Neutrino08 - Smirnov

The first (slightly) technical talk of Day One was by A. Smirnov, who began with a very entertaining explanation of his title: Where are we? Where are we going? He pointed out that there were 52 (relatively recent) neutrino papers on SPIRES-HEP with headings including the words where are we? Similarly, he found multiple papers in other HEP areas that used the same words. But String Theory only managed one hit. Do they not wonder where they are? He then showed a timeline of neutrino physics, from Rutherford to the present, which was marked mysteriously as being somewhere on a brane.

Comments on the standard picture followed, with brief mentions of nuclear physics, neutrino gases, solar neutrinos, supernovae, AGNs, GRBs, CP violation etc. A fascinating fact is the shift in publications indicated roughly by the diagram Smirnov also stressed that although the initial excitement in new neutrino physics moved around the idea of beyond the Standard Model physics, the situation was far from clear. He listed a few bottom up approaches to theory, such as the tribimaximal mixing. Actually, he cited Carl Brannen alongside Koide in a final note about nonperturbative approaches (perhaps I should give him Carl's blog url as a reference).

The talk went 15 minutes over time due to a sneaky tactic of lying through teeth promising to be on the last slide.