1 Introduction
5
the time of Newton and later. For a while, there were great disputes about who
invented calculus first. The so-called calculus controversy began simmering in
1699, and broke out into full force in 1711. Leibniz published it first, in 1684,
but Newton claimed that he started working on it as early as 1666. Leibniz
died a frustrated man for not getting any credit during that time, although
nowadays credit is given to both of them.
About a century later came Charles Augustin de Coulomb, and in the
following century came Michael Faraday and James Clark Maxwell, who
explained what makes the sky fill up with lightening. Gravity, electricity, and
magnetism were the only kinds of phenomena known at that time. So for
example, they could not tell us what makes the sun shine every day and helps
it keep on shining without ever shutting down, or whether it will ever shut
down. That was a matter of great interest in the nineteenth century. For
example, Lord Kelvin and Herman Helmholtz pursued the idea that it could
be due to gravitational contraction, but found that that could only help the
sun shine for some ten million years, and not the billions of years that it has
been shining for. Uncovering the actual mechanism took several more decades,
far into the twentieth century. The answer to this question is intimately tied
to the subject of this book, the neutrino. We discuss it later on. We now know
almost completely the answer to this question and also to the question: will
the sun ever stop shining and if so when? We will delve into this towards the
end of this book.
The sun, like other stars, was born from the cosmic dust, four and a half
billion years ago, when the universe was filled mostly with hydrogen, helium,
Lithium, and little else. The sun now also pretty much contains the same
elements. The story of the cosmos before and after the formation of hydrogen
and helium is a fascinating one that we go into later in the book. The Earth
and other planets were born from the disc around the sun by accreting and
processing “dust” from nearby matter (so the theory goes). But Earth has a
lot more stuff than hydrogen and helium. The Earth, which was a dust ball,
became solid and developed an atmosphere that has a lot of nitrogen, oxygen,
carbon dioxide along with other gases. This is a story that partly involves
our topic, the neutrino. The neutrino in many ways helped to make Earth a
comfortable place to live with all various chemical elements. Also in our daily
life, we use chemical elements much heavier than hydrogen and helium—
such as carbon, iron, nickel, etc. Where did they come from? How did a dusty
universe that in its first few minutes of “life” was full of only hydrogen and
helium, end up producing these heavier elements, so artfully organized in the
periodic table of Mendeleev? The answer to many of these questions appears to
be held by the tiny elusive particle, the neutrino. The birth and growth of the
5
the time of Newton and later. For a while, there were great disputes about who
invented calculus first. The so-called calculus controversy began simmering in
1699, and broke out into full force in 1711. Leibniz published it first, in 1684,
but Newton claimed that he started working on it as early as 1666. Leibniz
died a frustrated man for not getting any credit during that time, although
nowadays credit is given to both of them.
About a century later came Charles Augustin de Coulomb, and in the
following century came Michael Faraday and James Clark Maxwell, who
explained what makes the sky fill up with lightening. Gravity, electricity, and
magnetism were the only kinds of phenomena known at that time. So for
example, they could not tell us what makes the sun shine every day and helps
it keep on shining without ever shutting down, or whether it will ever shut
down. That was a matter of great interest in the nineteenth century. For
example, Lord Kelvin and Herman Helmholtz pursued the idea that it could
be due to gravitational contraction, but found that that could only help the
sun shine for some ten million years, and not the billions of years that it has
been shining for. Uncovering the actual mechanism took several more decades,
far into the twentieth century. The answer to this question is intimately tied
to the subject of this book, the neutrino. We discuss it later on. We now know
almost completely the answer to this question and also to the question: will
the sun ever stop shining and if so when? We will delve into this towards the
end of this book.
The sun, like other stars, was born from the cosmic dust, four and a half
billion years ago, when the universe was filled mostly with hydrogen, helium,
Lithium, and little else. The sun now also pretty much contains the same
elements. The story of the cosmos before and after the formation of hydrogen
and helium is a fascinating one that we go into later in the book. The Earth
and other planets were born from the disc around the sun by accreting and
processing “dust” from nearby matter (so the theory goes). But Earth has a
lot more stuff than hydrogen and helium. The Earth, which was a dust ball,
became solid and developed an atmosphere that has a lot of nitrogen, oxygen,
carbon dioxide along with other gases. This is a story that partly involves
our topic, the neutrino. The neutrino in many ways helped to make Earth a
comfortable place to live with all various chemical elements. Also in our daily
life, we use chemical elements much heavier than hydrogen and helium—
such as carbon, iron, nickel, etc. Where did they come from? How did a dusty
universe that in its first few minutes of “life” was full of only hydrogen and
helium, end up producing these heavier elements, so artfully organized in the
periodic table of Mendeleev? The answer to many of these questions appears to
be held by the tiny elusive particle, the neutrino. The birth and growth of the