I started with:
sqrt(1-((1/(1+120 PeV / (neutrino mass * c^2)))^2))
120 PeV to 120e15 * 1.602176634e-19 kg m^2 s^-2
neutrino mass to 1.25e-37kg
speed of light to 299792458 m/s
0.999999999999999999999999999999999999829277971
If you want details about the way this is calculated, I dug up the formula from an article I'd written about particle velocities in the LHC, back in 2008[2]. For comparison, their 7 TeV protons were going at 0.999999991 × c.
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=sqrt%281-%28%281%2F%281...
[2] https://log.kv.io/post/2008/09/12/lhc-how-fast-do-these-prot...
Time is in seconds, length in meters, temperature in kelvin, etc. A unit of energy like a joule is then defined using these base units, so 1 joule is 1⋅kg⋅m^2⋅s^-2.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/02/most-energetic-neutr...
And an interesting, somewhat related, video from PBS Space Time exploring how supernovas act as particle accelerators (but don't quite explain particles like this one or the 'Oh My God' particle):
They have 1/500,000 the mass of electrons. They interact only through the super short range weak force (and gravity). Nearly 5% of fission energy is expressed in neutrinos.
And, they may be their own antiparticles, meaning they can potentially annihilate each other.
Wild that these things can carry so much energy!
Oh, but those five...
So you're saying my iPhone built-in calculator app is going to have problems....?
Time to whip out dc on the terminal.
Your Android phone's built-in calculator app, however, will not. :^)
Not even sure if that's worth doing, either create/emit or use encode data into them as they fly by to be received by someone else
Edit: that's cool people have tried though
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_OPERA_faster-than-light_n...
which was something that would have happened in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steins;Gate
Funny the idea that the neutrino might be a tachyon never seems to go away. The best fit of OPERA results is within error bars of the speed of light but towards the superluminal side. Superluminal neutrinos of the energy they were generating with the kind of mass we expect wouldn't be going measurably faster than the speed of light.
I visited the site of this experiment
https://permalink.lanl.gov/object/tr?what=info:lanl-repo/lar...
where the best fit for the squared mass was just a tiny bit negative but within bounds of zero. There is the classic 1985 Chodos paper
https://www.academia.edu/27606971/The_neutrino_as_a_tachyon?...
and people still keep writing papers about it
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/14/6/1172
somebody is going to have to measure a positive mass squared to really put a stake in its heart.
Doesn't need to be submerged in a body of water as large as this. The Super-Kamiokande[0] detector for instance is located in a body of water inside a mountain.
Close, but ackshually...
Bodybuilders just oil up and pose in beauty pageants.
1 horsepower is basically one 250-pound bench press in one second. (550 foot pounds of work; the aforementioned bench press assumes a 2.2-foot stroke length.)
Most bodybuilders and serious weight lifters can do that, but they can't keep it up for long.
(To be clear, that's sustained effort over time, not just momentary. Athletically trained humans can do about 1 HP of peak momentary effort, and around 0.3 HP if sustained over time.)
From nothing, to detectable, to lethal, to big boom?
My intuition would be "detectable" but I don't know enough to do the maths.
And by the way, I am using the mass-energy, not proper mass, because the question is crazy enough not to even consider what would be the mass of a neutrino.
The probability of interaction of neutrinos with matter increases with the energy. I've asked o1 to estimate the mean free path of a 120 PeV neutrino in water and it came up with 1000km. So let's say, conservatively, that 10^-7 of the total energy gets deposited in your body when the beam goes through. The mass equivalent of a ping pong ball is about 2.5x10^14 J, which gives us 2.5x10^7 J total, or about 6kg TNT equivalent. This is only an order-of-magnitude estimate, but it would definitely not be healthy.
So BIG boom.
Since the velocity is so close to the speed of light, you can think of this like the energy released by annihilating a ping pong ball made of antimatter.
Edit: Commenter asked what would happen if they "hit", so I'm assuming a hypothetical 100% collision. But yes to stop 1/e of a neutrino beam with normal matter, you'd need a light year of lead.
Unless you get thrown back by ping pong balls normally, I think you'd be fine.
But also neutrinos don't typically collide with things very easily, they're more likely to pass through you without you ever knowing.
Its in section 4: Jam-Resistant Underwater Communication
The drawback is the impractical size and cost of a receiver.
But the main source is from cosmic rays and local radiation sources in the ceramic packaging and/or decaying elements in the metal frame/leads/solder.
James Watt just picked the smallest possible value of horse when defining the unit so he could sell more steam engines.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qxTKtlvaVE (donut, How Much Horsepower is a Horse?)
> This means that they should be typeset in the same character set as other common nouns (e.g. Latin alphabet in English, Cyrillic script in Russian, etc.), following the usual grammatical and orthographical rules of the context language. For example, in English and French, even when the unit is named after a person and its symbol begins with a capital letter, the unit name in running text should start with a lowercase letter (e.g., newton, hertz, pascal) and is capitalised only at the beginning of a sentence and in headings and publication titles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#...
In the wrong spot, this sounds to me like it kills you?
Nothing to be afraid of, of course, for the reason you mentioned. Just wondering, xkcd "what if" style
How they got so much energy in the first place is kind of an open question. Generally it involves magnetic fields and shock fronts, getting a little kick each time (but yes, you also have to avoid disintegrating the nucleus in the acceleration environment!)
The MFP of a 120 PeV neutrino in lead would be something like 10 kilometers, I think.
How about saving few hundred ms across the earth?
Arguably, an ugly wart, but one we are stuck with for historical reasons. The base units of the original metric system (metre and gram) were poorly proportioned for practical use, resulting in the two main scientific/engineering systems of metric units both choosing to prefix one base unit - the centimetre-gram-second (cgs) system chose to prefix the metre, the metre-kilogram-second (mks) system chose to prefix the gram, and eventually mks won out over cgs and evolved into SI.
Whatever warts SI has, they are nothing compared to the chaos of the Imperial/customary system
What is the dealbreaker here though? Because we have plenty of "poorly proportioned" SI units anyway; e.g. it would be much more practical to have megapascal, microfarad and megajoule as base units from an engineering pov (particle physicists might disagree;).
Ideally, the base units should be prefixless. Except for kilogram, they all are.
Imagine a system exactly the same as SI, except instead of the kilogram, it had the kram, where 1 kram = 1 kilogram... then the gram would be the millikram, the milligram would become microkram, the microgram would become the nanokram, etc... if you were starting from scratch, without any historical baggage, wouldn't such a system be superior? But of course, we aren't starting without historical baggage – almost everybody knows what a kilogram is, kram is a word I just now made up.
I think some derived units being "poorly proportioned" is inevitable given the physics we have.
That's a single, albeit large, gold mining pit and a fraction of the even greater volume excavated by humans looking for shiny stuff.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092765051...
Low energy tachyons would go a little faster, but you've got the additional problem of explaining why neutrinos got emitted in a spectral line.
In the beginning, the liter was a much more frequently used unit of volume than the cubic meter.
A liter was defined as the volume of a kilogram of water. In a system were the gram was the unit of mass, the corresponding unit of volume was the milliliter.
Which of the gram and the kilogram or which of the centimeter and meter were chosen as the units of mass and length did not matter much for mechanical units, in the way they were used in practice in the 19th century.
A definite choice of the base units has become important only after a bunch of new physical quantities have been defined for use in the theories of electricity, magnetism, heat and light, in the second half of the 19th century. When dealing with so many different physical quantities, not using unique base units would have caused too much confusion. While this necessity has been recognized, for many years 2 different choices for the base units were widespread, that based on meter-kilogram (used mostly by engineers) and that based on centimeter-gram (used mostly by theoreticians). Meter and kilogram were more typical for the sizes of practical machines, while centimeter and gram were more typical for the sizes of laboratory experiments.
But now I'm wondering what percentage of the useful thermal power in a nuclear power plant is produced by the neutrinos created in the reactions (the infinitesimally small fraction that happen to interact with the matter within the reactor, that is).
But it's still just a single tiny particle, so it's not a lot of total energy.
It's like how you can lift a heavy weight for a second, but that's all you can do. You would need to be able to lift it for hours to be useful as a replacement for a crane. Same idea: Intensity vs total work.
Seriously though, a 15A kettle sounds great.
Don't care. Still have the old ones, and whatever the electrician wired as '120V 3-phase AC' for the full US-style range in the US.
Left neutrino have weak hypercharge, so they are produce by weak interactions and are detected using the weak interaction. And also gravity.
Right neutrinos (if they exist) have no weak hypercharge so they only interact by gravity.