Just how often are you hit by a neutrino?
February 15, 2010 | 3:17 pm
Just a little snippet of information I picked up at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, DC, this weekend:
Chris Walter of Duke University says that the probability of a neutrino interacting with your body at some point in your life is about 1 in 4. So look around your friends–how many of them have been hit by a neutrino?
Keep in mind that neutrinos are flooding through you generally without interacting–about 100 trillion per second. That translates to something like 2.5 x 1021 neutrinos pass through you in your lifetime.
With a few simple estimates, we can convert that to say that the chance of a particular neutrino actually interacting with you is about 1 in 1 trillion trillion. That number is so extreme I can’t even really imagine it so I’ll just wonder for the rest of my life whether I’ve been one of the people lucky enough to be hit by a neutrino.
David Harris
Posted in APS April 2010 |
2 Comments »
February 16th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
If the chance of something happening is one in
every 10^^21 candidates and there are 10^^14
candidates per second, then it will happen about
every 10^^7 seconds, which is only ~116 days. So
everybody gets “hit” by about three neutrinos a
year. Maybe you need thicker tinfoil in your hat.
February 17th, 2010 at 7:22 pm
@Frank: Ack, my mistake was converting 10^^24 into words as 1 billion trillion! I have corrected this above. Thanks!