Nearly 100 years after being theorized, the strange behavior of the neutrino still mystifies us. They could be even stranger than we know.
Here in the 21st century, there’s a lot that we’ve uncovered about our Universe that, a mere century ago, would have been mind boggling. Sure, we already knew about General Relativity, the existence of subatomic particles, knowledge of radioactivity, and the beginnings of quantum mechanics. But we had yet to discover the expanding Universe and reveal the Big Bang, to recognize that the fields as well as the particles composing the Universe quantum in nature, or to learn that protons were composed of still smaller, more fundamental entities: the quarks and gluons. The big puzzles of today, including dark matter, dark energy, and the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry, could hardly have been fathomed at the time.
But as we continued to investigate the nature of reality through many different avenues:
- through laboratory experiments with radioactive materials,
- through cosmic ray experiments done first with hot air balloons and later, from space itself,
- through underground, well-shielded experiments surrounded…
