Thursday, August 7, 2008

Neutrinos? You're Kidding Me

I'm certainly not the first person that says that neutrinos do not exist. I'm pretty certain that the invention of the neutrino was one of the big boondoggles of modern physics. I would say that Wolfgang Pauli and the others rushed the solution of the problem of the continuous spectrum of the kinetic energy (or speed if you prefer) of the electrons that emerge from the nucleus in beta decay. At the moment I cannot prove it, but I feel fairly certain that the correct explanation lies somewhere in a proper accounting of all the energy and momentum involved in the decay process without neutrinos. Also, I have not yet found a fatal flaw in the 1956 experiments of Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, the first time physicists claimed to have observed neutrinos (albeit fairly indirectly). I am open to sensible suggestions and/or experimental results on either side of the hypothesis.

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