Neutrinos: Opening new doors

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and patience in advancing neutrino physics, illustrating how these factors have historically contributed to successful discoveries in the field.

Contribution

It highlights the role of interdisciplinary collaboration and patience in neutrino research, providing historical insights and emphasizing the need for harmonious theory-experiment relationships.

Findings

Effective collaboration enhances neutrino science progress.

Patience is crucial when studying elusive particles like neutrinos.

Historical cases demonstrate the value of interdisciplinarity in discoveries.

Abstract

In this contribution, which introduces the "Crossing the Portal" session of the NOW 2024 meeting, I discuss the value of the concepts of interdisciplinarity and innovation for neutrino physics. After some historical considerations, which provide an initial illustration of the significant role of these concepts, I review some well-known cases of neutrino science, involving both astrophysics and particle physics, which allow us to deepen the analysis. The importance of a harmonious relationship between theoretical elaborations and experiments emerges: effective collaboration between theoretical and experimental physicists played a key role in many of the successful cases and proved marginal or defective in the doubtful ones. The discussion highlights also the need to proceed armed with a patience, a virtue that Feynman himself indicated as essential to science, all the more necessary when investigating interesting but elusive particles such as neutrinos.