The Proposal of the Neutrino (1930) | Hacker News Reader

The Proposal of the Neutrino (1930)

fermatslibrary.com

69 pointsluisb18 comments

At first, I thought the title was a mistake, as the letter speaks of 'neutrons' throughout. But it turns out that the term 'neutrino' came only later:

'Pauli earlier (in 1930) had used the term "neutron" for both the neutral particle that conserved energy in beta decay, and a presumed neutral particle in the nucleus, and initially did not consider these two neutral particles as distinct from each other'

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino)

I thought the HN headline was incorrect until I read Pauli was looking for a particle of ~0.01 proton mass (neutrons and protons are about the same mass).

Thank you, I too was confused by this

Basically Pauli can't get his dear theory to work so has to invent magic dark matter to get the theory to match the experiments. This 'quantum' atom looks more and more like ptolemaic epicycles.

Clearly we need to throw the theory away and start from scratch.

[this being the internet: /s ]

I came here to snark this exact snark.

best part is that neutrinos are literally dark matter.

You and gpderetta are quantum-entangled?

It's Pauli who's being the principled scientist here, though. He comes up with something that explains the experimental result and fits established theory.

The epicyclist in this case was Bohr - his idea was that maybe conservation of energy is just a suggestion.

Maybe the missing mass is just the universe skimming a small percentage of the "transaction" as payment, right?

The neutrino is very real, and observable by experiment. It was first unambiguously observed in 1956 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowan–Reines_neutrino_experi...).

Reines was awarded a Nobel prize in 1995 for the discovery.

Of course, mine was just a quip at those that dismiss dark matter as just an 'hack' to patch a broken theory.

Ah, understood :)

I've been reading "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," which is a great book and covers the early discovery of Quantum Mechanics, including this letter. Recommended.

The follow-up to that is basically Command and Control which covers what happens after those things were made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book)

It starts out where those weapons and prototypes from World War II were sitting on a shelf in a hut in the middle of the desert with no real security. That program had been all but shut down, the team disbanded.

Equally interesting is Stalin and the Bomb which covers the Soviet efforts to replicate what the Americans had created: https://books.google.ca/books/about/Stalin_and_the_Bomb.html...

There's accounts of scientists painstakingly re-discovering fundamental things only to realize their superiors already knew the correct approach to take, their intelligence had stolen the files, but were concerned that the information was faked to lead them astray. They must have felt like high-school students getting their homework checked by the teacher.

Well don't get to ahead of yourself. The follow up should be "Building the H Bomb: A Personal History" by Kenneth W. Ford.

True. There is that thing.

The beginning "Dear Radioactives" is a classic, we even learnt it at school

As this was sent to experimental nuclear physicists in the 30's, it may well have been a reasonably accurate description.

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