Dark as a Dungeon- 2002 Davis/SNO version by Dr. Don Geesaman, Director of the Physics Division, Argonne National Lab (Tune: "Dark as a Dungeon", by Merle Travis ) Click here to play tune in the background Click here to see a video clip of Don Geesaman singing this song Come all you bright students so young and so fine and seek not your fortune way down in the mine. It will form as a habit, it will seep through your life and hunting neutrinos causes nothing but strife. (Chorus) For it's dark as a dungeon, and damp as the dew where neutrinos come slowly and the funding does too where it takes years to tell if the sun really shines it's dark as a dungeon way down in the mine. There's many a man I've known in my day who lived just to labor his whole life away like a fiend with his dope, like a drunkard with his wine a physicist can lust for the lure of the mine. (Chorus) For it's dark as a dungeon, and damp as the dew where neutrinos come slowly and the funding does too where it takes years to tell if the sun really shines it's dark as a dungeon way down in the mine. When the textbooks are written and the ages do pass It’s the men in the mines proved neutrinos have mass and though we twisted and strained with all of our might when it comes to the sun, well--- Bahcall got that right. (Chorus) For it's dark as a dungeon, and damp as the dew where neutrinos come slowly and the funding does too we finally know that the sun really shines it's clear as a Nobel prize, way down in the mine.

About 10 trillion (i.e. 1013) neutrinos are passing through your hand each second! These sub-atomic particles are emitted by the sun as part of the nuclear reactions that produce the sun's light and heat. They interact only very weakly with matter, which is why you're not aware of all the neutrinos passing through you. To detect them, physicists have constructed "neutrino observatories" far underground, where they are completely shielded from annoyances caused by high-energy cosmic rays. The neutrinos can easily pass through miles of earth. However, because there are so very many of them, even a tiny chance of interaction does result in occasional detectable events, resulting in a tiny flash of light that registers on an array of photomultiplier tubes, or in a transmutation of one type of nucleus into another, which can then be detected chemically. This song is about all the physicists who have worked in these underground observatories, and especially the discovery in 2001 at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) of the solution to the "solar neutrino problem". Briefly, the number of neutrinos emitted by the sun appeared to be a factor of 2-3 lower than predicted by the theory for the nuclear reactions powering the sun; this theory was championed by John Bahcall (mentioned in the next-to-last verse). As shown by the SNO experiments, neutrinos can oscillate from one flavor to another, showing that they have a non-zero mass. The early observatories could only detect a single flavor, resulting in the low count. For their roles in the whole history of neutrino detection, Ray Davis, Jr. and Masotoshi Koshiba received the Nobel Prize in 2002, as referred to in the last verse. Dr. Geesaman (above) performed this song to introduce a distinguished speaker at the Physics Division at Argonne National Laboratory on 25 Oct 2002. The speaker was Art McDonald of Queen's University, Ontario, and director of SNO. It had just been announced that he had won the Tom W. Bonner prize of the American Physical Society. Click here for a video clip of Dr. Geesaman's performance. (Prof. McDonald was wearing a live mic in preparation for his talk, and can be heard laughing and singing on the choruses.) Click here to purchase the original album for this tune (with lyrics about coal mining) from amazon.com

Background image: Part of the Photomultiplier tube array at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory
(courtesy of Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)