My geotomographic friend Daedalus:* Ariadne Homage Post

"The prefect homeopathic remedy for radiation exposure would be a neutrino beam". This was the thought that sprung unbidden into my head this morning, during the brief period of febrile lucidity that comes after the realisation that certain members of the household forgot to clean the coffee-grinder after using it for their morning-glory seeds. AGAIN.

Eight hours later, once I'd found my clothes, I realised that if Riddled Industries is to profit by exploiting the media-hyped fears of a credulous and ill-informed public then we'd best get cracking, because other charlatans entrepreneurs were already promoting homeopathic protection against fall-out from Japan.
Also the colloidal-silver merchants are climbing aboard the FAILwagon;
the chelation-therapy marketers;
and the disease-is-acidosis crowd with their emergency-pack water alkalinisers. VILE UNSCRUPULOUS OPPORTUNISTIC SCUM. Ah, but neutrino beams... what could be more homeopathic than a form of radiation that hardly even interacts with matter??

So as you see, we are scrambling to complete the Riddled circular β-beam neutrino factory with dual demon proton-injector systems. When the gimbals on the decay loop are installed, we will be able to point the neutrinos [produced by the decay of the relativistic muon beam, in turn produced by the protons' collision with the high-Z targets A] at the GPS coordinates of a paying customer anywhere in the world and they will receive their prophylactic dosage immediately, the intervening presence of the Earth making almost no difference to beam intensity.² Let's see our 'pHmiracle' competitors match that level of customer convenience!

We have opted for the β-beam geometry rather than a superbeam or Tevatron design because Canterbury Jack's Demolition Spares and Superconducting Magnets Emporium had a sale on 201-MHz RF cavities.

The photograph does not show Evangeline van Holsteren. She is off to the side, telling us that no-one would be that credulous because everyone knows that we are already bathed in a flux of neutrinos from umpteen sources. Also we are loonies. HA they laughed at Galileo too.

Mind you, there are serious plans to use that ~1% attenuation to map the interior of the Earth. And as well as Neutrino Absorption Tomography, there is Neutrino Oscillation Tomography, which I shall not go into because it involves the poorly-specified parameter θ₁₃ and has no marketable implications for homeopathy.

Walter Winter is the scientist best associated with the scheme. For us old-timers, however, Dr Winter is a Johnny-come-lately and we fondly remembered the original 1983 paper by De Rújula, Glashow, Wilson & Charpak.³ Rather than detect the neutrino beam and measure its attentuation directly, their plan was to use an array of microphones and pulse the beam while listening for the faint sounds that would be emitted from oil and gas fields in the Earth's crust as they absorb neutrino energy.


* Viz. Amusingly, the example used in the Whackyweedia to illustrate "Daedalus's" inventions is actually misremembered from Flann O'Brian.

² About 1% attenuation of a beam of 1-TeV neutrinos after it has passed though the globe from the Antipodes to the Podes.

³ Not accessible in electronic copy because the bastridges who publish Physics Reports have not digitised their back issues so I'm working from memory.

The three points in the Northern Hemisphere are neutrino-emitting facilities and the one in Japan has just experienced a massive earthquake. The three ovals in the Southern Hemisphere are locations of neutrino detectors to pick up the particle beams that have traversed the Earth from the three emitting facilities and OMFSM Christchurch has just experienced two earthquakes.

This however entirely a coincidence and the operations of the Riddled accelerator is completely unrelated to the fire breaking out in Paddy's #2 Barley field.