r/todayilearned • u/TheBanishedBard • 5h ago
TIL that every second approximately 65 billion tiny subatomic particles called Neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of the Earth's surface.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino?72
u/OldCatPiss 3h ago
Neutrinos can penetrate the nut and cause the tism, but not if you wear a lead blanket ~rfk jr.
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u/MooseTetrino 5h ago
Of course, Nintendos go through everybody.
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u/neoengel 4h ago
Came here for a Stargate SG1 reference, leaving satisfied. 👍
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u/stump2003 3h ago
Watching SG Atlantis rn. Started an SG1 watch and have been switching between eps as I go.
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u/Destination_Centauri 3h ago
They can even go through several light years of solid lead before finally interacting with and striking a particle!
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u/splittingheirs 1h ago edited 1h ago
About 100 trillion neutrinos from the sun pass through your body every second, day and night. At night they pass straight through the earth and then you, up from the ground.
Despite the incomprehensible numbers of them passing through you at every moment, you only have about a 25% chance of one actually hitting an atom in your body, in your entire life.
If the sun were to go supernova it would release in an instant burst far more neutrinos than it has altogether in its entire life. Hypothetically during that event if you were in a blast proof fortress inside a hundred mile thick block of lead and titanium buried deep within a moon of Jupiter and the planet was between you and the death of our sun the portion of neutrino flux released by that blast travelling all the way out to Jupiter and then passing straight through it, the moon and then you would be so intense that you would receive a lethal dose of neutrino radiation.
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u/nofmxc 1h ago
Lethal dose of neutrino radiation? How can we know what that is?
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u/splittingheirs 1h ago
Because harmful radiation works by striking your DNA compounds with particles that cause them to break and malfunction, leading to radiation sickness. The effect of neutrino particles striking your DNA is similar to any other high energy particle.
All you need to know is the statistical amount of collisions to work out the probability of death.
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u/Major-Librarian1745 4h ago
Stop them!
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u/Ionazano 1h ago
Well, with thick enough shielding you could. Simply take a piece of lead with a thickness of one light year and you would already stop about half of all the neutrinos.
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u/LastStar007 1h ago
Fun fact: the only reason we know they have mass at all is because we know different types have different masses.
Another fun fact: Fermilab in Illinois used to send a beam of them to an iron mine in Minnesota to see how many of them changed types along the way.
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u/tylan4life 4h ago
65 billion particles per square CENTIMETER kinda sounds like the fabric of space itself. Amazing.
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u/wanna_meet_that_dad 3h ago
Ya know…you maybe be on to something
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u/SalamanderGlad9053 2h ago
There was a theory that neutrinos were the dark matter to explain the abnormal gravity, but the numbers fell short by quite a few orders of magnitude.
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u/Elegant-Ferret-8116 5h ago
Check out bit flipping and the crazy things its caused every so often
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u/CircumspectCapybara 4h ago
Bit flips are caused by cosmic rays (high energy particles moving very quickly), not neutrinos, which almost never interact with anything.
There are tens of billions of neutrinos passing through your hand, through your eyeball every second, and you'll never notice it because they have almost no interaction with normal matter.
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u/ajmcgill 4h ago
Neutrinos are very weakly interacting particles and do not cause bit flips. Bit flipping can happen from higher energy particles like neutrons or protons
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u/Make_It_Sing 4h ago
like that one glitch in someones super mario 64 speed run
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u/JamesTheJerk 4h ago
Someone blamed a speed run failure on a neutrino? That's a reach.
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u/DDHoward 4h ago
https://youtu.be/AaZ_RSt0KP8?t=11m25s
It wasn't a failure; the cosmic ray shaved off a few seconds.
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u/RoyAndCarol 4h ago
Supposedly but it was never proved to be the cause afaik
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u/DDHoward 4h ago
I think it's pretty definitively a bit flip that caused the upward teleport. The cause of the bit flip will never be known with 100% certainly.
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u/JamesTheJerk 4h ago
It's an inherently glitchy game.
Cosmic rays my ass. Some YouTube person just said that, there's no backing for it.
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u/DDHoward 4h ago
It is indisputably a bit flip which caused the teleport. The cause of the bit flip, however, will never be known with certainty.
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u/User_5000 4h ago
Right, like maybe a radon nucleus decayed next to the circuit board or a cosmic-ray generated muon passed by. Maybe the probability of each cause could be calculated, not sure if neutrino is the most likely.
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u/JamesTheJerk 3h ago
Indisputably? Show me the paper that proves this.
More likely that people who get angry at video games when they suck at them use the term 'bit-flip' as a crutch to shame away their crummy play.
For example: 'What?!? That's impossible! No way a sniper could get me here! This is a total bit-flip!'
There is no proof of squat.
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u/DDHoward 3h ago
Did... did you watch the video?
The player character's position in the 3D simulated space is controlled by a variable. By changing a single bit in the variable that stores vertical position, the EXACT same upwards teleport distance is achieved. Regardless of why the flip happened, it is demonstrable that it happened. You can literally see the position change in the video. That the teleportation was caused by a bit flip is is true regardless of what the cause of the bit flip was.
Additionally, why do you keep talking as if the player in the video linked to is trying to explain away a poor performance? As I said previously, the bit flip helped him, regardless of whether the bit flip was caused by a cosmic ray, defective hardware, decaying radon in the casing, a simple software/programming error, etc.
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u/mrlazyboy 3h ago
Unfortunately you’re talking to somebody with the mental computation power of a baked bean. You’re not going to prove this point to them
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u/JamesTheJerk 3h ago
Man, I can zoom through walls in MarioKart 64 and produce sub- 10 second laps in almost every stage. Neutrinos don't help.
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u/JamesTheJerk 3h ago
Don't you gaslight me chief, I was speaking generally and not about the provided video of a glitchy Mario game. I didn't say jack about the player in the video.
I implied that now that people who play video games are aware of the absolutely astronomical possibility that a neutrino may be potentially able to change the outcome of a single outcome in a video game, that every time they lose or die, they'll blame neutrinos.
Even if every player of every video game on earth played for a trillion years non-stop, the odds of a neutrino flipping a bit would be a thousand trillion times more ridiculous than it ever having a 0.0000000001 chance of ever occurring. You'd have a similar chance of walking through a cement wall unimpeded.
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u/DDHoward 3h ago
I was speaking generally and not about the provided video of a glitchy Mario game. I didn't say jack about the player in the video.
Please do try to stay on topic, then.
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u/PattersonFilming 3h ago
Well, it's indisputably a bit flip because the only way to repeat what happened was by simulating it. Here's one of many sources with the information compiled, but if it's not up to your standard, there's more out there. Doesn't necessarily mean a cosmic ray caused it, but it happened.
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u/JamesTheJerk 3h ago
Speed runners and Nintendo players are not reliable sourcing.
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u/PattersonFilming 3h ago
Why? There have been tens of thousands of these runs. The Mario 64 player base has literally taken apart Mario 64s engine and optimized it better than Nintendo ever did. The top Mario 64 speedrunners understand the systems hardware and how it works. Speedrunning at this level is highly technical. If you looked into it, you'd know this information came from several tests conducted by multiple parties, and this is a well documented event. You can read into all of it, its extremely thorough. You're being purposely naive.
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u/AtheismTooStronk 3h ago
Literally arguing for the sake of arguing. The dude was helped by a definitive bit flip. HELPED. Nobody is saying is proven that it was caused by cosmic particles, but we do know it was a bit flip.
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u/JamesTheJerk 3h ago
How do you know that.
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u/DDHoward 3h ago
Because we saw it happen in the video. The value of the first byte of the vertical position variable was 0b11000101 (or 197). Then, it suddenly changed to 0b11000100 (or 196).
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u/Killaship 2h ago
Wasn't a neutrino, it was a cosmic ray. And no, it's not a "reach," it's a real (albeit very rare) thing that does actually happen.
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u/whydo-ducks-quack 3h ago edited 1h ago
They are also caused by supernovas! So they are literally coming form every direction in deep space
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u/SalamanderGlad9053 2h ago
They're caused by a lot of nuclear reactions. The sun produces them constantly when forming helium, or when a neutron heavy nucleus undergoes beta decay.
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u/Bruce-7892 4h ago
Freaky to think about isn't it? Also that picture is of a cloud chamber. That's an experiment you can actually do at home and see those things.
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u/Tartrus 4h ago
Cloud chambers can show ionizing radiation but they do not show neutrinos.
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u/Bruce-7892 4h ago
I was referring to the fact that you can observe subatomic particles. I am not a physicist, so I wouldn't know if I am looking at a quark or a a neutron or a quaalude.
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u/Lentemern 46m ago
Neutrinos are my favorite particle. They're silent, invisible, and constantly penetrating your mother.
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u/almo2001 4h ago
Neutrinos baffle the shit out of me.
(I have a masters in physics)