[lnauta]

One of the lead researchers in KM3NeT mentioned that the particle was emitting 2 horse power in light during detector transit. A typical body builder expends about 1 horse power while performing, so its 2 body builders in a single particle.

[A_D_E_P_T]

> typical body builder expends about 1 horse power while performing

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.

[h0l0cube]

So the neutrino is just doing a PB 1RM?

[lnauta]

Ha, that made me laugh, thanks for the correction!

[idlewords]

Neither could this neutrino.

[zozbot234]

Fun fact, a typical horse exerts about 1 horse power of usable work while performing. That's so weird, I'm sure almost no one would've been able to guess that - but it's true.

(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.)

[mikepurvis]

And a horse can do quite a bit more in peak as well— 1 HP is definitely meant to be the long term continuous output of a typical horse under load, especially a consistent load such as turning a millstone.

[loeg]

That's an all-day number. Peak HP/horse is somewhere in the 6-15 range.

[somat]

The funny thing is that a typical horse probably has closer to 2 or 3 horsepower and a big chonkin draft horse up to 4 or 5 times.

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?)

[wiredfool]

Track cyclists (sprinters, world class) do 2KW+ peak for a few seconds at a time. That's potentially ~3HP. (and while doing so, average more than 70kph over a 200m distance)

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

It must have been a very short amount of time. 2 HP is 1,500 watts, probably more light than all lightbulbs in my house combined.

[lnauta]

The muon traverses a few hundred meters of detection volume very close to the speed of light, so in the order of one microsecond.

[idlewords]

1500 watts is about what an electric kettle uses.

[mr_toad]

American kettles. Kettles in hard core countries push 2300 to 2400 watts ;-)

[astrange]

American stove startups can do it in 40 seconds with ??? watts by precharging a battery.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdawGen0QPc

[idlewords]

Slow-boiled water gives superior flavor!

[kevin_thibedeau]

Keeps the midichlorians from jumping out.

[moi2388]

I always cook my water sous-vide

[wiredfool]

Meh, Lidl sells 3200w kettles.

[Daneel_]

Where are the three phase models??

Seriously though, a 15A kettle sounds great.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Photonicinduction's 10-second kettle[1] managed about 10kW max (took around 5s to boil water) for a short time, 440V 23A. Then the resistance dropped, it went up to 16kW (426V 33A) and popped. 7-8kW (375V 19A to 400V 20A) seemed more sustainable.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDLw1Rx_cAI

[sitharus]

UK 240V with 13A sockets, 3120W. Sounds like Lidl are rounding up.

[whyenot]

So, 2,000 milliSchwarzeneggers if we use SI units?

[gattr]

Yes, but please observe SI rules [1]: it's millischwarzeneggers.

> 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#...

[m3kw9]

Can we harvest that energy?

[__MatrixMan__]

Not for that particular neutrino, it's gone. But yes, my home (and yours) is being heated by neutrino power as we speak. It's not a significant enough amount of energy to make a dent in the utility bill however.

[Sharlin]

Most inefficient thermal power plant possible: utilize the difference in neutrino flux between the hemisphere that's open to space vs. the hemisphere where Earth is in the way.

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).

[__MatrixMan__]

On the contrary, it would have to be efficient indeed to do anything useful underneath all of the shielding that we'd need to keep those baser forms of radiation at bay. Gamma rays: yuck.

[AnimalMuppet]

This particle spread this energy through a volume of seawater a few km deep in the Mediterranean. It's going to raise the temperature of that volume a few billionths of a degree, if that. So, no, we can't.

[the_arun]

What if our existing solar panels are optimized to detect these? Then will it improve the quality of solar panels to capture more energy from sunlight as well? Sorry, I'm no expert in this - asking more of a curiosity.

[tsimionescu]

There's nothing to optimize here, neutrinos just interact very very weakly with anything else because they don't carry charge (so no electrical interactions), don't carry color charge (so no nuclear interactions), don't carry weak charge (so no weak force interactions) and have tiny tiny masses, but they are still bosons (so don't act as field carriers like photons do, they're just regular matter). Their low chance of interacting with matter is a fundamental property of them, there's nothing you can do about it through technology, just like you can't create heavier electrons or weaker quarks.

[gus_massa]

> don't carry weak charge (so no weak force interactions)

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.

[tsimionescu]

Thanks for the correction!

[tadfisher]

Neutrinos interact extremely weakly with ordinary matter, which is why the detectors are typically huge volumes of water. Even then, the neutrinos interact with the purpose-built detectors on the order of one in a trillion. A neutrino power generator is not a feasible thing to build.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Unless you're next to an exploding star, in which case you have other problems/opportunities.

[ars]

It's an enormous amount of energy packed into a single tiny particle.

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.

[mr_toad]

If we had the ability to detect neutrinos in such a small volume as a solar panel they’d be immensely valuable for communication - we’d be able to beam signals directly through the Earth, or through deep water.

[calebio]

Following that same line, if we had that ability, it would be useful for communicating to deep submarines like the U.S. used to do with Project Sanguine[0] and ELF waves :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sanguine

[__MatrixMan__]

It might improve the quality of neutrino astronomy to have the world's solar panels also be neutrino detectors.

[rq1]

Particle on steroids.