Each year, the Nobel Prize awards people with outstanding contributions for humanity in chemistry, literature, peace, physiology or medicine, and physics. This year the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics to Takaaki Kajita from Japan and Arthur B. McDonald from Canada “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass.” Their discovery was announced to be a historic discovery for particle physics. After a various amount of experiments and calculations, neutrinos were considered massless; however, after years of working Dr. Kajita and Dr. McDonald have come to the conclusion that neutrinos are capable of changing their identities, or flavors, and therefore they must
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It is also the second most fundamental particles that make up the universe, after photons. Neutrinos come in three different flavors: electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino. These neutral charged particles were first postulated by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to explain how beta decays conserve energy; he called these particles “neutron”. In 1931, an Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, renamed the term neutron “neutrinos”, which means small and neutral in Italian. The majority of neutrinos in the galaxy are known to be appeared around 15 billion years ago, and they can be found everywhere in the galaxy. There are trillions of neutrinos floating through our bodies every second. Aside from radioactive decays, other neutrinos are also being produced from nuclear power station, particle accelerators, nuclear bombs, and also during the births and deaths of stars. Because neutrinos move nearly as fast as the speed of light and its weak interactions with matter, early experiments could not calculate the mass of neutrinos accurately. For several years, detecting and calculating the mass of neutrinos was a struggle for many scientists, and the Standard Model of Physics had predicted that neutrinos were massless. However, Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald’s discoveries resolved this mystery that helped them win the Nobel Prize. Their discovery is known to change “our understanding of
It is also the second most fundamental particles that make up the universe, after photons. Neutrinos come in three different flavors: electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino. These neutral charged particles were first postulated by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930 to explain how beta decays conserve energy; he called these particles “neutron”. In 1931, an Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, renamed the term neutron “neutrinos”, which means small and neutral in Italian. The majority of neutrinos in the galaxy are known to be appeared around 15 billion years ago, and they can be found everywhere in the galaxy. There are trillions of neutrinos floating through our bodies every second. Aside from radioactive decays, other neutrinos are also being produced from nuclear power station, particle accelerators, nuclear bombs, and also during the births and deaths of stars. Because neutrinos move nearly as fast as the speed of light and its weak interactions with matter, early experiments could not calculate the mass of neutrinos accurately. For several years, detecting and calculating the mass of neutrinos was a struggle for many scientists, and the Standard Model of Physics had predicted that neutrinos were massless. However, Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald’s discoveries resolved this mystery that helped them win the Nobel Prize. Their discovery is known to change “our understanding of