Just how DOES the sun shine?

Sequel to the post "THIS is Quantum mechanics".

For at least twenty years, we did not know how the sun worked, ie shone.

Yes, we had the equations, the PP1 and PP2 chains, and the C-N-O Bi-cycle, all nuclear physics equations, which predicted so many neutrinos.

So Dr Paul Davies in 1967 made the most interesting telescope ever. A huge tank of carbon tetrachloride buried in an old mine in Dakota.

Just to detect the neutrinos.

The problem was about those darn neutrinos, the smallest particles in the multi-cosmiverse. No mass, no charge, only "spin". They pass through lead without hitting anything in it for at least 18 million million miles.

And for years, Dr Davies detected about a third of the quantity predicted by our equations.

We could not figure it out.

Then a breakthrough.

It was put forward that maybe we detected only "electron" related neutrinos.

In order to understand this, it had to be realised that we now know there are three different types of neutrinos. What they are is no important.

What IS important is that the neutrinos coming from the sun were actually a "quantum superposition" of all three.

Dr Davies' telescope was only detecting one of them.

So, other experiments were set up to detect at least one of the others ( the third one is so rare, to detect them was almost impossible).

And we found it. This bumped up the number coming from sun to about two-thirds of what the equations predicted.

The next surprise was that there came results from experiments that hinted at an actual MASS for the neutrino. This changed things, as if the neutrino had an actual mass, the neutrino could "oscillate" between all three varieties, just like the K-0 meson could.

That would explain why we could only detect a third of the neutrinos. We would only detect the electron neutrinos.

Bearing in mind that the "oscillation" period depended on the reciprocal of the mass difference ( as measured by the K-0 effect), this explained an awful lot.

Finally, we had worked out just "how" the sun shone!!!!