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How the Neutrino’s Tiny Mass Could Help Solve Big Mysteries

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.

The KATRIN experiment is closing in on the mass of the neutrino, which could point to new laws of particle physics and reshape theories of cosmology.Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe

Of all the known particles in the universe, only photons outnumber neutrinos. Despite their abundance, however, neutrinos are hard to catch and inspect, as they interact with matter only very weakly. About a thousand trillion of the ghostly particles pass through your body every second—with nary a flinch from even a single atom.

“The fact that they’re ubiquitous, yet we don’t even know what they weigh, is kind of crazy,” said , a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago and

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