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Can neutrinos and force carriers be responsible for the decay of an atom in a butterfly effect sort of way?
Can neutrinos and force carriers be responsible for the decay of an atom in a butterfly effect sort of way?
I've read that scientists consider when an atom decays, that what causes it, why, and precisely when it happens can't be known and that this is the basis of the famous Schrodinger's cat thought experiment and where it relates to interpreting quantum states.
Yet, take something like neutrinos. They're tiny, and billions pass through pass every second in only centimeters of space. A quick google tells me
The solar neutrino flux for us on Earth is about 65 billion neutrinos, passing through just one square centimeter of area on earth, every second.
Now, I know (again, in simpler terms) that it would take roughly a lightyear's thickness of lead to stop a neutrino. The relative size of the neutrino (or well, the distance it interacts with other particles) and that of the nucleus of lead atoms is huge in the difference between the two, that a lightyear's worth of lead is needed to fill up the potential gaps.
So neutrino's interact very little with much else it seems. Yet with so many that exist and whiz around, what's not to say that over the course of 4.5 billion years for uranium for example, that a neutrino (or several) interacts with the nucleus and causes it to decay? We can't measure that because we wouldn't be able to see this happen, but what's not to say it may be the case?
I'm picturing atoms at their scale with a constant wind of neutrinos and other particles (like force carriers) and that radioactive atoms are simply unstable heaps that over time fall apart because of these winds, and that its simply very difficult or even impossible to probe what exact particle in the wind did what, like a sort of butterfly effect for atoms.
submitted by LuridTeaParty [link] [comment] Source: reddit answers: a knowledgebase built on reddit