Last week’s announcement that the Nobel Prize
in physics had gone to the experimenters who first observed neutrino
oscillations reminded me that I hadn’t covered the relevant physics in this
blog. So here we go.
I told you what neutrinos are here,
and I covered quantum superpositions of spacetime points here.
In quantum mechanics a superposition of states is also a state, so
superpositions of points are also points. Particles are resonances of points. In
the latter post I showed how protons and neutrons and other baryons are resonances
of superpositions of three points. Mesons are resonances of superpositions of
two points. Electrons are resonances of single points. Thus, spacetime is
really a superposition of spacetimes for different values of n, where every
point in a particular spacetime is a superposition of n single or pure points.
All of the particles observed so far are in the n = 1, 2, or 3 spacetimes,
although there has been a recent report of a possible n = 5 sighting.
