♪ (suspenseful music) ♪

>> Good evening, welcome.

My name is Roxanne Bogucka.

I'm a librarian based
at the Life Science Library

and I am pleased to bring
you the first Science Study Break

of the Fall 2010 semester.

First, behold the legaliese, okay?

Without restriction,
throughout the universe.

Those are the key words, okay?

Alright, okay.

Science Study Break tonight is
brought to you by P for the physics,

math, astronomy library.

The librarian there is Molly White.

And it's in RLM, so go visit the
physics, math, astronomy library.

But let's say you're working from
home some evening and you want

to use some of the resources that are
brought to you from the UT Libraries

like, for example, Institute
of Physics things.

Then you might go directly
to The Institute of Physics site.

And do a search for something
like maybe, Neutrino.

Just happened to occur to me.

And as you do that maybe you would find
something that you wanted to look at.

And so if you decided you wanted to
see this article and clicked on the

PDF link to it, you'll find that you're
being asked for some money.

Don't let this be you, okay?

Whenever you're off campus,
always use the UT Libraries

website to get to our resources.

So if you went from our databases
by subject to the physics databases,

and then you went from there to
the Institute of Physics journals,

you could look at the about link to
see this resource described, and

then you could use the active link to
enter Institute of Physics journals.

This is what you'll see
when you're off campus.

A screen that prompts you for
your EID and your password.

But once you enter that,
you're passed through

to the Institute of Physics.

And notice that this is
a different url here.

It has easyproxy.live.utexas.

That authenticates you as part of
the University of Texas communities,

so that when you do
this search for this article,

and you click on the article now,
you get to see this information about it,

plus when you click on the full text pdf
you actually get the full text.

And, you didn't spend any money,
so that's a good thing, alright?

Everybody's okay with that?

So, the University of Texas Libraries
is celebrating the life of the mind.

Now I want to tell you little bit
about science study break,

we've been doing this
for four years,

and tonight we have our first
encore presenter

which is Dr. Sacha Kopp
from physics.

He was with us last year to do a wonderful
presentation on "Angels & Demons,"

and tonight we have
the movie "2012."

Plus, I think, maybe some surprise
other footage that we'll see about.

But you can see that what we do
in this program is we look at

television shows and
we look at movies

that are in the science, technology,
engineering, medicine arena,

and we ask a researcher to come in
and discuss for us, and with us,

the validity of what's presented
in these shows.

Sometimes it's pretty scary
and valid like,

one of the first shows that we did
was where we looked at a season of "24"

that had to do with the bioterror
and Brent Iverson came in

and scared us all half to death
(laughter)

with how well they had
researched that season of the show.

Sometimes it's pretty laughable
and we all get to poke fun and

we all enjoy that too, okay?

So tonight we have Sacha Kopp
is gonna talk about "2012,"

the popular film, and I would like
to now tell you about him.

Dr. Kopp got his bachelor's, master's,
and Ph.D at the University of Chicago,

and he came to UT in 2000.

He is the new associate dean
of curriculum and programs,

and has been active in science
education for almost as long as

he's been active in elementary
particle physics-- what,

I don't know what happened there.

As a doctoral student,
he helped develop a pilot program

to retrain science teachers
in the Chicago public schools.

As an assistant professor
at Syracuse University,

he started a program which
is continued here at UT

to recruit undergraduate
teaching assistants

to assist in large lecture courses.

He served as associate chair
for undergraduate affairs

in the physics department,
and he's collaborated

with several faculty in the college
of natural sciences

to develop a new center
for inquiry in math and science,

which is devoted to promoting
and supporting the use of

inquiry-based methods in
science and math education.

And at the same time,
he and his research team

studied the physics of neutrinos
through an experiment based

at Fermilab outside of Chicago.

Please welcome Dr. Sacha Kopp.
(applause)

>> Thank you all so much
for coming out tonight.

What a great crowd
coming to listen about neutrinos.

Roxanne has placed the first page
of your quiz on your desk here.

The backside has the real
hard part, so I'll ask you-- no,

I was just tricking you.
(laughter)

Fooled you, no.
There will be no quiz

but you won't get ice cream
from the physics circus crowd

unless you can answer a few key
questions at the end of the lecture.

Okay so, Roxanne mentioned
that last year

I had fun giving a lecture here at the
series, in the movie "Angels & Demons,"

and someone kind of dropped
this one in my lap,

I don't know why Ron Howard got
interested in the Large Hadron Collider,

but he was very interested in
this book by Dan Brown,

and so that featured the
Large Hadron Collider in it,

and it was a perfect opportunity
to pump the public full of

the exciting news about
the Large Hadron Collider.

And this here-- some students of
mine actually came up to me and said,

"You know, if you thought that
Dan Brown book was bad,

"wait till you see this movie, '2012.'"
(laughter)

And so, instantly I was just
excited because again,

I don't really view these as
science movies

but rather excuses
to give talks so

there's lots of good stuff
in this movie,

it's a fun movie to watch,
but it is a movie of science fiction

and of course, like every
piece of science fiction,

there's always a little bit of a
true story behind some of the images

or the concepts that they bring out,
it's mostly nonsense but

it's fun to then talk about what is
the actual reality to what's going on.

So, this is the movie "2012," and I
don't know, has anyone seen the movie?

A few of us.
Okay.

So not everyone has seen it, let me
talk a little bit about first what it is

'cause then we can at least
get on the same page.

So, in this story,
the earth is basically destroyed, okay?

So, there's some
giant solar eruption,

and this solar eruption unleashes
this incredible burst of

these particles called neutrinos,

and these neutrinos come whizzing
throughout the universe

and bury themselves like little--
I don't know,

what you call termites
in the core of the earth.

And they heat of the core of the earth
to such a degree,

that it causes the core
of the earth to melt, yes.

And then actually causes
huge volcanic activity,

plate tectonic motion--
we're in a geology school here

so I can use that word.

And there's floods and everything
and lots of computer simulations

and everyone's dead.
(laughter)

So, I wanted to talk a little bit
about the first part of this

because that's kind of
the key (inaudible) of the story,

you know, the eruption of the sun
and how it unleashes all these neutrinos.

But I thought what I'd first do
is show a trailer from the movie.

So let's see if I can get that to work.

(laughter)
Cool.

I need to select audio.
Where do I select audio?

Okay, then I need to do source.

Just gonna try to find
the audio here, sorry.

Now if I pause that.

How do I select
the source of the audio?

That's a good question.

I'll figure this out.
No, I'm assuring that.

You know what?
I don't know.

No, it's not doing it.

So maybe you're right,
maybe I got to do...

Oh yeah, I think I did it.

(music starts)
Oh yeah, that did it.

Let's try again.
(video clip runs)

Sorry about that,
we'll...

♪ (ominous music) ♪

>> This mass suicide (inaudible)
to the Mayan calendar,

which predicts the end of time to occur
on the 21st of December of this year.

This year.
(flock of birds)

This year.

>> What are the odds.
(chuckles)

(crashes)

>> Those neutrinos are loud.

(glass shattering)

(people screaming)

I thought we'd have more time.

♪ (powerful music) ♪

(helicopter)

He said that the government
is building these ships.

>> So when do we let
the people know?

>> Our mission is to ensure
the continuity of our species.

>> Wasn't it also decided that people
have the right to fight for their lives?

(engine starts)

♪ (powerful music) ♪

>> No matter what happens,
we'll all stay together.

(video clip ends)
(laughter)

>> It's all a cover-up, man. No.
(laughter)

That's coming out a little dark
on that screen well, that picture

is probably one of the best pieces of
computer simulation in the whole movie.

They show this aircraft carrier coming
and dumping right on the White House,

as this huge tidal wave
is overtaking the east coast.

So I forgot to mention the other sort
of thematic piece of this movie is that,

ostensibly the whole end of
civilization was predicted,

at least according to the
movie-tellers by the Mayans.

And so, this date of December 21, 2012
is something that corresponds

to a prediction in their world,
or their mythology,

and I'll talk about that
a little bit too.

But what I found interesting
as I was looking up

a little bit about the facts
about the movie is

they encourage you to Google "2012"
at the end of the trailer and in fact,

this is really great PR,
they did an awful lot of work

setting up virtual think tanks
and nonexistent theology centers

and what have you, so that they
would be the first Google hits

that you came up with when
you Googled "2012."

And it was incredible because
then they told their own story

of what this Mayan prediction
and what is the science or whatever,

and now that's what are the top--
I don't know-- ten things

that you're gonna find out about when
you do in fact do this Google search.

So that's just something
to be mindful of

as we start thinking about
researching for ourselves,

what's gonna be presented to us
in a movie.

So let's talk about the first
part of this story which is the sun.

So ostensibly, in this story, the sun
has had some huge solar eruption--

I don't know what that means--
(laughter)

and this solar eruption has unleashed
an ungodly number of neutrinos at us.

So what are some important facts for us
as scientists about the sun?

Well, the sun is a big plasma of gas,
and it's rather heavy.

And that gravitational level of force
that's inside the sun

is enough to fuse atoms or nuclei,
more importantly, together.

So in fact, the main power
source in the sun

that's producing all the heat, the light,
and other things like neutrinos,

is nuclear fusion.

And actually that story is a relatively
recent description of the sun.

Up until, even I would say,
the early part of the 20th century,

scientists were really wondering
what is it that powers the sun,

and there are some very famous physicists
of the 19th and early 20th century

calculating various scenarios,
"What is the energy source of the sun?"

And they all came up with lifetimes
by which the sun would extinguish itself

of order of few thousand years.

That's very good if you believe
in certain kinds of theology

but if you're asking why is the earth has
been around for four billion years

and what's provide heat,
that was really hard to understand.

So with the dawn of nuclear physics
in the 20's and 30's,

this finally became to be understood.

And fusion, it turns out to be
very important to our story

'cause it produces lots of these
particles called neutrinos.

So there are lots of fusion processes.

Fusion is just a generic term for I will
take two things and fuse them together.

And in doing so, the reason we care
about fusion as an energy source,

it releases energy.

This energy can be in the form of heat or
it can be in the form of other particles.

And there are a lot of these reactions
that release neutrinos.

I've listed just a few of them,
most of them come from

the fusion of the lightest elements
to protons to make

an isotope of hydrogen called
deuterium or deuteron,

it releases one neutrino

and then it produces a spectrum
of neutrinos that's rather intense.

There are some other processes as well
that make contributions here.

You can take a proton and an electron,
two protons and an electron and make,

again, a deuteron
and a neutrino.

You can take helium 3 and a proton
and you make helium 4, and so on.

And all of these things
release neutrinos, in fact,

so many neutrinos come at us
from the sun, just our sun.

There are about ten trillion hitting your
body every second, just from our sun.

Now add up all the other stars
in the universe,

there are a lot of neutrinos
passing through you, okay?

Neutrinos are a big form of the energy
release of any star or any supernova.

A lot of the phenomena we see out in
the universe are releasing neutrinos.

They're also producing,
if you noticed,

in this little set of reactions
I produced, those listed here,

the heavier elements.

Some of the elements that
we have left to us,

are leftover from literally
the Big Bang.

We have protons and neutrons and
they've formed slightly heavier things.

We get up to helium and lithium
leftover from the Big Bang,

but the really heavy elements
are formed in stars.

And so we in fact rely for a lot of
the heavy minerals that we have

on the leftover star dust,
if you'd like.

Things that come streaming at us
or streamed at us long ago

when the earth was formed.

But the big takeaway message is yes,
there are a whole lot of neutrinos.

In fact, neutrinos were very instrumental
in confirming our picture

of how the sun actually
produces its energy.

There are a set of ideas of what the sun
was relying on to produce energy,

and there was a chemist,
actually not a physicist but a chemist

back in the 50's and 60's
who developed a technique

to actually detect neutrinos
from the sun.

And this chemist went deep
underground in a mine in South Dakota.

Had a large chlorine tank,
so bleach basically.

And when a neutrino hits an atom,
or nucleus actually, it produces argon,

and specifically a isotope of argon
that's radioactive.

He was a such a good chemist he could
isolate single atoms of argon

inside of that giant tank.

If you notice, that's him,
that's Ray Davis, that's the tank.

So it's a rather big vessel that he's
using to contain his big chlorine bath,

and he was good enough to isolate
individual argon atoms.

And every time he saw one, he knew that
a neutrino had interacted from the sun.

So he was counting up neutrinos
to see that that would in fact explain

the level of power produced
by the sun.

And he got an answer
that was about right.

For that, he was actually awarded the
Nobel Prize because that was big stuff,

to actually now confirm that we've seen
neutrinos from various celestial objects.

Well there are a lot us that do
neutrino experiments,

and it turns out, not because
we don't like the sunlight,

we all go underground to do it.

Actually a few of us here at UT Austin
are involved in an experiment

that's in northern Minnesota.

A place that's so
far north that's about,

just a couple of miles away
from the Canadian border.

It's only-- not snowed
in the area in August, turns out.

But we're about 2700
feet below ground.

This is the detector that we built,
it's not a chlorine tank,

you see here a person standing next
to that, so that's about 25 feet tall.

It's about 5,000 tons of steel.

A very large neutrino detector
compared to the original one by Ray Davis.

The world's deepest neutrino detector
is actually in Canada.

It's about 7,000 feet below ground.

And so, that's about as far as anyone
has dared to go because that's

a lot of digging to get that far.

Let's see if we can get this to work.

So, why are we going underground?

Well, it's not that these are top secret
projects as we'll see another clip

I'm going to play from the movie,
you might tend to believe

that neutrino projects
are sort of top secret work

by the government
and guys in black suits.

But, it's not so.

Actually the reason we do this
is that neutrinos are actually

very faintly interacting particles,

it's very difficult to see the signals
from a neutrino in your detector.

And particularly if you're looking
at a source neutrinos like the sun,

the sun is unleashing on us
a ton of other stuff,

there are many other particles
coming at us from outer space.

Protons, and gamma rays, and electrons--
all this stuff leaves signals in detectors

and we need to find ways of shielding
ourselves from that other stuff,

so that we're looking at just
the neutrinos.

So in fact what we do,
is we go deep underground--

so some of the detectors are
1,000 or 2,000, 3,000,

up to 7,000 feet below ground
and what that does,

is it tends to shield us
from this flux of other stuff.

So on the vertical axis of this plot

is the number of millions of particles
per square meter per year,

hitting an average detector
the deeper you go underground.

And so it lies in a curve
that gets lower and lower,

the deeper you get underground,
and that's the real reason

we tend to do this research
in rather difficult circumstances

'cause it's difficult to build
a 5,000-ton object

when you have to go down
a shaft that's probably

no bigger across than this room.

So it's kind of like building
ships in a bottle.

Yes?

>> How far down is the
(inaudible)?

Oh, that's a good question
and I'll come back to this

a little bit further later on.

A neutrino, on average,
could go through

about a light-year of lead
before it would interact.

So most of neutrinos passing through you,
and this is a good part of the story,

don't interact at all, okay?

Most of the neutrinos passing
through the earth don't interact at all,

they just keep on going.

So actually to see a neutrino
in the detector

or whatever apparatus you're
trying to build is a very rare event.

You're sampling a very small fraction
of the neutrinos that come at us.

Okay? Good question,
thank you.

Alright, let's go back to the movie.

All movies need a hero,
in this case it's a physicist.

And who else really?
(laughter)

Our movie starts out with
Adrian Helmsley who we are told

works for the Office of Science
and Technology Policy.

He is using neutrinos to track
the activity of the sun.

And they make, in this clip,
a rather unexpected discovery.

So let me play a clip
from the movie here.

Let's see if we can do it.

(video clip runs)

They're going down a mine shaft.

>> How deep do we need to go?
>> 10,000 feet.

>> I searched all over India
for this thing.

Used to be the deepest
copper mine in the world.

Remember my brother,
Gurdeep, he's a student now.

>> Namaste, Dr. Helmsley, sir.
>> Adrian. It's just Adrian.

>> (inaudible)

>> Just don't pour too much, huh?

>> How do you work
in this heat?

>> You come on a good day,
my friend.

Sometimes it could hit
120 degrees.

You have to come and meet Dr. Lokesh,

a Fellow of quantum physics
at the university in Chennai.

>> Namaste.
>> Dr. Helmsley.

>> So, what are we looking at?

>> These neutrinos are
acting normally.

Minuscule mass,
no electrical charge.

They pass through ordinary matter
almost undisturbed.

>> Your message said the count doubled
after the last solar eruptions.

>> That was last week.

But this happened two days ago.

The biggest solar eruptions
in human history

causing the highest neutrino count
we've ever recorded.

>> My God.

(video clip ends)
(laughter)

>> That does sound bad.
(laughter)

Well what could that do?
(laughter)

Well again, let's just talk a little bit
about what actually happens with the sun.

So the sun actually does have
big solar eruptions.

The sun does this all the time.

In fact, the sun goes through a rather
periodic cycle of these solar eruptions.

The pictures that I'm showing over here
are two snapshots of the sun

taken about five and a half
years apart.

Turns out, every eleven years
the sun has gone through a cycle.

In one picture, you can see it
looks rather smooth and uniform,

in the other it has
lots of blotches on it,

those are so-called sun spots.

The sun is going through a lot
of turbulence all the time,

and this turbulence seems to have
a periodicity where every 11 years,

it's going through a period
of large amounts of activity,

and that activity manifests itself in real
big fluid flow on the surface of the sun,

so-called coronal mass ejections,
you see huge flares

that end up sending off
huge amounts of mass from the sun

streaming off into space
and all kinds of stuff

that actually could be
quite catastrophic.

In fact, the biggest solar eruption
in human history

is not one that took place
in 2012 but rather in 1859.

And the story of that
is pretty remarkable.

So in this particular solar storm
back in the 1800's,

there was an early observation of it
just by looking up through a telescope

and you can see, gosh, the surface of the
sun looks pretty darn different today.

There were huge blotches on it,
there are huge sun spots.

And then, a couple days later,
all of a sudden,

there was a huge rain of particles
hitting the surface of the earth.

So I don't know if any of you
have ever been up north

to see the northern lights, has anyone
there seen the northern lights?

No, 'cause we're in Texas and so most
of us have never seen the northern lights.

If you live up-- let's say
northern Minnesota,

southern Canada or above,
it would not be unusual,

for you to see a rather dramatic
light display at night time.

It would happen in the day as well
but you would just see

so much of the light from the sun,
where high energy particles

that are streaming in on the earth
get directed up toward the poles,

the north pole and the south pole
by the earth's magnetic field.

And as these things come crashing
into the atmosphere,

they cause the gases in the
atmosphere to excite and emit light.

So if you see the northern lights,
something serious is going on.

There's a rather substantial
shower of particles happening.

Now, mostly that happens
up in the north or way down south.

So few of us live
at the south pole

that doesn't really figure into
most people's terminology.

But on this particular day,
back in 1859,

the northern lights,
the so-called northern lights,

were visible all throughout
California, Colorado,

the Chicago area,
down as far as Florida,

never before does this happen,
even in, would've been in Texas.

So that was really quite a sign
of a violent event.

Later, by a couple of days,
those sun spots went from being

sort of a dark black or brown color
to being bright white.

Today we would know that that
was a huge x-ray flare.

And, a second display of
northern lights came about

as reaching down as far south
as South America.

In fact, it was so bright,
this display of light in the night sky,

that it was said that miners who were in
Colorado woke up at 1 in the morning

thinking it was time for breakfast,
I mean it was really incredible.

So this was definitely a big event.

The impact of such a solar storm,
should it happen again,

are pretty big because what happens
when all these charged particles

come streaming at us,
ejected by the sun,

they carry with them their own
magnetic field.

Those of you who have to take
a physics class

learned that a current from
a moving collection of charge

emits its own magnetic field.

It starts to alter the magnetic field
put out by the earth itself.

And that magnetic field from the earth
is meant to be a protective layer for us,

well I don't know if it's meant to be,
but it is a protective layer for us.

It tends to steer stuff coming at us
away from the surface of the earth.

As that stream of particles
gets stronger and stronger,

now that weakens the magnetic
field of the earth to the point where

actually the magnetic field of the earth
is exposed or broken down

to the side facing the sun.

And now, we are sort of
twisting in the wind.

Today, if such a thing happened,
we would worry about this because

we have a lot going on that
wasn't around in the 1800's.

We have technology.

For example, we have power lines out there
and they carry currents.

Well currents tend to get affected
by magnetic fields passing by them

from all these charged particles.

And it's predicted that if such
a solar storm were to happen again,

we would have rather dramatic
power outages across the entire globe.

To this extent that you would probably
see huge electrical fires on transformers

and power lines
all around the world.

That's a simulation, that's not a...
(laughter)

That's Photoshop,
not real life, okay?

In fact, this is a simulation
of the level of power outages

there would be in the United States
if there was a magnetic storm

as big as the one that was in 1921,
which itself was only a third

or a fourth of the size
of the one in 1850's.

No ones ever bothered to do
the simulation of the one in 1850

because that would pretty much,
the entire country would be blacked out.

So the economic catastrophe
would be pretty big

if something like this
happened again.

The other thing we would worry about
in today's society,

is we float a lot of stuff
over the earth out there,

and it's pretty exposed as well.

And we rely on this stuff,
like GPS and communications.

Basically everything that's electronic
flying over the earth would be fried

by such a solar storm.

And even in more mild solar periods,
astronauts flying a space shuttle

go into interior sections of
the space shuttle to shield themselves

against the rather regular bombardment
of the stuff that they're exposed to

when the sun goes through
even a modest solar flare.

So, one of these things would
be a rather significant event.

Now the good news is,
if you're worried about 2012.

The sun does this in a fairly
regular schedule and it's not that big.

In fact 2012, if we look at the solar
cycle, it should be a pretty quiet year.

So this is a graph of
sun spots versus year,

and we had a pretty big year
in the early 60's,

we had a pretty big year
in the early 80's,

but 2012 no worries.

Maybe we should talk about
those scary neutrinos.

So, in the story, neutrinos
seem to be the real problem,

it's not the other stuff
coming at us from the sun,

but rather the neutrinos
that are emitted by the sun,

at least according to
the story teller.

So I thought we'd focus on what
happens with those bad neutrinos.

It's not gonna let me do that.

I'll show you.

(video clip runs)

>> Posing the highest neutrino
count we've every recorded.

>> My God.

>> That's not what
worries me, Adrian.

For the first time ever, the neutrinos
are causing a physical reaction.

>> That's impossible.

(pouring ice water)

>> Ah, that feels very good.

>> Please, follow me.

(door opens)

You won't believe this.
(inaudible)

This water tank goes down
another 6,000 feet.

Looks like the neutrinos
coming from the sun.

Have mutated into a new
kind of nuclear particle.

(laughter)

The heating of the earth's core,

and suddenly act like microwaves.

(bubbling of water)

(video clip ends)
>> Boy, that sounds really bad.

(laughter)
Heating up the earth's core.

Okay.

Here again, there's just a little
bit of truth to the fiction in this movie.

You notice they walked into
this chamber and it had

these kind of bulbous things
all along the walls,

and then there was this
big tank that they referenced,

it goes down another 6,000 feet with
looked like it contained boiling water.

Well there's almost just a little bit
of truth to what they were talking about.

(laughter)
Almost.

So let me show you what a modern
neutrino detector looks like

post Ray Davis from the 1960's.

This is the world's largest
neutrino detector.

It's located in Japan,

and it's called the
Super Kamiokande detector.

Kamioka is the name
of a mine in Japan so it's,

I forget what the -ande
tacked on means in Japanese but,

it's an enormous volume,
it's about 50,000 tons of water.

That's of equivalent to about
one gulf oil spill a day.

(laughter)
In Texas terminology.

And it is surrounded by
these bulbous objects,

they're called
photomultiplier tubes.

And what a scientist working
on this experiment is looking for,

are flashes of light when a neutrino
from the sun or other source

comes and interacts in the water,

and creates the electromagnetic
equivalent of a sonic boom.

So it's a light boom.

And you see a flash of light produced in
this water from a neutrino interaction.

So the entire thing you can think of
as a camera facing in

looking at this water target.

It doesn't by any stretch go down 6,000
feet, that's really pretty darn deep.

I think that's about the thickness
of the oceanic crust.

So that's a pretty significant tank
that they referenced in the movie

but this tank is pretty darn big.

This picture shows the tank
in a fish-eye camera lens

and looking up, it's just been
started to fill with water.

Those folks are in
a pontoon boat right there.

That's graduate students cleaning
the surface of those little

photomultiplier tubes.
(laughter)

And they'll eventually fill that up.

I guess the students sit there
and polish as they go.

(laughter)

It's about 70 meters tall.

So that's about the size
of the RLM building

for those of you who are familiar
with the north end of campus here,

that's one of the taller buildings
here on campus.

So that is a significant tank
but by no stretch 6,000 feet,

and the little bulbs serve
a very specific purpose.

The water never boils, okay?

It's not like the neutrinos
make the whole thing warm,

the neutrinos interactions release such
a small amount of energy in the water

that we're looking for the light
not boiling water.

So this is what you might see.

A neutrino coming in from the sun
would be an invisible dotted line

and all of a sudden it would
produce this flash of light

and this light would propagate
outwards and hit the walls of the tank.

And so you would see this
rather dramatic display

of a ring of light hitting the walls,

and that's actual data
from that experiment,

where they see different
types of neutrinos,

either electron-type neutrinos
or muon-type neutrinos interacting

in the water and you can see the
pattern of light on the walls of the tank.

This was an earlier experiment.

I just put it in there 'cause it has
a scuba diver in it.

Actually, one of the thing's
that was significant about

our discoveries with neutrinos
from the sun,

is that there's
not nearly enough.

So we don't really worry
about having too many

that cause the earth's
core to heat.

In fact, the early experiments
that we're looking for the so-called

electron-type neutrinos coming from
the sun, failed to detect enough.

And when Ray Davis first
discovered this,

everyone thought he was wrong,

'cause he's after all just a chemist
trying to work in a physicist's field.

And he stuck to his
guns for many years.

And this was really
to his credit and

I think why he deserves
the Nobel Prize. He

was consistently coming up
with results that said that

there were only about a
third as many neutrinos

as he would predict, given the
luminosity or brightness of the sun.

And in fact, that remains an
observations that other

scientists have confirmed
to this day. In fact, that's,

one of the key areas in particle
physics right now is why it is

that those electron type
neutrinos that seem,

you would think leave the sun in
a certain number don't appear

on Earth in the correct number.

I'll come back to that in a little while.

Well, in the movie, this becomes
a big cover up because

they decide, well, the Earth is
going to end. There's going to

be tidal waves and volcanoes,
and we're going to try to brace

ourselves by building ships
to protect ourselves. And

much of the story is then
most of humanity being

wiped out, with the small
exception of a few people

chosen to live on
protective ships or arcs

by the governments of the world.

I won't bother to play this clip
because we're running a little

bit on time, but this is Danny Glover
and he plays the President in this movie.

One thing I have to say, though, is that
this guy who plays the physicist who

works for the OSTP, the Office of
Science and Technology Policy.

He has a job I'd love to have.
He's this kind of swashbuckler

guy. He wears suits and
dresses pretty well.

He's in these control rooms with
pretty exotic panels, controlling,

you know, monitoring everything
going on all over the Earth.

You know, a real guy who works
for the OSTP is kind of like a

technology diplomat. He tends
to sign legal papers with other

countries on patent infringements
and advise the President on, you know,

which form we should
take, Beta or VHS.

(audience laughter)
So it tends to be a

much more mundane job,
although it's an important

job within the government.

The other character in the movie
is John Cusack, and he plays

your Average Joe that happens
to find out about the government

cover up by accident.
He's gone to Yellowstone,

where some of the scientists are
doing their work to find out where

the early volcanoes are
going to erupt, and he

happens to land upon...

Woody Harrelson.
(audience laughter)

And he's your ultimate conspiracy guy.
He's living out there in the woods, and

he's figured it all out.
He knows what the

governments of the world
are up to. He's got a little

radio broadcast, and I'm going to
let him explain the real goings-on

because he explains it
much better than I can.

Sorry.

Sorry, got the wrong one.

>> No way.
>> ... not afraid to tell the truth.

>> Thank you, Bill!
What are your questions?

>> I wanted to to know, where
is all this going to start?

>> Well, something like this could only
originate in Hollywood, Bill.

But seriously, they got the Earth
cracking under their asses already.

Our family believes in the
gospel of the Lord Jesus.

We have nothing to fear, Charlie.

>> Good for you, Bill.
Thanks for calling.

This is Charlie Frost reporting live
from Yellowstone National Park,

soon to become the world's
largest active volcano.

I'll be right back, folks.

>> Do you mind if I join you?
I wanted to ask you something.

>> You only got a minute. Pickle?

>> No. I'm listening to the broadcast.
I was wondering what exactly is it

that's going to start in Hollywood?

>> It's the apocalypse.
The end of days.

The Judgment Day. The end
of the world, my friend.

Christian's call it the Rapture, but the
Mayans knew about it. The Hopis,

the I Ching, the Bible, kind of.
(audience laughter)

Beer?
>> Yeah.

>> So, look. I got to eat. Why
don't you download my blog?

It's free. Of course, we do
appreciate donations.

>> In ancient times, the Mayan people
were the first civilization to discover

that this planet had an expiration date.

According to their calendar, in
the year 2012, a cataclysmic

event would unfold, caused by an
alignment of the planets in our

solar system that only happens
every 640,000 years.

>> Oh, not again.
(audience laughter)

>> Just imagine the Earth as an orange.

>> You lure them in with humor.
Then you make them think.

>> Our sun will begin to emit such
extreme amounts of radiation--

>> Those little bastards
are called neutrinos.

>> --the core of the earth will melt.
That's the inside part of the orange.

Leaving the crust of our planet
free to shift. In 1958, Professor

Charles Hapgood named it
Earth Crust Displacement.

Albert Einstein did support it.
People, we'll get it all.

The forces of Mother Nature
will be so devastating

it will bring an end to this world
on winter solstice, 12-21-12.

Always remember, folks, you
heard it first from Charlie Frost.

>> You have to keep a thing
like this under wraps.

>> I'll quit it there.

Yeah, so what he's got all figured out

in fact, according to him, the
governments are all in this plot

and the Mayans knew about
it all along. I don't know how

the Mayans predicted the
plot part, but they did.

They predicted also that all this unleash
of neutrinos were going to cause

rather severe tectonic motion
of the Earth's plates and

we're going to be all lost due
to volcanoes and floods.

So, here I want to actually look at
this notion of neutrinos causing

heating of the Earth's core. Because
that's a pretty substantial thing.

So, there's one little detail that's
very, very wrong in this movie.

And we already talked about it
because we talked about neutrinos

passing through us all the time.
Yes, it's true the sun unleashes

a lot of neutrinos. Every one of us
has ten trillion passing through us

from just our sun. And when
they do interact, scientists do

interact, scientists do enjoy watching
the rather dramatic displays in the

detectors that they've built and
the rather violent collisions of

a neutrino annihilating
the nucleus of an atom.

There's just one little problem.
It doesn't happen all that much.

Okay? Most of the neutrinos produced
by the sun pass right through the Earth.

They are extremely weakly interacting.

This has to do with how forces
connect particles together.

When most of us are looking at
each other, we are looking at light

and what is exchanged between
us are the carrier particles of light,

called photons. So there are photons
dancing all throughout this room.

There are some bouncing off
your skin into my eye.

There's some bouncing off
my shirt into you. And that's

what we see. That's what allows
us to communicate with one

another via the electric
magnetic interaction.

Well, the electric magnetic interaction
responds to something called

electric charge. Something
neutrinos don't have.

Neutrinos, correctly, are said to be
chargeless or neutral in the movie.

They don't have an electric charge,
and so the only force that they are

left with experiencing is the
weak force. The carrier of

the weak force is called a W particle.
It's the analogy of the photon, and it

weighs a lot. It weighs as
much as a krypton nucleus.

So for that neutrino to throw off
one of these heavy W particles,

to you, actually, it violates the law
of conservation of energy. It can't

create that thing and throw it over
to you because it doesn't even have

that much energy to begin with.
And so you say, "Well, how does

it allow itself to violate the law
of conservation of energy?"

Through one of the great things
in quantum mechanics, well, we

allow that in physics but we
just don't allow it for too long.

So there's this thing called the
uncertainty principle, and you're

allowed to violate everything in
quantum mechanics. You can

violate momentum conservation, you
can violate energy conservation, you

can violate anchor momentum
conservation. You can only just

do it for a little while though.
So it turns out this W particle

is only allowed to travel a little while.
It's kind of like Cinderella and the

glass slippers. And what that means
is that the information exchanged

between a neutrino and its neighbor
will only go a short distance. So the

neutrino would have to get
very close to something in

order to interact with it, and
that just doesn't happen.

In fact, the very fact that neutrinos
interact so weakly makes them an

excellent tool for science. Because
when we look at the sun, we are

seeing the light from the sun
and it streams at us, but that

light is pretty much the stuff that's
emitted from the very surface

of the sun. Any light or other forms
of energy from deep inside the sun

has to get through the molasses
of the rest of the sun to get out.

And it doesn't. It's trapped.
If you want to see the interior

core of the sun, though, you
look at it with neutrinos.

Because they are very penetrating.
In fact, this image here of a sort of

white dot with the yellow corona
around it is an image of the sun

created with just using neutrinos.
So in a sense, it's a picture of the

interior of the sun. It doesn't
look like it has a lot of detail

right now. That's because the
camera doesn't have a lot of

neutrinos hitting it or interacting
with in it. But it is that experiment

in Japan, actually taking a picture
of the sun using neutrinos.

Well, let's do some numbers.
This is a math lecture, so we're

going to put some numbers together
and actually ask, "Could these neutrinos

coming from the sun actually
heat up the core of the Earth?"

So here's my best attempt.
The sun emits about ten trillion

neutrinos per square centimeter
per second. Each neutrino

carries about 10 of the minus 13 joules
of energy. And the Earth is big. It's got

an area of 10 to the 18 square
centimeters. So I tally up

the total energy hitting the Earth
from neutrinos in any form is

10 to the 18 joules per second.
Well, that's a lot of joules.

You'd say, "Ooh, that's pretty bad."

There's another part of this equation,
though. If you want to ask, "Will it

heat up the core of the Earth?"
Well, you've got to heat it up.

I take all that energy and I dump
it into the mass of the Earth.

Well, it turns out the mass of
the Earth is awfully big too.

The mass of the Earth, a good
approximation is about 10 to

the 27 grams. So you take 10 to
the 18 joules per second for a one

second burst and dump it into 10
to the 27 grams, and the temperature

rise of the Earth would be a massive 10
to the minus 9 or one over one billionth

of a degree Celsius. So, there's
two problems with the movie.

Only two.
(audience laughter)

One is the neutrinos just don't
stop in the core of the Earth.

They don't travel through the
Earth's crust and then selectively

decide to stop in the core.
In fact, they wouldn't stop

in the solar system. They
would keep radiating out

through a light year of
lead or equivalent.

And even if they did, the energy
produced by the sun is nowhere

near enough in neutrinos to
heat up the core of the Earth

or the entire Earth itself. It's a
temperature rise of less than

a degree. Well, a billion times the solar
output would be one degree Celsius.

That's just not enough
to get worried about.

So it sounds good. But
not going to happen.

Now, there's this other quote in
the movie that's actually kind of

enticing. It talks about, what about
this thing where neutrinos transmute

into other nuclear particles?
Actually, that's true.

They don't transmit into microwaves,
though. They transmit into other forms

of neutrinos. So there's another problem.

Yes, if they changed into something else,
you could worry about that heating up

the core of the Earth, but it's
more neutrinos. So they're

not going to interact in
the core of the Earth either.

(audience laughter)

And there are experiments
to show that this happens.

There are experiments like
those of Ray Davis that say,

"We don't see the right number
of neutrinos from the sun hitting

us at the Earth. Our supposition is
that they changed away from the

type of neutrino that Davis was
looking for in his experiment

into another type of neutrino."
There's an experiment that

some of us at UT Austin did that
we made a beam of neutrinos

using an accelerator and we deliberately
aimed it down at the ground. Because

the Earth is fairly transparent to
neutrinos, the neutrinos go through

the su-- the Earth. You know, the
Earth is round. Remember the

Earth is round? Neutrinos go through
the Earth and come out in northern

Minnesota in our beam. And so we placed
a detector in northern Minnesota to look

for the neutrinos launched back in
Chicago, where we have an accelerator

to produce this beam. And once
again, not all the neutrinos arrived.

It's not because they interacted
in the Earth but because they

changed into another flavor of
neutrino that we weren't looking for.

So they disappeared
into another flavor.

And there have been furthermore
experiments-- Whoops, I wanted

to skip that.

Oh, I have to show this quote.

Yeah, that's the one. The one news
station in the United States that

carried a story about our neutrino
experiment said "Physicists Lose

"Some Neutrinos, Gain Some Information."
"Somewhere between Illinois and

"Minnesota, the federal government
lost some neutrinos."

(audience laughter)

Makes it sound like floppy disks
from Los Alamos, doesn't it?

There have been furthermore
experiments done that actually

show that this, when you lose
these neutrinos, they go into

something else halfway through
your experiment. They actually

go back into other forms of
neutrinos. There's an experiment--

Excuse me. The one in Canada that
plotted one of the neutrinos of the

electron type versus the number
of neutrinos of the other types,

and it showed that the sun's neutrinos,
although they all started out as electron

neutrinos, all ended up being
other types of neutrinos.

There's an experiment in Geneva,
Switzerland, where the large Hadron

Collider is located, that did the same,
very similar to us. They had an

accelerator over here. They aimed
the neutrino beam down into the

ground. Instead of going underneath
Madison, Wisconsin, they go through

nice places like Milan and Venice.
And they end up in the southern

boot of Italy, where they have
their neutrino detector. And

they found explicitly that what
they see on the other side is

another type of neutrino, not the
one that the sent in their beam.

So, we know that neutrinos do
transmute to other types of

particles, but those other particles
are neutrinos, so they're not going

to heat up the core of the Earth either.

Now let's talk a little bit about this
Mayan prediction stuff, because

that's important. I don't want you to
get real worried about the end of

days here. Okay?

In the movie, it talks about, that the
Mayans made these predictions

and that there was going to be a
fairly significant event on December

21, 2012, and I didn't show the clip,
but the ultimate story turns out to be

that all the planets will align, and
this will cause some big instability

in the sun, and that's what's going
to cause this big solar eruption.

So, the grains of truth to this are
that the Mayans, like a lot of other

ancient peoples, were excellent
predictors of the trajectories of

the planets in the sky. And they
cataloged many things. In fact,

we all know that they built their
calendars around the motion of

celestial objects. They even built
their temples around when you

would observe the various solstices
and what would you observe the

planet Venus doing and so
on. So, that part is true.

But, it's not necessarily true that
that's going to cause our big

cataclysmic event in 2012.
In fact, some of the other

things that people get very excited
about in the Mayan calendar are

that it's organized into these epics
called b'ak'tuns. I think I probably

pronounced it wrong. And that
one of these things goes through

a complete cycle in 2012.
So the Mayan calendar is

organized in increments of 20.
So this little T-shirt that you can

buy on the web sort of shows
what December 21, 2012 would

be in the Mayan calendar.
The first digit there is the

number of days. The second
digit represents the number

of unials, which is an increment
of 20 days, about a month. The next

digit over is one tun, which is 18
unials, which is 360 days.

So they fudged on the number
20 there so it came out to about

one year. And the next digit
over is called a k'atun, and

that's 20 tuns, and that turns out
to be a certain number of days,

and then there's a thing called a
b'ak'tun, which turns out to be

about 144,000 days. So the
Mayan calendar is built in

these increments of 20, and
one of the suckers is going

to end on December 21, 2012.
Okay? And this is described as

the big apocryphal event because
it is said, "Well, the Mayans predict

"that the end of their calendar is
on this date, and we are in trouble."

Well, there's a couple problems.
One, I don't know that this is

any different from December 31, 1999
when we had lots of confusion and

panic about the year 2000. And second,
scholars differ whether the 13th b'ak'tun

that's supposed to end in 2012
is actually a significant date.

Because that's not necessarily
the end of the Mayan calendar.

In fact, there are some hieroglyphs
in Mayan ruins that have been

discovered, which says that,
in fact, they're supposed to

be 20 of these b'ak'tuns. Because,
again, the calendar is built in

increments of 20.

If that's true, then the end of
the Mayan calendar isn't in

2012 anyway, it's in the year 4772.
(audience laughter)

There's another hieroglyph that's
been discovered in the city of Coba.

This was once a major city in the
Mayan period of 500s and 900s.

And this actually gives more
increments of 20 beyond the

digits that I showed you, and in
fact, there were 20 units of 20.

And that would mean that the age
of the universe according to that

Mayan calendar was -- what was it?
Four times ten to the twenty eighth days.

Which, by the way, is three quintillion
times the age of our known universe.

(laughter)

So, it's possible the Mayans had it
wrong, you know.

(laughter)

We should also look at this whole
story about the solar system being

in alignment and throwing the sun
into some instability. I want you

to look at the picture on the right
that shows the locations of the planets

off this little star charts that
you can get off the web.

Notice, let's see, Pluto is over there.
I also call it a planet because I'm

an old fart. There's Neptune, there's
Uranus, there's Saturn and Jupiter.

The picture on the right is the
same thing on 12/21/2012.

It doesn't look all that different.
Because you know what, it takes

a long time for the outer planets
to go through one cycle.

So, they're not going to be any
more in alignment today --

then than they are today.
Now you say, 'oh. what's the

inner planets that really matter
cause they pull on the sun all

the more?' Well, here's the inner
planets today, and here's the inner

planets in 2012. And they kinda look
no more aligned than -- in fact I think

they look more aligned today, so
you should really be worried.

(laughter)

Alright, the other thing that sometimes
gets talked about is a "Mayan Myth"

is actually the invention of a new age
astrologer which is thing thing called

Planet X or Nibiru, and that is the thing
that's going to throw the sun into some

instability. Planet X fear has been around
since, I don't know, time immemorial.

But this particular astrologer points
to that little hieroglyph there which

has a number of stars in the upper
panel, or number of planets,

and this person says, well that represents
Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, Uranus, Neptune,

Venus, Mars, Earth, Moon, and
Mercury, and then the Planet X.

And there's only one little -- two
little problems with this. Yes?

>> I'm just curious, is that Zecharia
Sitchin you're talking about?

>> Yes. Very good. You've seen that?
>> The Twelfth Planet?

>> Yes.
>> Yeah, I have read that a long time ago.

>> So there's a couple of problems with
Zecharia. One is, the Mayans didn't know

about Uranus, Neptune, or Saturn.
Oh no, Saturn they would've known,

'cause you could see that with your eyes.
So they couldn't have talked about this

tenth planet or twelfth planet because
they didn't even know about planets

eight and nine, or seven and eight. So
this hieroglyph, whatever this is,

doesn't represent the existence of
Planet X in Mayan astronomy.

And furthermore, the ancient culture
in Babylonia, not from Mayan. So --

The other thing I'll say is there are a
lot of other planets -- Planet X's out

there, and we all hear about Pluto,
but Pluto is one of a series of so called

'dwarf planets', which isn't even the
biggest one. There is Eris out there

and it doesn't have anymore likelihood of
crashing into the Earth than Pluto does.

So, let's recap. Where the movie is
correct is that it's really true that

a solar eruption does occur periodically
and these things can be fairly dramatic.

It does happen on an 11-year cycle.
It is true, as said in the movie that

neutrinos are used by scientists to track
the sun. In fact, they were instrumentally

understanding of how the Sun even
works. So that's a pretty cool thing.

It is true that volcanoes and tectonic --
volcanoes and earthquakes would result

as a result of plate tectonic motion.
We've lived with that for all of four

billion years and so that's not news
to us. And it is true that the

Mayan calendar is divided in such a
way that there is an increment

which is going to go through a roll-over
in 2012. However, there is not such thing

as a Mayan prediction of an apocalypse.
In fact, there is no clear indication

that the Mayans even had the idea
of apocalypse in their mythology.

That's very much a Judeo-Christian
thing. There is no scenario that's

proposed in the movie about a planetary
alignment that's even close to true

and this whole thing about neutrino
is causing a heating of the core of

the Earth we should just set aside
as cool science fiction. Okay?

Let me just--

But I will leave you with one scary
thought. There have been a number

of interesting papers lately about
radioactive decay loss that are

apparently changing due to neutrinos.
So, we all hear about exponential decay

of radioactive elements and that in
a half-life of a nuclear element

you lose one-half of that element
as that changes into something else

and it goes through exponential
decay. People have noticed or plotted

over time the following curiosity,
which is that the exponential life-time

of various isotopes tends to go through
a little modulation. In other words, it's

one microsecond one day and it's
0.9 microseconds the next day.

Actually, it goes through a cycle that
depends on where we are in the Earth's

orbit around the Sun. The Earth's orbit
is slightly elliptical, so we are getting

slightly closer closer to slightly far
away -- further away from the Sun.

And furthermore, this exponential
decay law goes through rather abrupt

changes whenever there is a solar flare.
So it's thought, actually it goes through

abrupt change a couple days before
there's a solar flare. And so it's thought

that neutrinos from the Sun are actually
messing with us a little bit, in the form

of interacting with these kind of
radioactive isotopes, such that we

can see it. So, see that.
(laughter)

Okay, I just want to promote one last
thing. There is an event coming up that

I want you to know about. There is an
open-house in the Physics Department

happening on September 28th. All of
you who had to take Into Physics know

that you have to learn about the
acceleration due to gravity. We are

going to measure it that day. We are
going to drop watermelons off the

building and see if it really does
accelerate at 9.8 meters per second-

squared. There is later in the semester
going to be a concert by the group,

(inaudible) here on campus put
on by the Physics Department.

And, with one apology for me poo-
pooing on this movie for so long,

I just want to show you I'm in good
company. Physicists tend to do this

a lot. And whenever I see the T.V show,
'Big Bang Theory', okay. A friend of

mine is the science consultant
for this T.V show.

He sent me this clip.

(inaudible)

Sorry. Where did it go?

>> If you don't have any other plans
do you want to join us for Thai food

and a Superman movie marathon?
>> A marathon? Wow how many

Superman movies are there?
>> You're kidding, right?

>> I do like the one where Lois Lane
falls from the helicopter and Superman

swooshes down to catch her.
Which one was that?

>> [All] One.

(laughter)

>> You realize that scene was rife
with scientific inaccuracy?

>> Yes, I know. Men can't fly.
>> No, no. Let's assume that they can.

(laughter)

>> Lois Lane is falling, accelerating at
an initial rate of 32 feet per second

per second. Superman swoops down
to save her by reaching out two

arms of steel. Miss Lane who is now
traveling approximately 120 miles an hour

hits them and is immediately
sliced into three equal pieces.

(laughter)

>> Unless, Superman matches
her speed and decelerates.

>> In what space, sir, in what space?
She's two feet above the ground.

Frankly, if he really loved her, he'd
let her hit the pavement. It would be

a more merciful death.

(laughter)

(applause)

>> Well with that I'll thank you and
thank you for tolerating my poo-pooing

on this movie for the last hour. So,
I'll take questions if you have them.

>> Couple of house-keeping notes
we have here. Right outside the door,

outside the building there are recycling
containers so if you wouldn't mind taking

your cans and bottles if you're leaving
now. Otherwise, you have time for

questions?
>> Yeah, I'll take a few questions.

>> Questions ahoy!

>> Yeah.
>> The only part of that little myth

(inaudible)

>> Yeah, I think that was just straight
up made up. I don't think that exists.

>> Actually, it does --
>> It does exist?

>> It's been disproven but it exists.
>> So, I mean plate tectonic motion

is a real thing. It's why we have
five continents and not one big

super-continent. It doesn't happen
rapidly. I mean the motion of continents

happens over millions of years. I
don't know much -- you say Hapgood

is actually a real thing?
>> He actually wrote a book. The forward

was by Einstein about the theories'
been disproven. It was actually

literally written in the '50s.
>> Yeah, the one -- thank you for that.

So, I'm wrong on this. There is a hapgood.
The thing that often gets confused about

sudden reorientations of things on the
surface of the Earth. It is true that

magnetic poles move, so North and South
Pole have been all over the place, and

that can change over relatively short
periods of time, but the motions of

the continents are extremely slow. Yeah?
>> So they made the case that the solar

flares were going to amp up
the number of neutrinos.

>> Yep.
>> Since that's surface sort of activity,

is there any connection between solar
flare activity (inaudible).

>> Actually, it's true. That was the last
thing I was trying to show you.

People do see a connection with the
neutrino flux and these kinds of things

like solar flares or coronal mass
ejections. But again, we wouldn't

worry because there's just not that
much energy in neutrinos. Yes sir?

>> Well I thought it was a great
presentation but I did want to

point out (inaudible) Yellow Stone.
>> Yellow Stone is?

>> Yellow Stone National Park
>> I didn't hear the end of the sentence

is all.
>> I said it's just free for an eruption

(inaudible) about 40,000 years ago.
>> Yeah, I didn't want to -- I was feeling

like I was running over time. There is
actually one little kernel of truth here

which is Yellow Stone is a hotspot -- a
volcanic hotpot. And it's one of several

around the surface of the Earth.
Hawaii itself is evidence of a hotspot.

There are places where the crust is
relatively thin and there are these

hot flumes coming up through the
mantle of the Earth. And as the Earth's

crust moves over it, you see a string
of volcanic activity as this crust slides

on by. The hotspot doesn't move, but
the Earth's crust moves. So, in fact, the

entire Hawaii chain, in fact another
related chain of islands that are now

submerged stringing all the way up to
Alaska are evidence of a hotspot and

the Earth's motion over that -- or the
crust motion over that hotspot.

Yellow Stone is another example. There
is a string of volcanoes that you can

trace, that go back, I don't know, 16
million years. And indeed, one wonders

why we haven't had one in a while,
but not one that's going to cause the

end of the Earth, but certainly it is a
source of volcanic activity. Absolutely.

Thank you. Other questions? Yeah.
>> I heard something about the polar,

the North and South Pole
changing positions. Is that true?

>> Yeah, I'm not a real expert here, but
the magnetic field of the Earth is caused

by the turbulent flow of the inner core
of the Earth, and that does adjust

or change in some way. So the Earth looks
like a big bar magnet and sometimes it's

titled this way and sometimes it's tilted
that way. It doesn't have to align with

the spinning axis of the Earth. In fact,
it doesn't even now. And it does move.

So we could see northern lights
here some day.

>> Who was that?

(laughter)

>> Oh you get a koozie for asking
questions? Cool, okay. Yes sir?

>> You said that there were
many types of neutrinos.

>> Three
>> And the different reactivity with

matter.
>> They do, but not in a way --

>> -- would bother us
>> Not in a way that would bother us.

The orders of magnitude difference
from that which would bother us and

where they are is small. So, depending
on the energy of the neutrino and the

flavor of the neutrino yes there is a
slight change in how much they will

interact with other matter, but it's...
>> So which of the neutrinos is emitted

by the Sun?
>> It's the electron neutrino, and the

early experiments that we were looking
for neutrinos from the Sun we're

reasonably looking for electron neutrinos,
and then they failed to detect them. So, as

this hypothesis of neutrinos transmitting
into other things evolve, people built

other types of neutrino detectors that
could see the other types of neutrinos,

and then they were found. Hence, we
are not worried about what it is that they

are transmitting into. It's not evil death
rays or microwaves, or anything like that.

It's other types of neutrinos.
>> It's just interesting for me because I

took an astronomic class way back, and
this happened over (inaudible).

>> You probably would have learned about
this because neutrinos figure very

prominently in astronomy. In fact, there
are more neutrinos in the universe than

there are anything else. And at one time
my field of particle physics was very

preoccupied with neutrinos because when we
thought that they might have a mass that's

a little bit bigger, then those mass of
all the neutrinos added up could have

been more than the rest of the mass of
the universe. In fact, my experiment and

a couple of others proved that that
neutrinos mass is still pretty small,

so not significant on a universal scale.
You probably did hear about that in

astronomy class as a result.
>> Thank you.

>> Yes, do you guys have a
corresponding (inaudible).

>> Yes they do. They have a corresponding
-- all participles have a corresponding

anti-particle.
>> And have you guys observed any

interactions in that at all?
>> Yes, the experiment I am working on

is trying to right now to measure the
difference in the mass between the

anti-particle and the particle. And well,
we're confused because we don't quite

have the same number, so either we
goofed up or there is something cool.

But mostly, that's not expected, and all
particles and anti-particles have the same

mass. Yeah, one last question maybe.
>> How do you obtain all these neutrinos

you use in these experiments with
a particle accelerator.

>> Oh, you take a big blowtorch of protons
and you just throw it at a target like

a big piece of graphite and it produces a
shower of other particles that aren't very

interesting but those other uninteresting
particles decayed in neutrinos.

And so we produce this gas of neutrinos
that goes bursting forward after we shoot

a proton beam at this target. So we do
that all the time. Okay let me with that

thank you all for coming tonight and
wish you a good night.

(applause)