Neutrinos: The inscrutable “ghost particles” driving scientists crazy
> They hold the keys to new physics. If only we could understand them.
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They aren't driving anybody crazy. But claiming that they were was a neat way of structuring a popular science progress report.
Jan Panteltje isn't a sophisticated reader, and still has hopes the the neutrino - or a neutrino - might work as Le Sage's famous mechanical explanation of gravity.
Remember this?
On 12 November 2001, about 6,600 of the photomultiplier tubes (costing about $3000 each[13]) in the Super-Kamiokande detector imploded, apparently in a chain reaction or cascading failure, as the shock wave from the concussion of each imploding tube cracked its neighbours.
"[13]" ?
It seems improbable than any individual tube imploding could have cracked any of it neighbours. The tubes are quite a way apart. It sounds more like an external shock going through and persuading a number of individual tubes to implode close enough together to amplify the initial external shock into a more intense plane wave that could collapse even more of those along its path.
Some 5200 tubes survived the incident, so John's description is inaccurate and somewhat misleading.
The text is from wikipedia.
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