In the way you describe it, electromagnetic charge is kinda easy to visualize. But when we get into Weak Force interactions, that’s when these other, much more abstract features come into play.
For example, when you say “Spin” you don’t mean regular ol’ Angular Momentum, I’m guessing, but other weird types like Isospin or I-don’t-know-what.
This is all fascinating stuff, truly. And way beyond my pay grade, lol!
On further thought, this is really strange.
I can visualize a negatively charged electron and a positively charged positron making contact and annihilating, how the minus and the plus cancel each other.
But what is it about neutrinos and antineutrinos that make them cancel out when they come into contact? What is it about their positive and negative characteristics that can make them go “poof!” in a burst of photons?
To think that all those individual stars are much, much closer to us, around a few hundred light years at most, while that thing in the background thousands of times more distant, at least two-and-a-half million lightyears behind.
Let’s put it this way:
Let’s say that with your telescope you can see stars that are around 3000 lightyears away. That’s about a kiloparsec, give or take.
Meanwhile, Andromeda is around 780 kiloparsecs behind that.
Here’s fun trick: rotate the glasses 45°, see which movie you get to see, it could go either way!
I’m going to copy-paste the exact relevant bit here:
For each neutrino, there also exists a corresponding antiparticle, called an antineutrino, which also has no electric charge and half-integer spin. They are distinguished from the neutrinos by having opposite signs of lepton number and chirality. As of 2016, no evidence has been found for any other difference.
I knew about the chirality difference, that there are no right-handed neutrinos nor left-handed antineutrinos (or something along those lines, breaking what was thought to be a fundamental parity or symmetry), but what puzzled me was that I thought the charge difference was the one big fundamental difference between matter and antimatter, and suddenly tonight the neutrino question popped into my head. At the very least I knew that it’s not a mass/negative mass type of difference.
Now as for that bit that says “opposite signs of lepton number”… I’d never even heard of this concept or characteristic, until right now.
“What the hell are you kids doing down there in the basement, that you need these more specific units?”
“Um… nothing, sir. Everything is quite all right, quite all right.”
“Hrumph! Very well then, I shall be in my study. And do try to keep the bloody racket down, for chrissakes!”
“Yes sir, thank you sir, goodnight sir… Whew… that was a close one!”
Brutalist playground!
Go ahead children, develop your spatial abilities in an entertaining manner, for the revolution!
The air’d dared upthere’d
In the past week on YouTube, on channels about math and physics, I started getting a constant bombardment of online casino ads. The predatory enshittification is intense anywhere you look.
Locked in a house with a killer fan that has a mind of its’ own!
Ma’am, we’ve traced and located the source of that breeze, it seems to be coming from…
🎵 Inside the house 🎵
🎵 Inside the house 🎵
As close to nothing as something can be and still exist… as far as we know.
That mass is so small, and behaves so strangely (it fluctuates), that the theories say the neutrino does NOT get its’ tiny fluctuating mass from the Higgs Field.
And if that ain’t a mind-blower of what is at the very edge of human knowledge and understanding of reality, I don’t know what is.
That’s just the half of it.
Watch the weight on the scale fluctuate, as the kitty neutrino keeps adorably creepily gazing at you.
…otherwise, those label warnings are for naught. Why have a warning to not do something, if no one is doing it, anyway?
Uh oh… is that a man who can pleasure two women at once?
That nose looks a bit much like something else, for a family newspaper’s comic strip page.
Which is more improbable: that, or there being no hallucinogenic drugs in Kirk and Spock’s time?
If they can easily manipulate molecules to make sheets of materials like transparent aluminum, AND they seem to keep an illegal stash of Romulan Pale Ale, imagine the mind-bending mind-enhancing substances they can come up with four centuries from now, yet square-jawed Kirk seems completely oblivious to the whole concept.
If that is so, if neutrinos really are their own antiparticle, would that theoretically mean that there is no such thing as neutrino annihilation?
Like photons, which are their own antiparticle, and don’t annihilate on contact with each other, but those are bosons with a completely different spin, and also have zero rest mass, unlike neutrinos/antineutrinos, which DO have mass, but seem to somehow draw it out from something other than the Higgs Field.