Neutrinos, antimatter, and science as a holistic detective agency

'Holistic' is a much abused word. Like 'quantum' and 'paradigm', it is beloved of snake-oil sellers of many types. But some kind of interconnectedness forms a key part of science's defence against spurious results and crackpots. Two new scientific results got me thinking this week

Deep in the ice, two kilometres under the heart of Antarctica, electronic pulses in the IceCube detector, the result of particles called neutrinos hitting the ice, have initiated a chain of reasoning which has recently led to their interpretation in terms of limits on supersymmetry.

Supersymmetry is a speculative theory about the basic physical principles of the universe. It has also been the focus of attention at the Large Hadron Collider, as well as at smaller precision experiments (for example of the magnetic moment of muons). There is no direct evidence that supersymmetry is correct, as a description of nature, but the fact that it can connect such disparate observations shows its usefulness as an aid to exploration. Being able display data from CERN and IceCube on the same graph, to measure them against a common scale, is important in gauging their relative sensitivity to the unknown, and in hunting for inconsistencies - or, in the case of a discovery, consistencies.