Neutrinos: The Particles of Decay

I watched a fascinating documentary on Nova last night about neutrinos, and with my reading list consisting of books on subjects like chaos theory and entanglement theory I figured it couldn't hurt to brush up on basic particle physics.

According to the current model of science, matter is composed of atoms, which in turn, are composed of particles (such as protons, neutrons and electrons). While it was originally thought that these 3 basic particles were the only ones, science has shown evidence that they are not. These 3 particles are made up of other elementary or "fundamental" particles, which are either fermions (particles of matter), or bosons, some of which perform as carriers of forces of nature, such as the weak, strong and electromagnetic forces (a gravitron, which would be a carrier of the gravitational force, would be a boson, but it is still theoretical). Neutrinos are one such additional elementary particle.

One interesting characteristic of neutrinos is that they have the ability to pass through matter almost unhindered (which they do at a rate of something around 100 billion per second). Another feature of neutrinos, the one that originally caught my attention, is the fact that they are a product of the decay or breakdown of protons and electrons. Neutrinos were actually discovered when scientists began to search for the 'missing energy' when they were studying the properties of decay. Sources of neutrinos include nuclear explosions, the nuclear fusion process in stars, supernovas and the interaction of cosmic rays with the Earth's atmosphere. Neutrinos themselves cannot be detected, so what scientists study is their interactions.

It got me thinking....

According to the first Law Of the Conservation of Energy, matter cannot be created or destroyed...it can only be transformed. So, when anything DIES (decays/degenerates), there is at the very least something basic within it that is not destroyed, that perhaps goes on to become something else (like neutrinos, perhaps).I think that the knowledge and study of neutrinos (as well as other subtomic particles) can be very useful in obtaining further scientific explanations or explorations into death, and what's more, that perhaps in the future, physics and philosophy will be disciplines that are taken much more seriously relative to the other. We would be deriving a more complete knowledge from an integrated whole composed of the science of physical reality and the pursuit of wisdom. I think the two can compliment each other greatly.

It must be said here that physics is an interest of mine, and certainly not an expertise, so anyone with more knowledge on this, feel free to correct anything I've said that is incorrect.