338 | Ryan Patterson on the Physics of Neutrinos

Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. These days in particle physics, in quantum field theory, in the attempt to understand the universe at its deepest levels, as you know, if you've been listening to this podcast, we have this great theory, the standard model of particle physics, but we also have plenty of reasons to believe that the standard model is not the final answer. It doesn't play well with gravity, it doesn't explain dark matter. It gives us a bunch of sort of tempting clues that somehow there should be grander unification of some sort.

So there's all sorts of reasons to go beyond the standard model, to invent new particles and new properties. And indeed, there's lots of papers out there in the scientific literature where people propose new particles. I've proposed new particles. I don't know many of my friends in the theoretical physics world who haven't proposed a new particle or two. But back in the day, long ago, uh the standards were different.

You know, when physics a hundred years ago was going on, there was so much data that we had that hadn't been explained by theory yet, that people weren't just proposing new particles just for the heck of it. They would wait until they really were forced to do that. by some experimental phenomenon. A great example of this, of course, is the neutrino. The idea of the neutrino was proposed around 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli because there was this known phenomenon, namely beta decay.

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