Electric Sun & Solar Neutrinos II
Haig has given us a very long post (
#1168 in this thread) which is as usual filled with cut & paste, in which he expresses great confidence, but is in fact mostly wrong. I can't deal with so much in any realistic fashion; after all, it is so much easier to cut & paste without thought than it is to explain why the material presented is in fact just plain wrong. Here I will deal with the neutrino data.
and falsify interpretation of neutrino observations that support the high core temperature. This will be harder done than said, because all of the theory & observations I have mentioned here are rooted in very fundamental physics.
Clearly, although the fusion model is beloved by its advocates, an objective analysis of
the Sudbury and MiniBooNE experiments reveal that the missing neutrino problem still remains very far from being solved. And unless it is, the fusion model stands completely falsified. Don Scott
http://www.electric-cosmos.org/sudbury.htm
Nice try, but Don Scott is not just wrong, but actually
backwards. In fact the
MiniBooNE experiments are consistent with, and therefore confirmatory of the other neutrino experiments, not in contradiction to them as claimed here. But explaining all this requires that the whole story be told in some detail and I will set out to do that here.
Reference my own earlier posts
Electric Sun & Nuclear Fusion I &
Electric Sun & Nuclear Fusion II and in particular my own webpage
Solar Fusion and Neutrinos for background information, especially regarding neutrino physics, and publications that I do not reference here.
There are three types of neutrinos: electron, muon and tauon along with three matching anti-neutrinos. Nuclear reactions inside the Sun produce only electron neutrinos. The early experiments designed to detect solar neutrinos were sensitive only to electron neutrinos and they counted too few neutrinos to be consistent with expectations of any physically reasonable solar model. Later experiments designed to be sensitive to all 3 types of neutrinos detected a sum total over all 3 types that is equal to the total number of electron neutrinos expected from the Sun (within the limits of experimental uncertainty, a fact which I will not repeat but is obviously a necessary consequence of any experiment). These observations are consistent with the previously established theory of neutrino oscillation, which tells us that neutrinos in the presence of a mass density can "oscillate" from one type into another. In the case of solar neutrinos, the oscillation is from the electron type into either muon or tauon type. Furthermore, the observation of a day-night asymmetry in the solar neutrino observations is consistent with the motion of the Sun (confirming that they are indeed solar in origin), and consistent with the theory of neutrino oscillation through the mass density of the Earth. Note that this is a completely mutually consistent collection of theory and observational data, in particular confirmatory of the oscillation of solar electron neutrinos into muon or tauon neutrinos.
Meanwhile, data from the Liquid Scintillating Neutrino Detector (
LSND) seem to show oscillation of tauon anti-neutrinos into electron anti-neutrinos (
Aguilar, et al., 2001). In this paper it is clearly stated that ... "
it is difficult to explain the solar neutrino deficit, the atmospheric neutrino anomaly, and the LSND excess of events with only three flavors of neutrinos, so that a fourth, sterile neutrino has been proposed to explain all the data." This statement underlines a very important point: Experimental data have to be interpreted in the context of theoretical expectations. If we stick to our standard 3 neutrino types, then there is a problem making all of the data mutually consistent. However, if we modify the theory (e.g., add a fourth type of neutrino) then all of the data can become mutually consistent.
Scott & Haig are both telling us that the MiniBooNE data are absolutely inconsistent with the Sudbury data, ignoring the obvious fact that this claim depends explicitly on theoretical context. Add a fourth type of neutrino to your theory, and in fact the inconsistency vanishes. Of course, they also ignored the fact that LSND experiment studies the oscillation of tauon anti-neutrinos into electron anti-neutrinos, while the Sudbury experiment deals exclusively with the oscillation of electron neutrinos into tauon and/or muon neutrinos. There is no overlap in the data type between these experiments. Since they share no commonality in data, then they can be compared with each other only in the context of some theory. So once again, the Scott & Haig claim requires a theoretical context to make any sense at all, and they do not present any such theory, therefore their claims are devoid of value.
The MiniBooNE experiment was designed specifically to test the LSND claim. The initial results, those to which Scott & Haig refer, appear in
Laha & Vempati, 2007 and in
Tanaka, et al.., 2007. The MiniBooNE experiment tests for oscillations of muon anti-neutrinos into electron anti-neutrinos. Note that LSND studies the different path of tauon anti-neutrinos into electron anti-neutrinos, so once again a theoretical context is required to compare the data between LSND & MiniBooNE, since they share no common data type. In particular, see the
MiniBooNE publications page and scroll down to the PhD theses by Monroe (2007) and Aguilar-Arevalo (2008) which will supply all of the gory details you will need. These initial MiniBooNE data do not show any sign of oscillations of muon anti-neutrinos into electron anti-neutrinos.
The Scott/Haig approach to interpreting what has happened thus far is weak at best. They claim that the conflict between these experiments (which deal exclusively with
anti-neutrinos) is a critical blow to any claim that neutrinos actually oscillate. But what we actually have is a large collection of experiments which show positive signs for neutrino oscillations and
one experiment that does not. Does common sense support the idea that this one experiment must overrule and falsify all of the other experiments, even though they do not even share a common data type? I don't think so. Remember my comments above about sterile neutrinos and theoretical context.
In reality, the situation was/is rather more confused than Scott or Haig realize.
Maltoni & Schwetz, 2007 analyze the MiniBooNE & LSND data, along with other reactor neutrino oscillation experiments and come up with some interesting findings. First, if the MiniBooNE & LSND data are ignored, then all other neutrino oscillation experiments are easily compatible with the standard 3 types of neutrinos. Adding 1 or 3 extra "sterile" neutrinos to the theoretical mix does not help to make MiniBooNE & LSND more compatible and may even make things worse. However, by adding 2 extra "sterile" neutrinos to the theoretical mix the MiniBooNE & LSND data now mesh together quite nicely and are not incompatible, but it does cause some internal tension with the MiniBooNE data set. This just serves to emphasize the role of theoretical context in deciding how to interpret experimental data. This also shows us that sometimes we can't reach definitive conclusions in science. Sometimes we are stuck with conflicts between data sets, and that's where we sand here, with a conflict that needs to be addressed. Scott's way of resolving the conflict is to
assume that his preconception is correct, while more objective scientists try to resolve the conflict by examining every aspect of both theory and experiment and letting logic and data lead the way rather than preconception. That is what wed do here, and we will be rewarded with some success for this effort.
The final chapter of my neutrino story comes in the form of a press release from Fermi National Laboratory dated 18 June 2010:
MiniBooNE results suggest antineutrinos act differently. The old standard theory of neutrinos assumed that they had no rest mass, but neutrino oscillation requires that neutrinos have a rest mass, so that part of the theory has been modified, and much of the neutrino oscillation research ongoing today is intended to seek out the proper neutrino rest mass. But theory continued to hold that neutrinos and anti-neutrinos oscillated in the same manner. However, the latest MiniBooNE results imply that this is not the case, that the theory is in error and anti-neutrinos oscillate differently than do neutrinos. This is a very important result. Says the press release: "
Earlier this week, after nearly three years of running in antineutrino mode, MiniBooNE collaborators announced that they had obtained a result consistent with the findings from LSND. In fact, analyzing the data in the context of a standard two neutrino mixing model favors an LSND-like signal at a 99.4 percent confidence level." These results are presented in the paper
Aguilar-Arevalo, et al., 2010 which has been published in Physical Review Letters. This paper also reviews the history of the relationship between LSND and MiniBooNE data.
Scott's criticism, cut & pasted by Haig was based on initial results from MiniBooNE, misinterpreted by Scott to mean that there was no sign of neutrino oscillation. However, the correct interpretation is that there was (and still is) no sign of anti-neutrino oscillation in the theoretically expected energy range. But the current MiniBooNE data does show anti-neutrino oscillation at lower energies, which are consistent with the LSND data, which also showed anti-neutrino oscillation at lower energies. So the LSND and MiniBooNE data are mutually consistent, replacing the assumption of new neutrino types with the assumption that anti-neutrinos oscillate differently from neutrinos (the latter assumption being better supported by the data).
The Bottom Line
Haig supports Scott's claim that the MiniBooNE data implying no neutrino oscillations casts serious doubt on LSND data that does show evidence of neutrino oscillation. But that claim of Scott's was never reasonable in the first place, since it ignored all of the solar neutrino data and ignored the potentially serious difference between the oscillation of neutrinos and anti-neutrinos. We now know that the latest MiniBooNE data, as of July 2010, do in fact show anti-neutrino oscillation and are in fact consistent with, and not contrary to, the LSND anti-neutrino oscillation data. Therefore an objective analysis concludes that the Haig/Scott claim stands falsified.
This is a necessarily complicated story laced with neutrino physics jargon that is hard to get around and I hope I have managed to tell the story in a comprehensible fashion. In any case, it is important to always understand that science is a moving target. Scott saw a result he liked, and simply stuck with it. But while Scott stood still, frozen by prejudice, science moved on, and the result in which he placed so much confidence was in fact negated and reversed by later data. Scott's failure to research his own claim has nothing to do with a lack of funding or support; it took me an hour or two to do all the research to write this post (which took much longer than the research), using public archives, in a field of physics about which I know very little. Scott is supposed to be a professional, but he does not act like a professional and makes too many simplistic and lazy mistakes to be considered trustworthy.
As of now, the solar neutrino data stand without any serious criticism by anyone, and therefore the theory that the Sun is powered by internal nuclear fusion reactions also stands without any valid scientific opposition.
