Btw, exactly. Occam's razor
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/... cuts out any such superfluous bs from science. We have a solar neutrino problem,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... , we cannot detect all the neutrinos that are supposed to be flooding us from the Sun, so we suppose that they have a very weak interaction coefficient, but to really fit the graph, we need one more object concocted, a neutrino mass. My college professor said give me 19 independent variables, and I can fit an elephant with a graph. Give me 20, and I can accurately fit the tail too. Occam's razor is against such things. Observational evidence showing neutrinos propagating faster than light is exciting, not disheartening!
The real answer to the solar neutrino problem is that there is no fusion going on inside the Sun. Yeah, you heard that right, time to revise all science textbooks. Or how else do you explain that a tiny little object in the night sky sets off not one, but three neutrino detectors worldwide, but we keep listening to the neutrinos from the Sun and they ain't coming, when in fact the detectors should be flooded and drowned in solar neutrino signals, and ignore distant galaxy events. Fact is there is no fusion going on inside the Sun, the Sun is only hot for the same reason the inside of the Earth is hot: Thorium, Uranium 238 and 235, and Potassium-40. In fact that is why an asteroid is cold, the Moon has no molten lava, because it's too small, nor does Mars, or Mercury, but Venus is sufficiently large to possess one, Earth is larger, and Jupiter, underneath all that hydrogen, is probably even hotter than Earth, and so are probably Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, depending on the size of their silicate-cores. If you dumped a bunch of silicate asteroids with terrestrial abundance of thorium, uranium and potassium-40, together, into an Earth-sized mass, you'd get a planet with a molten inside, and a certain degree of surface temperature just from that, and total heat emissions. If you gathered enough similar asteroids and planets in extra-solar-system space, and dumped it all together to form an object the mass of the Sun, you'd pretty much get a Sun, with 5778 K surface temperature, not just molten volcano lava underneath a cold crust, but the whole surface would be volcano lava. Under such mass the gravity would be big enough to hold back even hydrogen, even at that 5800 K temperature, but as holding more and more back increases size, it increases gravity and increases compression and accelerates the nuclear reactor, i.e., the temperature goes up, and hydrogen gets boiled off and shot off as solar wind, and the Sun has a somewhat steady size, instead of an ever-growing one. Such compression/temperature rise cycles, blowing off hydrogen into outer space, it cooling by thermal radiation, falling back onto the Sun, with very long characteristic times, could explain ice-ages and global warming ages, as hydrogen can take a long trip all the way past Pluto, then stop, then get slowly accelerated back and fall back unto the Sun, and this whole thing could be steady state, but once in a while you have a massive comet or what not bring new fuel, or create a cold spot, or what not, and create minute fluctuations that could self amplify into full scale ice ages. But helium, being 4 times heavier than hydrogen, stays down, so the reason for the 75% hydrogen and 25% He in the Sun is a simple distillation process by molten lava down below, not a fusion conversion of hydrogen to helium, else our neutrino detectors would be screaming and not even noticing a distant SN1987A under the heavy noise. In fact when you look up in the sky and you see all the stars, that's pretty much all the matter there is in the Universe, so to speak, because if it gets massive, it gets hot by the natural abundance of nuclear isotopes, everything massive enough is a natural nuclear reactor fueled by the diffuse, trace, nuclear isotopes in its makeup, and, unless it sets off nearby neutrino detectors, it does not do fusion. The differences in star-sizes and spectrums should be sought along the nuclear isotope concentration topic, the heavier the star to maintain hydrogen-boiloff tempearature, the less the concetration of isotopes, unless it's OK to be a "nude" star, with no hydrogen whatsoever on the surface. Which brings me to the topic of...
... how we measure the absorbtion spectrum of hydrgen in every star's spectrum. Well, I say intergalactic space might be uncondensed, gravitationally un-destablizied, and actually vacuum pressure there might be higher than nearby a star, with more hydrogen per unit volume. Do we know the answer to such things? A voyager-like probe would be nice, but I don't know how you can accurately measure density so low, and in fact you wouldn't know where the dense gas vs. vacuum solar system boundary is, as very near the star, the hydrogen bouncing up and down all the way to Pluto's orbit and back could be considered simply an extended solar flare of a different kind, and part of the star's atmosphere. But intergalactic space might be full of hydrogen, and helium, and we could get the absorbption spectrum that way, not from being in the star itself. Emission spectra, now that's different, but as all emission spectra have to travel through the absorbption spectrum medium, it's hard to make it out. But if they could somehow do it, measuring a star with hydrogen emission spectra means it has surface hydrogen, but lack of evidence, plus high color temperature could mean it's a nude star.
Also, I calculated yesterday that according to the few hours difference, from 168,000 light years (how do they know how far it is?), it comes to 7.7 hrs / (168,000 years*365.25 days/year *24 hrs/day)=7.7 hrs/1472688000hrs =5.23x10^-9, or an index of refraction of 1.00000000523. As hydrogen at 0 C and 1 atm is 1.000132, this gives an extragalactic vaccum hydrogen pressure
of 0.0000396 atm, which seems very high, as most of the references around the web cite much less, in fact they assume intergalactic space is more vacuum than anything, and that the bulk of matter is contained inside galaxies and stars and solar systems. Perhaps this could be that "dark energy" holding together the universe, giving that extra gravity to everything.
As far as getting two neutrino pulses goes, it's obvious that they must be the same pulse, received at two different times. Something drastic happened, and it happening twice is unlikely. The explanation should account for this. The explanation is that there are two different major types of neutrinos detected, going with different speeds based on type. For light, there is the phenomenon of birefringence based on polarization, but that requires an anisotropic medium such as a crystal. It's more likely we simply have different neutrinos. According to the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... there is 3 types of neutrinos, electron assumed to be
If the electron neutrino is really not that interacting and we get a bunch from the Sun, then there could be fusion going on. It all depends on the Lawson criterion. However, how can we tell what the core temperature of the Sun is? Does the temperature of Earth get that much hotter once you go deep enough past the molten lava layer into the iron/nickel/whatever-iridium core? Or is it pretty much steady, because the metal core does not hold those isotopes? (Maybe the Moon was shot out of the Earth, and a lot of the Moon mining would dig up lots of iridium and platinum type things.) So if the Sun has a metal core, which kind of blocks out the hydrogen, does the inside of the Sun ever reach the Lawson criterion?
I'm too sleepy, gonna hit the sleeping sack. Don't have time or energy to proofread,