"Because the neutrino only interacts weakly, when moving through ordinary matter its chance of interacting with it is very small. It would take a light year of lead to block half the neutrinos flowing through it."

Neutrino, in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino

"... if all humanity, about 250 million tons, were distributed in a layer of homogeneous thickness on all the emergent lands, the "stature of man" would not be visible to the naked eye; the thickness one would obtain would be around sixteen thousandths of a millimeter."

Primo Levi, in The Periodic Table (1975)

"... every cubic centimetre in the universe contains on average about 300 neutrinos left over from the Big Bang. They are travelling around the cosmos at or near the speed of light; and they are passing through you as you read this."

The Particle Odyssey (2004)

"I always think love is a little like cosmology. There's a Big Bang, a lot of heat, followed by a gradual drifting apart, and a cooling off which means that a lover is pretty much the same as any cosmologist"

Philip Kerr, in The Second Angel (1998)

"Note that once the LSR is chosen the Sun immediately begins to drift away from it, implying that we would effectively need to redefine the reference point constantly. In reality this is not a significant problem because the orbital period of the LSR (perhaps 230 million years) is very long compared to the lifetime of a typical research grant, so there is not sufficient time for the effect to become noticeable. ..."

B.W. Carroll and D.A. Ostlie, An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics (1996) (Addison Wesley)

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