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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)?
