JUNO: the hunt for the universe's most elusive particles

朱诺:探寻宇宙中最神秘粒子的追寻

Babbage from The Economist

2025-09-04

40 分钟
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单集简介 ...

Neutrinos are elementary particles that are extremely light and rarely interact with anything else. Mostly, they pass invisibly through the universe—hundreds of trillions of neutrinos will have passed through your body as you read this. For physicists, though, these ghostly particles present a big problem. The prevailing theory of particle physics, the Standard Model, predicts that neutrinos should have no mass—but this is not what physicists observe in the real world. Now, scientists at JUNO, an enormous new lab in China, have started to hunt for the elusive particles and, in doing so, they hope to solve this giant conundrum in fundamental physics. Host: Alok Jha, The Economist's science and technology editor, with Emilie Steinmark, The Economist's science correspondent. Contributors: Juan Pedro Ochoa-Ricoux of the University of California, Irvine; Wang Yifang and Yuekun Heng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts. Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+.
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  • The Economist So a few weeks ago I flew out from London to Hong Kong and then I made my way by car across the border into the mainland into China's Guangdong province just on the southern coast.

  • That's Emily Steinmark, the Economist Science Correspondent.

  • And you get to see a lot of different stuff.

  • You drive past Shenzhen, which is like this super futuristic city.

  • and then arrive in a very rural mountainous farmland.

  • People tending the land by hand, you know,

  • with their shirts off, little black goats just roaming freely,

  • and just beyond the fields, incredibly thick and dense green forest covering these mountains.

  • And it was at the foot of one of these mountains that I boarded a little yellow train.

  • The slope is 40%, so it's a little deep.

  • You can see the railway.

  • I was with my guide at the site.

  • He was an engineer and a physicist and it's about a little over a kilometer this train.

  • And it doesn't take you through the hills or kind of show you this amazing landscape.

  • It goes underneath one of the mountains.

  • It's quite a loud journey.

  • And then you exit and you're in this massive, quite cold, quite damp network of tunnels.

  • Let's see if there is a tunnel.

  • Yes.

  • It's sealed to the hole.