| Oh, duh. I can follow that logic now. The meat of my question is much dumber though: How do we know the "Same" neutrino is oscillating? We don't even have concrete understanding of how they would have mass, and different existing concepts of how it could be are problematic. There's so much the standard model isn't sufficient for, in terms of explanations and predictions and categorization, that it always feels odd to me when we shove another weird thing into the "Particle" bucket. It's also a dumb complaint though. A lot of deficiencies probably come down to simply not having enough good data to distinguish different ideas. It's hard to get good data with something that "Barely interacts" with anything else, by definition. Also maybe my complaint is entirely semantic, that a naturally unfinished or incomplete theory is presented as "We know". If you model a scientific theory developing over time, are we still so early that neutrino oscillation could actually be entirely different? Or do we actually have the data to demonstrate that "No, a singular neutrino absolutely changes to different flavors over time, nothing else could cause the effects we see in X, Y and Z demonstrations"? Like, I have sky high confidence that the standard model captures and predicts things like electrons and protons and quarks extremely well, so it always feels dissonant when we see things get weird like this, but also nature doesn't promise us coherent rules, just consistent ones. Reality could very well be full of crummy edge cases. Just sucks that I'll be dead before we really figure most of this stuff out. Also WTF even is time.... Why does something that is in one state, sometimes, be in a different state.... Is it even real? You can travel through space because you can have a spacial velocity, and that velocity can change through forces acted upon you, but is it even possible for there to be an analogous set of forces that can change your "Time velocity".... I'll have to buy my physicist friend a drink so I can have him laugh at me for weird, half baked philosophy questions that aren't really valid. |
Given a flux of neutrinos, e.g. coming from the Sun or from a nuclear reactor, one can use the different kinds of neutrino detectors to estimate the total flux and the fractions of the three kinds.
With another set of detectors put somewhere else, at a great distance along the direction of propagation of the neutrino flux, i.e. where those neutrinos arrive later, one can measure again the fractions of the total flux.
If one measures different fractions, and knowing the propagation time between the 2 locations, one can conclude that oscillations exist and measure the frequency of the oscillations.
Nonetheless, this is much easier said than done, All neutrino experiments have extremely poor signal-to-noise ratios and all their results are affected by great uncertainties.
The theory about the existence of the neutrino oscillations had been originally proposed as an explanation for the fact that the flux of neutrinos coming from the Sun was about 3 times smaller than predicted by the modelling of the fusion reactions inside the Sun.
Later, experimental results from measuring the fractions of the different neutrino kinds at distant locations appeared to support the oscillation hypothesis.