So, according to basic Ant-Man theory, if I were hit by one of these, it should be like getting all that (10% of a) ping pong ball energy concentrated in a tiny spot, causing me to fly backwards across the room?

I would expect it to be more likely to punch through skin than to actually propel you.

But also neutrinos don't typically collide with things very easily, they're more likely to pass through you without you ever knowing.

I was thinking the same though. It doesn't interact often, but if it randomly does annihilate with another particle in your body, at such a small scale (subatomic) that force/pressure just destroys anything in its path no? Like a paint flake hitting a space ship. Or is it more like "light" (since they're iirc their own antiparticle), which is then absorbed by surrounding matter and turns into heat?

In the wrong spot, this sounds to me like it kills you?

Nothing to be afraid of, of course, for the reason you mentioned. Just wondering, xkcd "what if" style

Yeah there's no way it would be able to grip onto anything, probably more like the Bugorski case, where he stuck his head into a particle accelerator and a proton beam went right through his head.

Isn't Ant-Man logic that he still has the same mass when he shrinks and, as such, can generate the same force?

Unless you get thrown back by ping pong balls normally, I think you'd be fine.

And yet when he grows he still has enough strength to punch a leviathan out of the sky. I'm not sure there's such thing as ant man logic - It doesn't seem like it should result in strength both ways.

His weight also changes with size, or doesnt, depending on what would be more convenient for the current scene

One of the lead researchers in KM3NeT mentioned that the particle was emitting 2 horse power in light during detector transit. A typical body builder expends about 1 horse power while performing, so its 2 body builders in a single particle.

> typical body builder expends about 1 horse power while performing

Close, but ackshually...

Bodybuilders just oil up and pose in beauty pageants.

1 horsepower is basically one 250-pound bench press in one second. (550 foot pounds of work; the aforementioned bench press assumes a 2.2-foot stroke length.)

Most bodybuilders and serious weight lifters can do that, but they can't keep it up for long.

So the neutrino is just doing a PB 1RM?

Ha, that made me laugh, thanks for the correction!

Neither could this neutrino.

Fun fact, a typical horse exerts about 1 horse power of usable work while performing. That's so weird, I'm sure almost no one would've been able to guess that - but it's true.

(To be clear, that's sustained effort over time, not just momentary. Athletically trained humans can do about 1 HP of peak momentary effort, and around 0.3 HP if sustained over time.)

And a horse can do quite a bit more in peak as well— 1 HP is definitely meant to be the long term continuous output of a typical horse under load, especially a consistent load such as turning a millstone.

That's an all-day number. Peak HP/horse is somewhere in the 6-15 range.

Track cyclists (sprinters, world class) do 2KW+ peak for a few seconds at a time. That's potentially ~3HP. (and while doing so, average more than 70kph over a 200m distance)

The funny thing is that a typical horse probably has closer to 2 or 3 horsepower and a big chonkin draft horse up to 4 or 5 times.

James Watt just picked the smallest possible value of horse when defining the unit so he could sell more steam engines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qxTKtlvaVE (donut, How Much Horsepower is a Horse?)

It must have been a very short amount of time. 2 HP is 1,500 watts, probably more light than all lightbulbs in my house combined.

The muon traverses a few hundred meters of detection volume very close to the speed of light, so in the order of one microsecond.

1500 watts is about what an electric kettle uses.

American kettles. Kettles in hard core countries push 2300 to 2400 watts ;-)

Slow-boiled water gives superior flavor!

Keeps the midichlorians from jumping out.

I always cook my water sous-vide

Meh, Lidl sells 3200w kettles.

Where are the three phase models??

Seriously though, a 15A kettle sounds great.

Photonicinduction's 10-second kettle[1] managed about 10kW max (took around 5s to boil water) for a short time, 440V 23A. Then the resistance dropped, it went up to 16kW (426V 33A) and popped. 7-8kW (375V 19A to 400V 20A) seemed more sustainable.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDLw1Rx_cAI

2500W on 240V, single phase AC, 16A, German 'Schuko'-plug is normal. Or was. Some EU-regulation limits that to 2000, or even 1500W only now, for new devices, or something.

Don't care. Still have the old ones, and whatever the electrician wired as '120V 3-phase AC' for the full US-style range in the US.

UK 240V with 13A sockets, 3120W. Sounds like Lidl are rounding up.

American stove startups can do it in 40 seconds with ??? watts by precharging a battery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdawGen0QPc

Can we harvest that energy?

This particle spread this energy through a volume of seawater a few km deep in the Mediterranean. It's going to raise the temperature of that volume a few billionths of a degree, if that. So, no, we can't.

What if our existing solar panels are optimized to detect these? Then will it improve the quality of solar panels to capture more energy from sunlight as well? Sorry, I'm no expert in this - asking more of a curiosity.

If we had the ability to detect neutrinos in such a small volume as a solar panel they’d be immensely valuable for communication - we’d be able to beam signals directly through the Earth, or through deep water.

Following that same line, if we had that ability, it would be useful for communicating to deep submarines like the U.S. used to do with Project Sanguine[0] and ELF waves :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sanguine

It's an enormous amount of energy packed into a single tiny particle.

But it's still just a single tiny particle, so it's not a lot of total energy.

It's like how you can lift a heavy weight for a second, but that's all you can do. You would need to be able to lift it for hours to be useful as a replacement for a crane. Same idea: Intensity vs total work.

Neutrinos interact extremely weakly with ordinary matter, which is why the detectors are typically huge volumes of water. Even then, the neutrinos interact with the purpose-built detectors on the order of one in a trillion. A neutrino power generator is not a feasible thing to build.

Unless you're next to an exploding star, in which case you have other problems/opportunities.

There's nothing to optimize here, neutrinos just interact very very weakly with anything else because they don't carry charge (so no electrical interactions), don't carry color charge (so no nuclear interactions), don't carry weak charge (so no weak force interactions) and have tiny tiny masses, but they are still bosons (so don't act as field carriers like photons do, they're just regular matter). Their low chance of interacting with matter is a fundamental property of them, there's nothing you can do about it through technology, just like you can't create heavier electrons or weaker quarks.

> don't carry weak charge (so no weak force interactions)

Left neutrino have weak hypercharge, so they are produce by weak interactions and are detected using the weak interaction. And also gravity.

Right neutrinos (if they exist) have no weak hypercharge so they only interact by gravity.

Thanks for the correction!

It might improve the quality of neutrino astronomy to have the world's solar panels also be neutrino detectors.

Not for that particular neutrino, it's gone. But yes, my home (and yours) is being heated by neutrino power as we speak. It's not a significant enough amount of energy to make a dent in the utility bill however.

Most inefficient thermal power plant possible: utilize the difference in neutrino flux between the hemisphere that's open to space vs. the hemisphere where Earth is in the way.

But now I'm wondering what percentage of the useful thermal power in a nuclear power plant is produced by the neutrinos created in the reactions (the infinitesimally small fraction that happen to interact with the matter within the reactor, that is).

On the contrary, it would have to be efficient indeed to do anything useful underneath all of the shielding that we'd need to keep those baser forms of radiation at bay. Gamma rays: yuck.

Particle on steroids.

So, 2,000 milliSchwarzeneggers if we use SI units?

Yes, but please observe SI rules [1]: it's millischwarzeneggers.

> This means that they should be typeset in the same character set as other common nouns (e.g. Latin alphabet in English, Cyrillic script in Russian, etc.), following the usual grammatical and orthographical rules of the context language. For example, in English and French, even when the unit is named after a person and its symbol begins with a capital letter, the unit name in running text should start with a lowercase letter (e.g., newton, hertz, pascal) and is capitalised only at the beginning of a sentence and in headings and publication titles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#...

Now, what will happen if you get hit by a ping-pong ball mass of 120 PeV neutrinos? 120 PeV is about 2e-16 grams, so a ping-pong ball will have about 1e16 of them.

From nothing, to detectable, to lethal, to big boom?

My intuition would be "detectable" but I don't know enough to do the maths.

And by the way, I am using the mass-energy, not proper mass, because the question is crazy enough not to even consider what would be the mass of a neutrino.

The mean free path of neutrinos through lead is around one light-year. So, taking the thickness of the body to be 1/2 a meter, you would expect the probability of any individual neutrino to interact with the body to be ~5 x 10^-17. So you'd ballpark have around a 20--40% chance that a single neutrino interacts with your body. It would probably cause a localized radiation burn. Detectable, but probably not lethal unless you got really unlucky with where it hit you.

The mean free path of much lower energy neutrinos in lead is about a light year.

The MFP of a 120 PeV neutrino in lead would be something like 10 kilometers, I think.

More like 100 km I'd think but yeah, the neutrino nucleon cross section gets much bigger at high energies

Total energy of impact would be 120 PeV x 10^16 = 120 x 10^31 eV = ~60 kilotons TNT, or 4 Hiroshimas.

So BIG boom.

Since the velocity is so close to the speed of light, you can think of this like the energy released by annihilating a ping pong ball made of antimatter.

Edit: Commenter asked what would happen if they "hit", so I'm assuming a hypothetical 100% collision. But yes to stop 1/e of a neutrino beam with normal matter, you'd need a light year of lead.

Sounds like a great topic for an xkcd video

There is a what if about it. https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/

> big boom

The probability of interaction of neutrinos with matter increases with the energy. I've asked o1 to estimate the mean free path of a 120 PeV neutrino in water and it came up with 1000km. So let's say, conservatively, that 10^-7 of the total energy gets deposited in your body when the beam goes through. The mass equivalent of a ping pong ball is about 2.5x10^14 J, which gives us 2.5x10^7 J total, or about 6kg TNT equivalent. This is only an order-of-magnitude estimate, but it would definitely not be healthy.

Right, and it is this amount of energy in a single particle. A ping-pong ball is comprised of who-knows-how-many billions of particles, so the energy of any one particle is a fraction of the whole.

A ping pong ball would be roughly 2 trillion trillion atoms, for reference

Does this count as "Americans will measure with anything but the metric system"?

No, it is called giving context.

Does this count of “non-American’s online will take any opportunity to shit on America”?

Are you implying that people who use the metric system have an intuitive sense of what 120 PeV means?

There's interesting "end of life" scenario. Nearby supernova exploding and sending so many high energetic neutrinos that even with their rare interactions they could mess up all chemistry that biology uses. And you wouldn't be able to shelter from it since the whole planet is basically transparent to them.

120 PeV is 0.020 of a Joule, or 20 milliwatt-seconds.

the way I play ping pong (holding the paddle like an ice cream stick)? or the way a professional ping pong player plays (which probably means they are serving aces on me all day)?