| I'm not a physicist so take it with a grain of salt: > 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"? We are still early in the sense of "why neutrinos have mass" but the evidence for neutrino oscillation itself is very strong. The classic experiment is measuring the neutrino flux coming off of our sun: the total neutrino flux matches solar-model expectations but without neutrino oscillation, the electron neutrino flux does not, and the missing fraction depends on distance divided by energy. The T2K experiment has measured the oscillation of a muon neutrino beam over about 300km and the Daya Bay experiments measured electron anti-neutrino oscillation from nuclear reactors over a distance of several kilometers. At this point the evidence required to overturn neutrino oscillation would have to be extraordinary. > 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. My understanding is that the mathematical machinery created to explain quark flavors is also used to explain neutrino flavors, so we're not dealing with a unique snowflake in physics. |