energy creates a matter proton and an antimatter particle called an antiproton. So the amount of antimatter shortly after the Big Bang should have been exactly the same as the amount of matter. As a CERN page on this topic says, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe." 

But whenever a matter particle touched an antimatter particle, both would have been converted into photons. The eventual result should have been a universe consisting either of nothing but photons, or some matter but an equal amount of antimatter. But only trace amounts of antimatter are observed in the universe. A universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter would have been uninhabitable, because of the vast amount of lethal energy released when even a tiny bit of matter comes in contact with a tiny bit of antimatter.

The mystery of why we live in a universe that is almost all matter (rather than antimatter) is called the baryon asymmetry problem or the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem.  There is not much of a prospect that this problem will be solved in our lifetimes.  It's like the problem of "why is there something rather than nothing?" That's not a problem we can expect to solve in our lifetimes. The infographic below explains this matter-antimatter asymmetry problem. 

But sometimes when scientists have embarked on a boondoggle costing billions, they may evoke the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem to try to sanctify their misguided schemes.  That is what is going on with various boondoggle projects researching neutrinos. They include these projects:

• An ongoing T2K experiment in Japan that beams neutrinos over a distance of 295 kilometers. 
• An ongoing 280-million-dollar NOVA experiment in the USA that beams neutrinos 804 kilometers (500 miles), from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois to a 14,000-ton detector in Ash River, Minnesota.
• An under-construction 3-billion-dollar DUNE experiment in the USA that will attempt to beam neutrinos 1300 kilometers (800 miles), from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois to a very-deep-underground facility in Lead, South Dakota. 

The first two experiments have been running for years, and there was recently released a paper announcing a kind of combined results from the projects. Nothing of any importance was found.  But you might think otherwise from some of the press coverage, some of which attempts to make this "found nothing" result sound like something worthwhile. 

Scientists were hoping to find evidence of something called "mass ordering" or something else called "inverted ordering," but the paper says, "The data show no strong preference for either mass ordering."  We read, "There is no statistically significant preference obtained for either of the mass orderings." We also read, "We do not see a significant preference at present for either mass ordering."  

The only thing the paper authors say on the question of the matter-antimatter asymmetry is, " It is unknown whether neutrinos—and thus leptons—violate charge-parity (CP) symmetry and thereby provide a source of matter–antimatter asymmetry in nature, which is of great interest given the connection between CP violation and the unexplained matter dominance in the Universe." Since the paper says nothing else on the topic of matter-antimatter asymmetry other than this "say nothing" sentence,  the results obtained utterly fail to shed any light on the mystery of matter–antimatter asymmetry, contrary to the sales pitches for these very expensive projects, which tried to suggest that they would give important insight on this topic. 

The Reuters article on this paper describes it without exaggeration, and does not claim that the work shed any light at all on the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem. We have a headline of only "Researchers in US and Japan offer insight into ghostly neutrinos."

A Caltech press release on the paper uses some scrambled reasoning to gin up some relevance to the results. It states this:

"The combined results of NOvA and T2K so far do not favor one mass ordering scenario over another. However, if future results show the neutrino mass ordering is inverted and not normal, NOvA's and T2K's results published today provide evidence that neutrinos do exhibit the suspected asymmetry, potentially explaining why the universe is dominated by matter instead of antimatter. "

This is  kind of like someone saying, "My photo published today of triangular marks in the mud provides no evidence of extraterrestrial creatures; however if it is proven in the future that there are extraterrestrial visitors with triangle-shaped feet, then my photo published today potentially provides evidence of such creatures." 

In the article here, a Professor Yu speaks in a bungling way. We read,  "Professor Yu said, 'Given these results, we expect that next-generation neutrino research facilities such as Japan’s Hyper-Kamiokande or America’s DUNE will discover matter–antimatter asymmetry,' adding, 'We anticipate being able to understand why matter exists in overwhelmingly greater amounts than antimatter in the universe.' ”  But we already know that matter-asymmetry exists, so it makes no sense for Yu to be claiming that it will be discovered by the still-under-construction DUNE project. That's as silly as saying that you anticipate that some new project will discover that the sun exists. There is no basis whatsoever for the described "anticipation." The new paper describes 14 years of expensive neutrino search that failed to shed any light on why "matter exists in overwhelmingly greater amounts than antimatter in the universe."

We can describe the neutrino study projects listed above as "pigeonhole pet projects." That's because they are investigations of some topic of no interest to the general public, and only of interest to a very small number of physicists, such as neutrino specialists. If you are a scientist trying to get funding for one of these pigeonhole pet projects that are of no interest to 99% of the public, what sales strategy can you take? One strategy: try to make your little pigeonhole pet project sound like it has some relevance to some grand mystery that people are interested in. 

Dirty DUNE Is a Billion-Buck Boondoggle

The New York Times recently had a long story with this misleading headline: "Why the Big Bang Produced Something Rather Than Nothing."  The headline is baloney, because the story suggests no answer to this long-standing scientific problem. Nowadays bunk  clickbait headlines are frequently found in science news media, even in top-tier sources that we expect to be following better journalistic practices.

The story mentions some research on neutrinos, and tries to make it sound like maybe the research has some relevance to the long standing problem called the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem. Scientists believe that when two very high-energy photons collide, they produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and that when matter collides with antimatter, it is converted into high-energy photons. Such a belief is based on what scientists have observed in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are accelerated to near the speed of light before they collide with each other. But such conclusions about matter, antimatter and photons lead to a great mystery as to why there is any matter at all in the universe.

Let us imagine the early minutes of the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, when the density of the universe was incredibly great. At that time the universe should have consisted of energy, matter and antimatter. The energy should have been in the form of very high energy photons that were frequently colliding with each other. All such collisions should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. For example, a collision of high energy particles with sufficient energy creates a matter proton and an antimatter particle called an antiproton. So the amount of antimatter shortly after the Big Bang should have been exactly the same as the amount of matter. As a CERN page on this topic says, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe." But whenever a matter particle touched an antimatter particle, both would have been converted into photons. The eventual result should have been a universe consisting either of nothing but photons, or some matter but an equal amount of antimatter. But only trace amounts of antimatter are observed in the universe. A universe with equal amounts of matter and antimatter would have been uninhabitable, because of the vast amount of lethal energy released when even a tiny bit of matter comes in contact with a tiny bit of antimatter.

Nothing in the New York Times story mentions anything like a possible answer to this matter/antimatter asymmetry problem. There is merely a mention of some T2K experiment that suggests only very weakly that maybe there's a tiny bit of asymmetry involving the all-but-massless "ghost particles" called neutrinos. This isn't anything like a resolution of the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem.   The anomaly detected by the T2K experiment is only a three-sigma observation, which could easily be the result of mere chance.  A three-sigma event occurs by chance about 1 in 625 times. The rule-of-thumb in physics is that you don't call something a discovery unless it is a five-sigma event, which occurs by chance only about 1 in 3.5 million times. A five-sigma result is roughly 5000 times harder-to-get than a three sigma result.

Neutrinos are "bit players" in the physical drama of the universe, and make up very much less of the universe's mass than protons. That means it is extremely unlikely that the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem will be solved by studying neutrinos. 

But now scientists are proposing that we spend more than 1 billion dollars on a project called the DUNE project, to study asymmetry or oscillation issues in neutrinos. DUNE stands for Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. The cost of this project (which will be operational in 2027) will be between 1.2 billion dollars and 1.8 billion dollars, according to this document.  

They didn't get a convincing result from the massively expensive T2K experiment, so now our scientists want to spend more than a billion dollars on a whole other neutrino experiment.  The chance that anything terribly important will come from such an effort is very low. On its "Frequently Asked Questions" page, the web site of the DUNE project tries to answer the question, "Why is DUNE scientifically important?" It fails to answer that question in any remotely persuasive way.  It says, "DUNE aims to find out, for example, whether neutrinos are the key to solving the mystery of how the universe came to consist of matter rather than antimatter," but it gives no rationale for thinking that such a thing is true, and no explanation of how it might be discovered that such a thing is true.  There's a link to a video which also fails to explain any rationale for thinking that neutrinos could possibly be the explanation for the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem. 

Trying to play up the importance of neutrinos (which make up a vastly smaller fraction of the universe's mass than protons), the video makes the claim (at the 54 second mark) that neutrinos are "the most abundant matter particles in the universe."  Scientists actually believe that the amount of matter in protons is many times greater than the amount of matter in neutrinos, and that the most abundant matter substance in the universe is some other undiscovered type of matter called dark matter, which is believed to exist in vastly greater mass amounts than either protons or neutrinos. At an expert answers site, we read the following:

"The problem with neutrinos is that they are very light. There is no conceivable mechanism that would produce enough of them to make up a significant percentage of the total mass of the universe."

The DUNE project will probably end up being like the LIGO project, another billion-dollar boondoggle which has produced almost no astronomical results of any importance.  It has been claimed that by now the LIGO project has detected something like 50 examples of gravitational waves.   Some are not even sure that LIGO has actually detected gravitational waves.  Last year a physicist stated the following:

"The signals that LIGO and Virgo see are well explained by gravitational wave events. But we cannot be sure that these are actually signals coming from outer space and not some unknown terrestrial effect."

 Even if the LIGO detections are real gravitional waves from distant sources, they are of no great importance. None of these observations has done anything to change our understanding of the universe, or clarify any of the central problems of cosmology or astronomy.  The gravitational waves come only from rare freak events lasting only for the shortest times, events such as colliding black holes and colliding neutron stars. So LIGO has been a kind of sideshow of no great importance.  We might compare it to a billion-dollar project searching the world trying to track down all the cases of head-on collisions of tractor trailers, although such a project would probably be more useful than anything we learned from LIGO. 

LIGO cost American taxpayers more than a billion dollars. There was also a quite substantial environmental cost for constructing something like the two LIGO observatories, each an L-shaped unit stretching for 4000 meters.  All such massive construction projects contribute to global warming. Our scientists frequently lecture us about the importance of reducing global warming emissions. But when it comes to constructing gigantic boondoggle projects that contribute substantially to global warming, and produce only meager results,  our scientists raise no objections.

Like LIGO, the DUNE project will be very expensive in terms of its global warming cost. One of its detectors will be constructed more than a kilometer underground. That kind of deep digging has a high cost in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, and tends to create pollution in a variety of ways.  But you would never know that from a very misleading document that was filed, one claiming that this massive construction project will have "no significant impact," by which it means environmental impact.

Entitled "Finding of No Significant Impact and Floodplain Statement of Findings," the document tells us the following:

"Construction of the underground detector—necessary to eliminate cosmic radiation that could interfere with the detector—would require excavation and transportation of a large volume of rock. The rock would be transferred to either the Gilt Edge Superfund site, or to the Open Cut in Lead, a former surface mining pit that was part of the former Homestake Mine. Truck, conveyor and/or a rail system would be used. The Gilt Edge Superfund site is a highly disturbed former gold mine in Deadwood....Up to 950,000 cubic yards (yd³) of soils would be removed and re-used or stored on site. Up to 45,000 yd³ of rock would be excavated, but important geological resources would not be affected."

The document tells us that up to a million cubic yards of soil and rock would be excavated by the DUNE project, and much of it  transported and dumped at some pit or mine. This project has very obviously a very large environmental cost, including a very large global warming footprint. But contrary to all the facts it is stating, the document claims there will be "no significant impact" on the environment. It states that the DUNE construction project "would not individually or cumulatively have a significant effect on the quality of the human environment."  You might as well claim that leveling fifty city blocks in Manhattan would have no significant effect on the environment. 

The government web page below reminds us of one of the countless reasons why massive hard-rock removal projects and massive soil removal projects can have very big environmental impacts.  At the end of the yellow line shown below is where DUNE will be massively involved. 

The DUNE project is an environmentally reckless boondoggle "white elephant" project. Neutrinos are mere bit players in the physical makeup of the universe. There is no reason to think that the DUNE neutrino project will do anything to solve the great mystery of why the Big Bang did not yield a universe with equal amounts of matter protons and antimatter antiprotons, or nothing but photons arising from the combination of such antimatter and matter. And in the unlikely event that the scientists who work on the DUNE project ever happen to report some five-sigma event relating to neutrinos, we should be suspicious about  their reports.  Once a project has been born with the very misleading claim that digging a million cubic yards of soil and rock will have no significant environmental impact, then we should be suspicious about the accuracy of all further statements related to such a project. 

Let us imagine the best result that might happen from the DUNE project. There might be discovered some reason why the Big Bang should have produced more neutrinos (made of matter) than anti-neutrinos (made of antimatter). But it would be worth very little to know such a thing. What we are interested in knowing is not why the Big Bang might have produced some universe with only ghostly neutrinos as matter, but why the Big Bang left us with so many protons that are vastly more massive than neutrinos. The precise name for this problem is the baryon asymmetry problem.  It is the problem of why the observed number of baryons (protons and neutrons) in the universe is more than trillions of times greater than the number of antibaryons (antiprotons and antineutrons), contrary to what the Big Bang theory predicts. There is no hope that the baryon asymmetry problem can be solved by doing experiments with neutrinos, because neutrinos are not baryons.  There is no point at all in spending a billion dollars trying to establish why there might exist a universe with only neutrinos, because we don't live in such a universe.  There is a point in trying to figure out why we live in a universe with so many baryons.  But the DUNE project would do nothing to solve that problem. 

When "Dead End" Scientific Efforts Are Spun as Glorious Progress

One of the biggest unsolved mysteries of nature is the mystery of matter/antimatter asymmetry. Scientists believe that when two very high-energy photons collide, they produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and that when matter collides with antimatter, it is converted into high-energy photons. Such beliefs are based on what scientists have observed in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are accelerated to near the speed of light before they collide with each other. But such conclusions about matter, antimatter and photons leads to a great mystery as to why there is any matter at all in the universe.

Let us imagine the first minute of the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, when the density of the universe was incredibly great. At that time the universe should have consisted of a tightly packed density of energy, matter and antimatter. The energy should have been in the form of very high energy photons that were frequently colliding with each other. All such collisions should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. So the amount of antimatter should have been exactly the same as the amount of matter. As a CERN page on this topic says, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe." But whenever a matter particle touched an antimatter particle, both would have been converted into photons. The eventual result should have been a universe consisting either of nothing but photons, or some matter but an equal amount of antimatter. But instead we have a universe with lots of matter and only trace amounts of antimatter.

It would be incredibly inconvenient if matter and antimatter were equally distributed. So much energy is released when matter makes contact with antimatter that if there were large amounts of antimatter lying about, you'd have “oops, someone blew up Europe because he stepped on a tiny piece of antimatter” situations all over the place.

Scientists have made no progress in resolving this mystery of why we live in a universe in which matter is 1,000,000,000,000,000 times more common than antimatter.  But you'd never know this from reading recent press accounts. Such accounts have discussed  futile dead-ends pursued by scientists looking for answers about why we don't live in a universe that is all photons or half antimatter. But such dead-ends have been hailed as explanatory progress. 

An example is the recent misleading headline in Scientific American, a headline of "Physicists Come Closer to Answering Question of Antimatter’s Scarcity." No real progress was made in resolving the issue. The physicists merely found that an antihydrogen atom (a hydrogen atom consisting of antimatter) behaves the same way as a hydrogen atom, which is what was expected. We read this:

"Doing so allowed them to observe that in antihydrogen—which is composed of an antiproton and a positron, the electron’s antiparticle—jumps in energy levels known as the Lamb shift were identical to those seen in hydrogen. This symmetry rules out one of the possible answers to the matter-antimatter discrepancy."

There is nothing else of substance reported in the article. No real progress was made in resolving the question of why we live in a universe that isn't all photons or half antimatter, neither of which would be habitable.  You do not make progress in resolving some problem with limitless potential answers when you merely rule out one answer. If I spend a weekend pondering whether the meaning of life is crucially related to potato chips, and finally decide after 48 hours of deliberation that the meaning of life is not related to potato chips,  I have ruled out one possible answer; but this does not mean I have actually made progress in figuring out the meaning of life.  And, similarly, if you spend six months trying to create a high-voltage time machine, and finally conclude after six months that high voltage is not useful in making time machines, you are not entitled to claim that you have made any progress in making a time machine. 

A similar example of misleading spin is an article on the Science Daily web site. The title of the article is "Why is there any matter in the universe at all? New study sheds light."  Below this headline we have a subtitle of "Scientists one step closer to understanding the mystery of matter in the universe."   Below is a quote:

"After more than two decades of work by researchers at the University of Sussex and elsewhere, a final result has emerged from an experiment designed to address one of the most profound problems in cosmology for the last fifty years: namely, the question of why the Universe contains so much more matter than antimatter, and, indeed, why it now contains any matter at all. Why didn’t the antimatter cancel out all the matter? Why is there any matter left? ...The answer relates to a structural asymmetry that should appear in fundamental particles like neutrons. This is what we’ve been looking for. We’ve found that the 'electric dipole moment' is smaller than previously believed. This helps us to rule out theories about why there is matter left over – because the theories governing the two things are linked."

Of course, you have not made any actual progress in resolving some question with a near-infinite number of possible solutions when you merely exclude one or a few of those possible solutions. So scientists have not actually "shed light" on the mystery of matter's existence, or moved "a step closer" to solving such a mystery. Science Daily's unwarranted spin on this topic was repeated by other science web sites such as this one.  What's going on is that the science news web sites are all just uncritically parroting the spin from a university press release.  So the groundless claim of that press release ("Scientists one step closer to understanding the mystery of matter in the Universe" ) was mindlessly parroted all over the science news media.  This kind of thing goes on almost every day. University press releases very often make claims about research that are not warranted.  A scientific study found that 33% of university press releases contain "exaggerated causal claims." 

The Six Most Dangerous Plans of Mad Scientists

One of the stock characters of movies is the Mad Scientist. One of the first such characters in the annals of fiction was Doctor Frankenstein, and there have been many mad scientists since then in books, plays, and films. The term Mad Scientist can also be used for any real-life scientist who proposes some outrageous plan that is extremely dangerous. Let us now look at some of the very dangerous schemes that these daring scientific thinkers have proposed.

A book available on www.amazon.com

Geoengineering: Playing Dice with Our Climate

Geoengineering is the idea of doing large-scale monkeying with our planet's atmosphere to help reduce the effects of global warming. One plan calls for creating a vast armada of ships that will heat up sea water and shoot the steam or mist into the air, which will supposedly whiten clouds and increase cloud reflectivity, thereby reducing the amount of sunlight our planet absorbs.  Another plan calls for sending up into the atmosphere huge amounts of aluminum oxide particles.  Another plan calls for blocking sunlight by pulverizing asteroids, and inserting their dust into the atmosphere.  Then there's a plan for dumping millions of tons of iron particles into the ocean, in hopes that this will cause a huge surge in plankton, leading to a decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide when the plankton takes in carbon dioxide.

These plans are potentially very dangerous, because they might end up having some unexpected side effects that make our climate worse. The wikipedia.org article on geoengineering says, “There may be unintended climatic consequences, such as changes to the hydrological cycle including droughts or floods, caused by the geoengineering techniques, but possibly not predicted by the models used to plan them. Such effects may be cumulative or chaotic in nature, making prediction and control very difficult.”

Asteroid Mining: Be Careful, or Lose a Continent

The solar system is full of chunks of rock called asteroids. Asteroid mining is the proposal that we drag one of these metal-rich objects closer to our planet, and then start mining the rock for valuable metals.  Asteroid mining is an incredibly dangerous proposal, because of what might happen if astronauts tried to move a big asteroid closer to Earth, and the asteroid accidentally fell upon our planet. Scientists think that the dinosaurs were wiped out millions of years ago when an asteroid struck our planet.  If a ten-mile wide asteroid struck our planet, it would probably be enough to kill everyone on a continent. If a large enough asteroid struck Earth, so much dust would be raised in the air that almost everyone would die. So asteroid mining therefore qualifies as a Mad Scientist Plan.

Self-Reproducing Intelligent Robots: Would They Spare Us?

Some scientists are eager about the prospects of making intelligent robots. There has even been discussion about making such robots self-reproducing, so that they could make copies of themselves. Of course, great danger lurks in such a plan. If the robots were able to make copies of themselves, they could start reproducing at a rate far faster than the maximum rate that a human can reproduce. The end result might be something like a world of 20 billion robots and 8 billion people. The robots might then  decide that they don't need us, and take over the whole planet.

Turbocharged Flu

A scientist in the Netherlands has written a scientific paper describing how  the genome of the H5N1 flu strain can be modified to make it spread many times faster.  People are worried that if the details of the plan ever get out, the result could be a flu strain that kills hundreds of millions of people. 

Genetically Modified Humans

Some scientists are eager about the prospects of modifying human genes. Some thinkers want to just make modifications that will eliminate specific genetic-based diseases. Others want to make genetic modifications that will improve human characteristics such as height and intelligence. The problem with making modifications in human genes is that you can introduce subtle bugs in the human software which get propagated to more and more people as humans breed.  What if we find out 50 years later that some problem caused by genetic modification is causing millions to die of cancer? Unlike computer servers, there is no way to release a global software patch to millions of human beings.

Antimatter Spaceships: Oops, We Blew Up the Planet

Every type of atomic particle has an antiparticle with an opposite charge (for example, the electron is a negatively charged particle that has a positively charged antiparticle called a positron). Antiparticles are normally very short-lived, lasting much less than a second.  Antimatter is a  type of matter consisting of antiparticles. So far scientists have only been able to create tiny amounts of antimatter, but some scientists think that one day we could accumulate a huge amount of antimatter, and use it to power a spaceship. The reason why antimatter is attractive as a potential rocket fuel is that when matter is combined with antimatter, fantastic amounts of energy are released (much more than the energy released by the most powerful nuclear bomb).

However, the same reason why antimatter is so good as a rocket fuel makes it a deadly hazard. If a small amount of antimatter were to accidentally explode, it would create an explosion so vast that it could destroy our planet. So the scheme to create antimatter spaceships may be the ultimate Mad Scientist Plan.