Friday, July 29, 2005
More Bad Science Reporting
Experiments are currently being conducted to detect and measure radiacitve decay that is believed to supply at least half of the heating that goes on at the earth's core. The NYTimes reports on it in a fashion that creates more questions than answers.
My guess is they did it based on trajectory, but don't you just hate it when a story leaves such gapping holes, and doesn't even acknolwedge them.
The baby oil and benzene detector lies two-thirds of a mile below the Japanese island of Honshu in the Kamioka zinc mine. It recorded flashes caused by ghostly particles called neutrinos, which were produced by the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium deep in the heart of the Earth as they shot up through the ground and the detector.Fair enough -- it's a glorifed cloud chamber. But later in the article they say this
Neutrinos, which travel almost at the speed of light and can pass gracefully through miles of lead or the entire Earth without interacting with it, were first detected streaming from a nuclear reactor in 1956.Which says, essentially, that the detector is going to detect neutrinos from every source everwhere. Think about this -- if neutrinos do not interact with earth or lead, then all the neutrinos emitted by the nuclear power plants around the globe will also be detected -- likely those of extraterristial origin as well. So how did they tell which ones came from reactions in the planet's core as opposed to somewhere else?
My guess is they did it based on trajectory, but don't you just hate it when a story leaves such gapping holes, and doesn't even acknolwedge them.
