338 | Ryan Patterson on the Physics of Neutrinos
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll
4.7 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 2025
⏱️ 87 minutes
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Summary
The story goes that Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed the existence of neutrinos, was embarrassed to have done so, as it was considered uncouth to hypothesize new particles that could not be detected. Modern physicists have no such scruples, of course, but more importantly neutrinos turn out to be very detectable, given sufficient resources and experimental technique. I talk with neutrino physicist Ryan Patterson about what current and upcoming experiments teach us about neutrinos themselves, as well as implications for dark matter and why there are more particles than antiparticles in the universe.
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/12/08/228-ryan-patterson-on-the-physics-of-neutrinos/
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Ryan Patterson received his Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University. He is currently Professor of Physics at Caltech. His research involves a number of aspects of experimental neutrino physics, including involvement in the NOvA and DUNE experiments.
Transcript
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| 0:54.3 | Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. These days in particle physics, in quantum field theory, in the attempt to understand the universe at its deepest levels, as you know, if you've been listening to this podcast, we have this great theory, the standard model of particle physics. But we also have plenty of reasons to believe |
| 0:59.1 | that the standard model is not the final answer. It doesn't play well with gravity. It doesn't |
| 1:04.7 | explain dark matter. It gives us a bunch of sort of tenting clues that somehow there should be |
| 1:10.4 | grander unification |
| 1:11.5 | of some sort. So there's all sorts of reasons to go beyond the standard model, to invent new |
| 1:17.1 | particles and new properties. And indeed, there's lots of papers out there in the scientific |
| 1:21.8 | literature where people propose new particles. I've proposed new particles. I don't know many of my |
| 1:26.5 | friends in the theoretical |
| 1:27.8 | physics world who haven't proposed a new particle or two. But back in the day, long ago, |
| 1:33.4 | the standards were different. You know, when physics 100 years ago was going on, there was so |
| 1:39.1 | much data that we had that hadn't been explained by theory yet. The people weren't just proposing new particles just for the heck of it. |
| 1:47.6 | They would wait until they really were forced to do that by some experimental phenomenon. |
| 1:53.3 | A great example of this, of course, is the neutrino. |
| 1:56.3 | The idea of the neutrino was proposed around 1930 by Wolfgang Powley because there was this |
| 2:03.1 | known phenomenon, namely beta decay. This is the decay of the neutron. Neutron is a little bit |
| 2:09.0 | heavier than a proton, so it can decay into a proton, which is a positively charged particle, |
... |
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