Belinda Smith

speaker

2,440 appearances 25 recordings 4 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 6d ago

Belinda Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 25 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.

Appearances

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The Science Show · Looking inside cells, and how seals hear so well underwater · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

Now it's filled with a material called liquid scintillator.

The idea here isn't merely to detect neutrinos, but to see what role they play in a peculiar type of radioactive decay known as neutrinoless double-beta decay.

That decay process is, for now, purely hypothetical, and it depends on neutrinos having the very weird property of being their own antiparticle.

Time to bring in another expert.

As Lorna Nolan explains, figuring out if neutrinos have these very strange properties isn't just pie in the sky.

It's possible that the peculiar properties of the neutrino might shed light on the mystery of the missing antimatter.

I know it's a lot to take in.

We've got the Big Bang and antimatter, and these strange particles called neutrinos.

Not to mention the puzzle of dark matter that we started off with.

But for scientists like Ray Bunker, these aren't just random puzzles that physicists scratch their heads over.

He sees them as intimately related, because they're all part of an effort to tackle a larger and more basic question.

What, exactly, is the universe made of?

At a high level, our goal is, with this combination of neutrino and dark matter experiments, is to understand the matter content of the universe.

Not just what all the different particles that make up matter are, but also how that matter content has evolved.

And that problem of trying to figure out what the universe is made of goes hand in hand with the puzzle we started with.

Why is so much of the universe invisible?

Now, we can see stars and galaxies through our telescopes, but the numbers don't quite add up.

Astronomers can estimate how much the stars in some particular galaxy weigh, and how much the surrounding clouds of gas and dust weigh, but if you add it all up, you get a number smaller than what you get from just studying the motion of the galaxy itself.

In other words, a big chunk of the mass comes from something else, something that we're not seeing.

That's the puzzle of dark matter.

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