Late last week, “Ray Davis died at 91 from complications due to Alzheimer’s”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/02/nyregion/02davis.html?ex=1150171200&en=40a0b519ebe85d99&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVERFEATURES. Dr. Davis is legendary in the field of physics for his painstaking devotion to the study of neutrino production in the sun. His work with physicist “John Bahcall”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_N._Bahcall demonstrated that the prediction of neutrino flux from the Standard Solar Model (SSM) overestimated the observed flux here on earth. This simple observation, driven by a desire to check the nuclear engine in our sun, led to one of the most mysterious and exciting discoveries of the last decade: “neutrinos have a very tiny, but non-zero, mass, which allows them to mix one into another”:http://www.interactions.org/quantumuniverse/qu/questions/q7.html.
The existence of neutrino mass, while it can be accomodated by the Standard Model of Particle Physics, is not itself well-connected to the origin of mass in the quarks and leptons. This presents a new landscape of puzzles, from the origin of mass in the universe to the asymmetric “relationship between matter and antimatter”:http://www.interactions.org/quantumuniverse/qu/questions/q9.html.
So many questions, so little time in a single human life. Thank you, Ray, for giving a new generation of physicists something to live for. May we do the same for our own scientific progeny.
