Did you ever think about it, that every second 700 trillion neutrinos fly right through your body? That’s about equal to the number of sand grains carried by roughly 30 trucks. It also happens to be about equal to at least 7 times the number of cells that you have in your body… Every second, every cell in your body is being shot 7 times by a neutrino bullet at light speed. Now if that isn’t manslaughter…
Weird though isn’t it? You don’t feel a thing… no pain, no tickling, no anything… It’s as if you’re thin air…

Neutrinos are particles with no (detectable) mass and no charge. The sun produces 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 neutrinos every second. But because they have no mass and no charge, nothing attracts or repulses them.. They are like ghosts. The only way to detect them is by witnessing rare collisions between a neutrino and another particle. That’s what they try to do in the Super Kamiokande neutrino detector in Japan (see picture).

Try imagining how…

…it would feel if somebody tried to push 30 trucks of sand grains through your body every second… Aren’t we damn lucky that the sun doesn’t spit sand grains? :P

Another funny thing is this… Quite some time ago three cavemen somewhere in southern Europe were hunting down a mammoth. The moment they brought it down with one of their giant spears, a number of photons were produced in the center of the sun. These photons are the light that you see when you look at the sun this very moment. It took these photons 50,000 years to travel through the sun’s interior before they could fly off to Earth and reach your eyes.

On the other hand, the 700 trillion neutrinos that are passing through your body this second were produced 8 minutes ago… 8 minutes ago, two protons collided somewhere in the center of the sun, producing a deuteron, a positron and a neutrino… That neutrino just flew right through the tiny part in your brain that screams: “Isn’t science great!?”…