There is no rest for the wicked

Neutrinos are wicked. Of that there can be no doubt. They simply refuse to obey the rules that physicists have laid down for them. Physicists pray for them at mass three times a day, but they refuse to be seen with mass. They refuse to rest, but are always gadding about at (almost) the speed of light, going straight through (almost) everything without stopping, and are very hard to catch. If you want to catch a neutrino, you have to build a huge tank of dry-cleaning fluid (or something else containing lots of chlorine) underground, and wait a long time for one to show up, among all the zillions that whizz straight through the tank without even saying hello. Even then, you never see the neutrino, all you see is the reaction of one of the chlorine atoms when it gets hit.

Neutrinos are produced in nuclear reactions, and physicists have worked out exactly how the nuclear reactions in the sun work, and so they worked out exactly how many neutrinos the sun should produce, and exactly how many they should detect in their tanks of chlorine (or whatever it was – it may have been xenon). And how many did they find? One-third as many as they predicted. Oops. Experiment says theory is wrong. Theory says, wait a minute, we’ll change the theory. Hmmm. Dangerous move, that. But they changed the theory.

You see, neutrinos come in three versions, like triplets, and just so you can tell them apart, one of them wears a red jumper, one wears a blue jumper and one wears a green jumper. The neutrinos produced in the sun should all have been wearing red jumpers, so the experiment looked for the red jumpers. But it turns out that the neutrinos that showed up were wearing any old jumpers, they didn’t care whether they were red, green or blue. So the theory had to cook up a way to make the jumpers change colour. Well, I’m not going into the details of that, but the only way that physicists could think of explaining this was to say that the neutrinos have some rest mass. Originally they were supposed to be massless, like photons of light, but this strange phenomenon of the jumpers changing colour could apparently only be explained if the neutrinos had mass, and the different coloured jumpers had different masses.

Well, now, any time you invent a new theory like this, you have to test it. That is the first rule of science. If you have an idea, you have to test it. No ifs, no buts, no excuses. You have to test it. And you are not allowed to say the idea is correct until it has been confirmed by experiment. That is the second rule of science. So they tested it. Did they confirm it? No. Not yet, anyway. So they are not allowed to say that neutrinos have mass, are they? Of course not. This hypothesis has not been confirmed by experiment, and therefore it is against the rules of science to say that it is “true”, or “known”, or “a fact”.

Practically every physicist on the planet, almost without exception, says that it is “known” that neutrinos have non-zero mass. This is simply FALSE. Yet when I point this out to them, they do not change their tune at all. The statement that neutrinos have a non-zero rest mass (which is equivalent to the statement that they have a state of rest) is a hypothesis, that has been neither confirmed nor refuted by experiment. It is not a “fact”, it is not “known”, it is not “true”. It is a hypothesis.

I hypothesise the opposite: I hypothesise that there is no rest for the wicked neutrinos. My hypothesis is not a “fact”, it is not “known”, it is not “true”. But until experiment provides a conclusive answer, my hypothesis is just as good as the other one. Provided, of course, that I can come up with an alternative explanation for why the jumpers appear to change colour. Which I have done: the jumpers are multi-coloured, and the colour that you see depends on which way you look at it. What does this mean? It means the colour depends on which direction is up. And since the Earth in NOT flat, despite what many physicists seem to think, the colour depends on where you are. And since the Sun is also NOT flat, the colour also depends on where the neutrino came from.

You cannot define mass without defining rest. You cannot define rest without taking into account the entire universe. Nobody has ever caught a neutrino and made it sit still. Nobody ever will. Neutrinos do not have a “rest” state. They do not have a “mass”. Yes, they fall “down” in a gravitational field, but so do photons, and nobody pretends that photons have a “mass” or a “rest”. We detect photons that have been travelling for 13 billion years without ever taking a rest. We detect neutrinos that have been travelling in convoy with photons for millions of years, and arrive within seconds of each other – we know they set out within seconds of each other, but we don’t know the precise timing.

And what exactly is the purpose of these wicked neutrinos in the grand scheme of things? Why did God put them there? What use are they? I’ll tell you – they are there to tell you where the rest of the universe is, and where it is going. They are there to implement Mach’s Principle. They are there to tell you exactly how you are moving with respect to the rest of the universe, and exactly how much resistance the universe is going give you if you try to move differently. They are there, in other words, to define inertia. They are there, in other words, to define rest. They do not have inertia, they define inertia. They do not have rest, they define rest. They do not have mass, they define mass, in exactly the same way that photons do not have electric charge, but they define electric charge.