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Article: Hunt for missing matter turns to neutrinos.(The Dallas Morning News)
- Article from:
- Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
- Article date:
- June 12, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Poetry is supposed to be eternal. Poets, therefore, should be careful when writing about science.
Take John Updike, who in 1960 published a light-hearted look at the subatomic particles called neutrinos.
"Neutrinos, they are very small/They have no charge and have no mass/And do not interact at all," reads his poem "Cosmic Gall."
But the poem was already out of date when Updike wrote it. Neutrinos do, in fact, interact with other matter. That's how scientists first detected the neutrino, four years before "Cosmic Gall" appeared.
And in the past two years, scientists have found that neutrinos have mass after all. Far from being a mere ...