https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
Mechanism is via conversion of neutrinos into charged particles which are then detected via Cherenkov radiation which is produced when a charged particle moves with speeds larger then the speed of light in the medium. (That is only possible because it is less than the speed of light in vacuum which cannot be exceeded.)
This was also discussed recently if you are interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655286
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=south+pol...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pole_Traverse
https://octanepress.com/content/south-pole-traverse_antartic...
Significant amounts of things still come in by air cargo at great cost, but a lot also comes the long slow way.
So, the US/NSF is like "we have a bunch of money to do science, but it has to be at the south pole". People like Halzen who had a crazy idea go to NSF and say how can I get a bunch of money to do this. NSF says, we don't have that kind of money in our physics budget, but if you were to do it at the southpole we could fund it.
Thanks, I had no idea this was possible!
It is the "phase velocity of light in that medium" that is exceeded.
phase velocity of light in a medium = speed of light / refractive index of the medium.
Thus the EM wave is slowed down in a medium and so a charged particle can exceed it producing Cherenkov radiation. This is similar to a sonic boom in atmosphere when speed of sound is exceeded. In both cases the object is traveling faster than the wavefront.
It is only in vacuum that "phase velocity of light" = "group velocity of light" = c (i.e. 300,000 km/sec)
What really is the speed of light in a medium/vacuum, group or phase velocity? - https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/450377/what-real...
The deviation caused by uncertainty in the package arrival time is typically extremely short, but not zero, for finite signals.
The actual "entity" that is restricted to be <=c is "information velocity". An infinitely repeating pattern would have travel at (phase velocity)=c ... but would ironically transmit no actual information (the bit value is restricted to 1, not 0 or 1).
Why the pole specifically? You could probably build a second IceCube 100 miles away, but how are you going to get that materials there? Pole has a skiway for large aircraft and infrastructure to house a large number of people. The traverse (SPoT) only became operational near the end of construction - the initial holes were drilled in 2005 and almost everything had to be flown in.
Telescope In The Ice does a great job of explaining the history and science behind the experiment.
I'm personally very happy that we're still funding science that isn't obviously monetised.
The reason for Antarctica is that it's the only place you find cubic kilometres of stable ice that doesn't drift around.
1: Ice-mass that isn't contaminated by atomic testing fallout (if the ice has been there since the 40s it's without radioactive waste (faschinating to read about how WW2 wrecks is a prime resource of steel since it's a huge amount of steel without trace amounts of radionucletiods from testing fallout).
2: No current interference (nuclear power, radiowaves,etc) creating possible test uncertainties.
3: I'm sure there are other reasons
The negative naturally is cost, but since the expriment succeeded it will probably be useful for any attempts to send robots or even humanity into space beyond the solar system.
The US has a research station at Summit Station Greenland but compared to South Pole, it's spartan (like, the first time I went there, I slept in a tent because of lack of hard-sided berthing, but then a Polar bear came a few years later and now hard-sided berthing is required). There are longer-term plans to improve the station in Greenland but we'll see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Neutrino_Observatory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNO+
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-Kamiokande
There's a weird overlap in engineering and physics disciplines between the hard engineering/business practices of the mining industry, and particle physics.
I have been researching applications of FTL as well;
Where is there an actual vacuum on Earth or in microgravity? So, there are Proca waves within dielectric Proca metamaterials and plasmas and waveguides; and photons can have effective mass and/or longitudinal charge Ez in ionized plasma?
So, Maxwellian waves with no longitudinal (Ez,) component can exist in what fraction of the universe if they can only exist in a vacuum?
A Twistor model can model such;
I appreciate the boldness of this project, it has an element of sci-fi to it. Building a base at the south pole to bury sensors in ice to measure elusive particles. The stuff of dreams!
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory#/...
There are nearly 300 living laureates. Enough to hold a yearly meetup for them in Lindau, where usually about 40 gather. This year, for the event's 75th anniversary, there were even about 70. Imagine that.
IIRC Oppenheimer facilitated / sponsored a meeting there after the Manhattan Project, as a gathering where physicists could talk freely about physics for a change.
[1]: https://icecube.wisc.edu/collaboration/meet-the-collaboratio...
For better or worse the prize can only go to 3 people. Over the years there are generally many dozens of people who make absolutely critical contributions to these kinds of experiments. In this case, though, the same guy was listed as the PI of the UW Madison group, and Madison is very clearly "the" operator of the project.
Halzen is by any measure an awesome physicist, but he's also a good "fit" for the Nobel because of this unique situation.
https://science.nasa.gov/image-article/apod-2011-february-13...
I romanticized that kind of work, but I think my limit is roughly what you said at around 2 weeks. The novelty wears off. Especially because I miss my kids a lot after a few days.
Actually, another big one: I love cooking. When you eat what you're given and don't have a choice, even if the food is pretty good it's kind of... I don't know... I really just want to go home and make something that is distinctly 'my food', something I would only have at home.
Even so, I absolutely love field work. The stuff I do is nowhere near as crazy as the Antarctic. I'm typically on the semi-remote islands of the British Columbia coast. My wife goes to the Arctic; her experience is probably more like yours. Lots of time isolated on icebreakers. Occasionally visiting remote navy or military bases, though. Some indigenous communities. Not as middle-of-nowhere as the Antarctic! The longest she has done is 7 weeks, with ~4 days off of the ship.
Not right now though! https://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/spwebcam.cfm
Anyway, I'd love to do it again
While there is some romantic imagery (penguins!) down there, and the disconnect from the rest of the world might be appealing, for large parts of the year you’re just stuck inside.
Francis isn't the first Nobel Prize winner I've crossed paths with. But I think he's the only one I'd call a "decent human being". (When I use it, that phrase has a meaning roughly comparable to "nontrivial", so, saying it is nontrivial.) He was well enough liked by faculty and students during my time at UW-Madison.
It's important to note that he's not getting the prize for "conceiving of IceCube" like some people are saying. It's for "conceiving of IceCube and somehow actually making it happen". The latter is the achievement.
Congratulations.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/why-the-neu...
One of my primary disagreements with my friends and colleagues was based on their insistence that opposing a new facility was anti-science and only done by the "uneducated". IMO, while this was true for a small subset of opposing factions, there were often real reasons for not building which took realities outside research into consideration.
What? Since when does even the Nobel Institute themselves proclaim that economics of all things is as much part of the pantheon of science as fundamental physics, the same economics that was deliberately added to that list by the same powers that made free-trade economics the only allowed form within catholic economics, the same powers that funded research and shaped policy worldwide to first normalize neoliberalism and then to turn it into the only orthodoxy in economics, that prize that is actually the mundane "Bank of Sweden Economics Prize" is not only mentioned, it is treated as part of the holy set (of actually five) by the institute themselves?!
One thing I noticed was that more than a few were seriously sick in childhood and had to be homeschooled. This includes Edward Morley, Peter Higgs, René Descartes (though I'm not sure how rare it was at his time), and the mathematician Julia Robinson, who was bedridden with scarlet fever at 9 years old, then had to get tutoring to catch back up, and had this to say about it [2]:
> I have since read that a solitary childhood or, what amounts to the same thing, a period of isolation resulting from an illness is frequently noted in the early lives of scientists. I am not sure what the significance of this finding is. Obviously I had to amuse myself for long periods of time, but I didn’t do so with mathematics. I am inclined to think that what I learned during that year in bed was patience.
> By the time I was well enough to go back to school, I had missed more than two years. My parents arranged to have me tutored by a retired elementary school teacher. In one year, working three mornings a week, she and I went through the state syllabuses for the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It makes me wonder how much time must be wasted in classrooms.
Sidenote: I found the book [1] through asking a free LLM what source this quote might be referring to. They are reasonably good at this kind of literature search, especially because it's easy to judge whether they gave you something useful.
[1] https://archive.org/details/cradlesofeminenc0000goer_l9f8/pa...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20181207045746/https://www.maa.o...
Indeed, "in-spiraling" seems more like a one-man discovery (or has more of a chance to become one) than many (not all, obv) nobel prize winning work
The mechanism for which Higgs was awarded was also independently discovered by at least ten other people (I can't count)
>The Higgs mechanism is therefore also called the Brout–Englert–Higgs mechanism, or Englert–Brout–Higgs–Guralnik–Hagen–Kibble mechanism,[9] Anderson–Higgs mechanism,[10] Anderson–Higgs–Kibble mechanism,[11] Higgs–Kibble mechanism by Abdus Salam[12] and ABEGHHK'tH mechanism (for Anderson, Brout, Englert, Guralnik, Hagen, Higgs, Kibble, and 't Hooft)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_mechanism
Can't wait for OpenAI to get the nobel prize; Swedes are more sympathetic than mathematicians!! (so that human beings might completely separate discovery from reward/awards/recognition. Discovery is a human right!!!)
This question in the field of "general problem-solving" (inventions etc.) was investigated by studying patent literature by Genrich Altshuller in the former Soviet Union and systematized as TRIZ - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ
Theory of inventive problem solving' is a methodology which combines an organized, systematic method of problem-solving with analysis and forecasting techniques derived from the study of patterns of invention in global patent literature.
TRIZ developed from a foundation of research into hundreds of thousands of inventions in many fields to produce an approach which defines patterns in inventive solutions and the characteristics of the problems which these inventions have overcome.
See also my older comment for more resources - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45976697
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_astronomy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_neutrino_background
In other words: we already have lots of things that measure photons. You see things on two totally different media it's a lot more compelling than just one.
Or we can all just think big thoughts at the same time... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calling_Occupants_of_Interplan...
Also, if you're sending out photons from a planet, chances are there's a local star nearby. Stars tend to be a broad-spectrum photon source, which is going to make it tough for receivers to decode the intentional signal.
I don't see academia shouting at every street corner to think about all this brain implant craze because there are people who are being tortured for years remotely using brain implants and other invasive techniques. Zero word from academia 'bout that. Oh, wait, yeah, history shows the crazy psychos from the intel agencies doing terror on human subjects on unimaginable scale were recruiting from the academia. Yeah, okay, plenty critical thought by the academia when nothing has been done to prevent that from happening again.
I guess they're all compliant now, as there's no real pushback for using remotely controlled terrorists with brain and body implants to wreak havoc on the populace. Like I said, nobody asks any really hard questions anywhere.
Because, knowing little about physics, this strikes me as reasonably interesting work compared to the slop in my own field.
95% of faculty political donations in Cornell went to the Democrats. 98% in Princeton. Whereas 100% of billions of federal funds disbursed to all the universities comes from the tax base that's Republican as equal share. Is this not weaponization of education? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTBML_wEeSk)
Nobody cares about the Nobel Prize as anything more than a circle j*k anymore. Someone would even say a bunch of filth sell outs propping each other up.
That confused me for a moment so it seems worth clarifying: in ice, certain particles can travel faster than light does in ice.
I assume this is not a hard, totalizing law since it seems we're able to get samples of neutrino collisions in just a kilometer sized chunk of ice on Earth (meaning that the probability of collision is not absolutely zero and there's no way to know the full neutrino travelogue through the universe)
to put things to scale 1 ly is 9,460,730,472,580,800 meters, or 63,241.077 astronomical units, the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
Needless to say, it's pretty weakly interacting as far as interaction goes...
Identifying the origin let us see objects behind dust clouds or other obstacles.
How does this not violate conservation of momentum? Are you saying every single collision is head-on?
In other cases, the particle being collided is scattered and won't show up in the detector. Low energy neutrino collisions also have very faint light and difficult to detect. Solar system produced neutrinos are in this category.
- In the beginning, for the first couple of events, only because they have way higher energies than anything in the solar system could produce - By now, with enough data collected, their origin correlates very well with the milky way - we are close to identifying several far away galaxies as well
This is the significance. Contrary to some statements published today, IceCube was not primarily built to study Neutrinos, it was built to study the universe using Neutrinos.
That's why we care where they are coming from, we want to learn about the astrophysical objects that produce them.
[1] https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/07/the-surreal-world-of-n...
[2] https://news.cnrs.fr/videos/detecting-neutrinos-at-the-botto...