(This is Part 3 of a series on neutrinos, Majorana fermions, and one of the strangest open questions in physics. Read Part 1 and Part 2.)

Neutrinos have mass. We know this. And massive particles — ALL massive particles, as we established in Part 1 — flicker between left- and right-handed states. That flickering IS the mass. The constant Higgs handshake, the endless switching. That’s the deal. That’s what makes it all hang together.

But neutrinos don’t flicker. Left-handed neutrinos stay left-handed. Right-handed antineutrinos stay right-handed. No switching. No flickering. Nothing. And yet they have mass.

So either everything we just said about mass is wrong — and I’m pretty confident it isn’t — or something very strange is going on with the neutrino.

The most straightforward solution is this: the right-handed neutrinos ARE there. They exist. We just can’t see them.

Here’s why that works. Think about the electron. The electron has two completely independent ways to describe it. One: handedness. Left or right. But we’ve found that for a massive particle this is just the flickering — transient, constantly changing. It’s not a permanent label. Handedness for an electron is almost…incidental. It doesn’t define what the electron fundamentally IS.

But there’s another way to describe an electron: particle versus antiparticle. Electron versus positron. And THIS one is permanent. Important. Pinned open by electric charge. An electron has charge. A positron has the opposite. If they meet, they annihilate in a flash of pure energy. The universe treats this distinction as sacred, because charge is conserved, and the universe does not mess around with conserved quantities.

So for the electron: handedness flickers and doesn’t really matter. Particle versus antiparticle is locked and fundamental and really, REALLY matters. Two descriptions. One important, one not.

This gives us what we can reasonably call the Dirac picture — named after Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, who first worked out the mathematics of relativistic quantum particles. In this picture, the neutrino works exactly the same way as the electron. Two options for handedness, two options for charge. Four total combinations.

Left-handed neutrino: we see them, the weak force loves them. Right-handed antineutrino: we see them too, the weak force produces them in beta decay. Those are the observable ones.

Then there are the other two. Right-handed neutrino. Left-handed antineutrino. These exist in the theory. They just don’t interact with anything. Our germaphobic weak force won’t touch them — wrong hands, remember? They have no electric charge, so electromagnetism ignores them. No color charge, so the strong force ignores them. The only force they EVER feel is gravity. They are, in the most complete and total sense imaginable, invisible. Not hard to detect. Not rare. Not shy. INVISIBLE. Completely, permanently, in-principle undetectable by any instrument we could ever conceivably build.

They could be in this room RIGHT NOW and we have no way of detecting them.

And look — it works. The math is consistent. It explains why we only see left-handed neutrinos.

There’s even something genuinely beautiful hiding in it. If those right-handed neutrinos exist and are ENORMOUSLY massive — and I mean absurdly, almost comically massive, like ten to the fifteen times heavier than a proton — then something elegant falls out of the mathematics. Their mass and the mass of ordinary left-handed neutrinos end up inversely linked. Make the right-handed partner heavier, and the left-handed neutrino gets lighter. It’s called the seesaw mechanism. Push one end down, the other goes up. And it would explain why neutrino masses are so vanishingly, almost insultingly tiny. The lightness of the neutrino would be a direct echo of the enormousness of something we can never directly observe.

That’s nice.

But here’s the thing. When it comes to the electron, its two descriptions — handedness and particle-versus-antiparticle — are kept independent by electric charge. Charge is what forces them apart. Charge is what insists that “electron” and “positron” are categorically different things that cannot be confused or collapsed into each other.

But the neutrino has no electric charge. We have bookkeeping devices that keep neutrinos distinct from antineutrinos in our equations — but unlike electric charge, they’re not sacred. They’re not protected by any deep principle. They’re accidental. The universe didn’t mandate those rules. They just fell out of the math, because we designed the math that way.

Here’s the thing: nothing is FORCING the distinction between “neutrino” and “antineutrino” to be fundamental.

And that’s the crack in the door that Ettore Majorana walked through.

In Part 4, we get to Majorana’s last paper — and the experiment that might finally answer the question he left behind.

L.A. County officials want to put $2.7 million toward beefing up the team of people investigating fraud within a deluge of recent sex abuse lawsuits, suggesting a broadening probe at the district attorney’s office.

The funding allocation, part of the county’s $48.8-billion budget proposal unveiled Monday, would bring on 10 new people to the small team prosecuting alleged fraud within the county’s historic $4-billion sex abuse settlement. L.A. County Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman announced the probe last November following a Times investigation that found nine people who said they were paid to sue.

The county has agreed to pay billions to settle more than 11,000 claims of sex abuse in juvenile halls and foster homes, a flood of lawsuits spurred by a 2020 law changing the statute of limitations. Since those settlements, more than 5,000 new lawsuits have been filed with an average of 150 new claims coming in per month, according to the county, raising the prospect of future costly payouts.

Acting Chief Executive Joseph Nicchitta said Monday the new filings would continue to be an “anchor” around the county’s finances.

“It is something that’s going to weigh on us going forward,” he said at a news conference announcing the new spending plan.

Nicchitta made a pitch for legislative change, noting the county was looking to Sacramento to “eliminate loopholes allowing abusive practices by attorneys that inject weak and potentially fraudulent claims into settlement pools.”

The push by the county to change the law has been hotly criticized by some advocates who accuse government officials of trampling on victims’ rights.

“These reforms that we are seeking are anti-fraud,” said Nicchitta. “They are not anti-survivor.”

The payouts are yet another cloud looming over the budget proposal, along with rising labor costs and federal funding cuts. The recommended budget represents a 7% decrease in spending compared to the current plan. But Nicchitta said Monday it wasn’t all doom and gloom, with the county managing to stave off layoffs and program cut

The upcoming budget proposal, he said, represented the calm before the next big wave of potential rollbacks.

“Remember, we’re in the eye of the hurricane,” he said.

The budget forecast was notably rosier than last year’s, in which the county was saddled with $2 billion in new wildfire costs and had made the first round of slashes to finance the sex abuse payouts. The county froze hiring at the time and made most departments shrink their budgets by 3%.

Those cuts, Nicchitta said, went deep enough that they can avoid major slashes this upcoming fiscal year, though he warned the fallout from the Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” will soon wreak fresh havoc on the county’s finances. Health officials say they expect more than $2 billion to be cut from the budget for health services over the next three years.

Costs from wildfire will also continue to weigh on the county’s coffers. Officials say the federal government has yet to respond to a February request for rebuilding aid. Nicchitta said he was “optimistic” the money would soon be made available.

Growth from property taxes has given the county a small new pot of funds, which will be used largely to pay for increased salaries for county workers. An additional $12 million will go to public defenders, who say they’re buckling under untenably heavy caseloads, while the Office of Emergency Management will get roughly $10 million to add 44 positions, according to the proposal.

The office, which is responsible for coordinating during emergencies, was under scrutiny following the alert failures of the Eaton fire, and officials had promised in the aftermath to revamp the small office.

The supervisors will be briefed on the budget plan Tuesday.