Neutrino Flowers

What do you know? We, our bodies, are sieves for cosmic travellers — trillions of them, in fact.

The universe is awash with two extraordinarily abundant particles: photons, the particles of light, and neutrinos, their almost invisible companions. Photons travel at the speed of light, while energetic neutrinos travel fractionally slower. Yet their behaviour is strikingly different. Light illuminates and interacts with the material world; neutrinos pass through it almost unnoticed. One makes the universe visible, the other travels largely unseen. Almost the light and dark sides of the same cosmic coin.

As you read this, trillions of neutrinos are whizzing through us and almost everything else in the known universe.

They originate in nuclear reactions, radioactive decay and other energetic events, from the furnace of our Sun to exploding stars and the neighbourhoods of black holes. Some have been travelling since the earliest moments of the universe.

They come in three flavours (a technical term): electron, muon and tau. And here's the thing. They can change flavour as they travel, through a strange process known as neutrino oscillation, which scientists can measure but which remains entirely beyond our senses. Most of those passing through us come from the Sun, constantly pouring through our bodies by day and travelling through the entire Earth to reach us by night. Others arrive from much further afield, having crossed unimaginable distances through space.

All this is happening every nanosecond of our lives, and we haven't, apparently, the slightest sense of it. Sixty-five billion solar neutrinos passing through every square centimetre facing the Sun, in a seemingly endless stream. The rowan berries hanging from the boughs of the tree outside my window are being bombarded by these cosmic travellers. And I have a garden of neutrino flowers I can't even see. Nobody can.

Even the physicists who study this stuff all the time are confounded by some of these extraordinary blinking systems. They know that neutrinos are particles, not immaterial apparitions. They have mass, carry energy and momentum, and can change from one flavour to another. What they cannot yet explain is why neutrinos have any mass at all when the original Standard Model of Particle Physics predicts none, why those masses are so unimaginably small, or whether the quantum fields used to describe their existence are themselves fundamental or manifestations of something deeper.

A neutrino is not a little grain of matter flying through empty space. It is an invisible elementary particle, understood in quantum physics as an excitation of a field extending throughout space. But ask what that field actually is, rather than how it behaves, and things become considerably less certain. We have mathematical descriptions of extraordinary precision, instruments that occasionally catch these elusive travellers, and theories that predict their behaviour. Yet the ultimate nature of the reality being described is currently unknown.

And neutrinos are only part of the story. The deeper we look into matter, the less it resembles a collection of separate objects. Quarks, electrons, photons and other particles combine and interact to make up the world around us, constantly shaping and changing it. Neutrinos, however, are particularly extraordinary. They are the most numerous known particles with mass in the universe, yet scarcely interact with the ordinary matter of which our bodies, the Earth and the stars are made. They are matter too, but unlike the particles that bind together to form atoms, neutrinos have no electric charge and interact only through the weak nuclear force and gravity. They can travel through entire planets almost as though nothing were there. Trillions of these almost invisible cosmic travellers pass through us every second, scarcely disturbing the world of which we are part.

What emerges is not simply a universe containing countless separate things, but an interconnected physical reality from which the extraordinary diversity of things arises. The rowan berry, the tree and its leaves, the garden, the soil beneath it, the Sun and the neutrinos passing through are all participants in this reality, though in very different ways. And here lurks the theory of everything, the Eldorado of scientific endeavour and endless philosophical musings, perhaps best captured in an idea later associated with the twelfth- and thirteenth-century philosopher and mystic Ibn Arabi: Unity in Multiplicity, Wahdat al-wujūd, the unity of being. One reality manifesting itself in an extraordinary multiplicity of forms.

So where does this leave us and the trillions of unnoticed neutrinos passing through our total being in an uninterrupted continuum? I'd like to say nowhere, but that is too glib a response. Much of human activity is conditioned by some kind of relationship with stuff that remains a complete mystery. Most popularly, gods are said to determine everything, or, perhaps more elegantly, the Buddhist canon, offering a path off the endless wheel of existence, free from the craving and attachment that keep it turning. Could these, and many more, be yearning for a union with a neutronic nirvana?

Most of us yearn. A lovely word, and simple. To yearn is to desire, want, ache for something, even if we have everything. It has momentum. Its most everyday, poetic and mystical meaning is perhaps found in the yearning for love, although one can yearn for almost anything – a day off would be nice. The point is that yearning is an often hidden dynamic of human life, and perhaps of life itself. Even the rowan berry, emerging, ripening and eventually falling to the earth below, participates in a movement of becoming that we might, with a little poetic licence, call yearning.

OK, it's a stretch beyond poetic licence, but maybe yearning is a kind of friction between unseen processes coursing through our subconscious systems and that part of life we associate with soul or heart. And perhaps we have been too quick to confine yearning to human desire, as though it were simply a psychological appetite for something we do not possess.

There is an old mystical saying, particularly associated with the Sufi tradition: I was a hidden treasure, and I desired to be known. It is a remarkable proposition. The hidden treasure does not want to remain hidden. It invites discovery. There is a movement towards manifestation, an im-pulse, if you like, from the unseen towards the seen. In Ibn Arabi's understanding of existence, multiplicity is not the opposite of unity but one of the ways through which unity becomes manifest. The ancient Indian Upanishads, rooted in the Vedic tradition, also explore the relationship between Brahman, the underlying reality of existence, and Atman, the self. Here, too, are questions of unity and multiplicity, the seen and unseen, and the nature of consciousness.

And yet there is a tension here. Buddhist teachings seek liberation from the craving and attachment that bind us to the wheel of existence, while the hidden treasure places desire at the heart of manifestation. One seeks freedom from the yearning that binds, the other gives yearning an almost creative significance. The Upanishads offer another approach to the relationship between self and ultimate reality. Perhaps all three are concerned with something that escapes our ordinary understanding of the separate self, though they approach it by quite different paths. While there is no reason to suppose they are all saying the same thing, each points towards a reality beyond the limits of our ordinary understanding of the human condition.

Consider the extraordinary physical reality of which we are part. For billions of years, long before the appearance of human beings, matter and energy were engaged in an immense process of transformation. Stars formed, burned and died. Neutrinos and their fellow elementary particles participated in creation's long journey to today. Planets formed. Chemical relationships developed into increasingly complex arrangements, and somewhere in this history life appeared. Eventually, some of that life acquired the capacity not merely to respond to its surroundings but to become curious about itself, to remember, imagine, desire and question its own existence. Maybe curiosity itself is an ancient partner to yearning.

In other words, the universe produced creatures capable of being curious about what they yearned for.

And what of the unconscious? We generally use the word to describe aspects of our own minds, the hidden processes, impulses and memories influencing our behaviour without entering awareness. But the unseen is not confined to the workings of the mind. There is the physically unseen, the enormous activity of particles, fields and forces beyond our senses. There is the psychologically unconscious, the hidden workings of our minds. And there is the mystical hidden, that which religious and philosophical traditions have sought to discover or become united with. They are not necessarily the same thing, but they raise a common difficulty: how much of what constitutes our existence is actually available to our awareness?

Perhaps the question is not how consciousness came to inhabit an otherwise unconscious universe, but how a universe of apparently unconscious relationships came to produce the experience of being conscious at all.

The vast majority of physical processes taking place throughout the universe are entirely without any demonstrated consciousness, yet they are hardly inactive. They generate movement, interaction, transformation and, under particular conditions, the emergence of life. Our own consciousness has developed within that immense history. It is not something we can simply detach from the physical processes that constitute us, even though our experience of being conscious seems so different from the particles, chemical reactions and electrical activity through which we attempt to explain it.

Might there be an unconscious momentum between the unseen and the seen? And might this be where consciousness resides? Not in some separate compartment of existence, but in the continuity between physical processes beyond our perception and the extraordinary capacity of life to become aware of itself. Perhaps consciousness is not a departure from that continuity but one of its manifestations — the unseen becoming, however fleetingly, aware of its own existence.

And perhaps the relationship works both ways. We are not merely the passive outcome of ancient physical processes. We have become curious participants in them. Through observation, experiment, imagination and experience, we discover aspects of a reality that had been entirely beyond our awareness. What was unseen becomes, in some measure, seen. What was unknown becomes known. Yet the process of discovery continually reveals how much remains hidden.

Not necessarily a hidden intelligence directing everything, nor a suggestion that neutrinos are secretly yearning to become rowan berries, but a momentum inherent in the unfolding relationships of existence. The unseen is not simply the absence of something visible. It is also the immense domain of physical activity from which the visible world emerges, upon which it depends, and into which much of it passes again.

This is where the hidden treasure places desire at the heart of manifestation: I desired to be known. Science describes processes of transformation without requiring such a desire, although scientists themselves are hardly free of it, yearning to crack the theory of everything, the elusive TOE. Yet here we are, products of those processes, possessing an apparently inexhaustible capacity to yearn, to seek, to know and to be known. The desire is real, whatever its origins. And the separation between the unseen physical processes that constitute us and the conscious experience of being ourselves is perhaps not as complete as our everyday language suggests.

So perhaps yearning is not simply an ache for something missing. Perhaps it also expresses a movement towards recognition, an unseen primeval call and response creating relationship and participation in a reality of which we are already part but can never fully apprehend. The scientific bods pursue it through their ambition, instruments, equations and elusive particles. The romantic mystics through contemplation, love and the dissolution of the separate self. The rest of us pursue it through all manner of ordinary and extraordinary activities, often without the slightest idea what we are looking for.

Meanwhile, the rowan berries continue to ripen and fall. We soak in an ocean of trillions of neutrinos that continually pass through all that we are, almost always without leaving the faintest trace. And I sit looking out at my garden of invisible flowers, wondering whether the hidden treasure and the desire to discover it are not, in some unfathomable way, part of the same thing.

Selected Further Reading

The following readings provide background to the scientific and philosophical questions explored in A Garden of Neutrino Flowers. They are intended to encourage further enquiry rather than suggest that particle physics, consciousness and mystical experience are different explanations of the same phenomena.

Neutrinos and the Nature of Matter

The Nobel Prize in Physics (2015). Neutrino Oscillations Show That Neutrinos Have Mass. Nobel Prize Outreach.

An accessible explanation of the discovery that neutrinos change flavour as they travel, establishing that they possess mass and revealing a fundamental limitation of the original Standard Model of particle physics.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2015/summary/

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (2025). Neutrinos Weigh Less Than 0.45 Electronvolts. KATRIN Collaboration.

Reports the experimental upper limit on neutrino mass, illustrating both the precision of contemporary particle physics and the unresolved question of why neutrino masses are so extraordinarily small.

https://www.kit.edu/kit/english/pi_2025_029_astroparticle-physics-neutrinos-weigh-less-than-0-45-electronvolts.php

Quantum Fields and Physical Reality

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Quantum Field Theory.

Examines the theoretical foundations of modern particle physics and the philosophical questions surrounding the relationship between mathematical descriptions, physical fields and the ultimate nature of reality.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/quantum-field-theory/

Unity, Mysticism and Buddhist Thought

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ibn ‘Arabî.

Explores Ibn Arabi's understanding of existence, manifestation, divine knowledge and the relationship between unity and multiplicity. Particularly relevant to the concept of Wahdat al-wujūd (Unity of Being) and the mystical saying concerning the hidden treasure and the desire to be known. The saying is influential in Sufi thought, although its attribution as an authenticated hadith is disputed.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ibn-arabi/

Patrick Olivelle (1998). The Early Upaniṣads: Annotated Text and Translation. Oxford University Press.

A scholarly translation and commentary on early Upanishadic writings, including their enquiries into Brahman, Atman, knowledge and liberation. The text illuminates both the connections and the differences between Vedic, Sufi and Buddhist approaches to ultimate reality.

https://academic.oup.com/book/50014

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy.

Introduces Buddhist understandings of consciousness, non-self, impermanence and the processes through which mental experience arises. Provides an important contrast with mystical traditions that interpret existence in terms of an underlying unity.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/

Consciousness and the Emergence of Awareness

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Consciousness.

Surveys major philosophical questions concerning subjective experience, self-awareness and the relationship between consciousness and physical reality. Relevant to the essay's enquiry into whether consciousness might be understood as an expression of the continuity between unseen physical processes and conscious experience.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Neuroscience of Consciousness.

Examines contemporary scientific approaches to understanding how conscious experience relates to neural activity, including the achievements and limitations of neurological explanations.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-neuroscience/