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[Phys-l] The speed of neutrinos




Whenever neutrinos are discussed, it is usually asserted that they travel very close to the speed of light, which was responsible for people thinking they were probably massless. But the statement 'close to the speed of light' is meaningless. A particle is either traveling at the speed of light or it is not, and there are no degrees of closeness to it. So this choice of phrase obviously means that physicists always observe neutrinos to be traveling close to the speed of light in their lab-frame. But how can *all* neutrinos, no matter how and where they were produced, appear in the lab-frame to be traveling close to the speed of light? Surely there should be plenty of neutrinos floating around at nice slow speeds relative to the Earth, right?

Derek