alt Hacker NewsIt's trivial to add a matrix to account for neutrino masses, but that doesn't explain their origin.
That is not a trivial problem at all. It certainly has not been solved, and it's possible experiments will say "Both the current ideas are wrong."
It's trivial to add a matrix to account for neutrino masses, but that doesn't explain their origin.
That is not a trivial problem at all. It certainly has not been solved, and it's possible experiments will say "Both the current ideas are wrong."
> It's trivial to add a matrix to account for neutrino masses
The matrix you are thinking of is presumably the PMNS matrix [1]. It's equivalent to the CKM matrix for quarks [2]. The purpose of both is to parametrize the mismatch between flavor [3] and mass eigenstates, not "to account for neutrino masses" or "explain their origin".
As far as the standard model is concerned, neutrino masses and quark masses all originate from Yukawa couplings [4] with the Higgs field. Adding such terms to Weinberg's original model of leptons is very much a trivial exercise, and was done already well before there was solid evidence for non-zero neutrino masses.
> it's possible experiments will say "Both the current ideas are wrong."
Assuming that by "Both current ideas" you mean Dirac vs Majorana mass, those are the only available relativistic invariants. For both to be wrong, special relativity would have to be wrong. Hopefully I don't need to explain how extraordinarily unlikely that is.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontecorvo%E2%80%93Maki%E2%80%...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabibbo%E2%80%93Kobayashi%E2%8...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavour_(particle_physics)
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukawa_coupling