So China buried a glass ball the size of a house 700 meters under a mountain — the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory, JUNO — to catch antineutrinos squirting out of two nuclear plants next door. Fine. The particle weighs about 10⁻³⁷ kilograms. The detector weighs 20,000 tons. That's a ratio of 2×10⁸. I did it on paper.
Two cubic kilometers of rock excavated. For one oscillation measurement. Published in Nature like that's normal.
Kate Scholberg at Duke calls it "exquisite." Kate flies to Tokyo twice a year for Hyper-Kamiokande meetings that could be a Zoom, and I have seen her itinerary. Liangjian Wen at least lives near his hole.
The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment in South Dakota is digging a bigger one. Concrete is 8% of global emissions. Each gram of antineutrino mass measured this decade will cost roughly one Belgium.
I am not against knowing the mass. I am against pretending the mountain was free.
Based on the original article "Giant Underground Detector Releases First Major Findings on Ghost Particles".
