7 The Neutrino Is Born as an Idea
55
Fig. 7.2 Wolfgang Pauli. Source: Wikipedia.org
Pauli was having severe personal difficulties during the 1929–30 period. His
first wife Kathy Deppner, a cabaret dancer whom he married in 1929, was
continuing her previous affair with another man; his mother had committed
suicide after being abandoned by his father, and Pauli was seeing Swiss
Psychiatrist Carl Jung at the time. It is at this juncture in his life that the
idea of the neutrino came to him. Part of the letter he wrote proposing the
neutrino, translated from German, is given below:
Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen,
As the bearer of these lines, to whom I graciously ask you to listen, will explain
to you in more detail, how because of the “wrong” statistics of the N and Li6
nuclei and the continuous beta spectrum, I have hit upon a desperate remedy
to save the “exchange theorem” of statistics and the law of conservation of
energy. Namely, the possibility that there could exist in the nuclei electrically
neutral particles, that I wish to call neutrons, which have spin 1/2 and obey
the exclusion principle and which further differ from light quanta in that they
do not travel with the velocity of light. The mass of the neutrons should be of
the same order of magnitude as the electron mass and in any event not larger
than 0.01 proton masses. The continuous beta spectrum would then become
understandable by the assumption that in beta decay a neutron is emitted in
addition to the electron such that the sum of the energies of the neutron and
the electron is constant…
55
Fig. 7.2 Wolfgang Pauli. Source: Wikipedia.org
Pauli was having severe personal difficulties during the 1929–30 period. His
first wife Kathy Deppner, a cabaret dancer whom he married in 1929, was
continuing her previous affair with another man; his mother had committed
suicide after being abandoned by his father, and Pauli was seeing Swiss
Psychiatrist Carl Jung at the time. It is at this juncture in his life that the
idea of the neutrino came to him. Part of the letter he wrote proposing the
neutrino, translated from German, is given below:
Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen,
As the bearer of these lines, to whom I graciously ask you to listen, will explain
to you in more detail, how because of the “wrong” statistics of the N and Li6
nuclei and the continuous beta spectrum, I have hit upon a desperate remedy
to save the “exchange theorem” of statistics and the law of conservation of
energy. Namely, the possibility that there could exist in the nuclei electrically
neutral particles, that I wish to call neutrons, which have spin 1/2 and obey
the exclusion principle and which further differ from light quanta in that they
do not travel with the velocity of light. The mass of the neutrons should be of
the same order of magnitude as the electron mass and in any event not larger
than 0.01 proton masses. The continuous beta spectrum would then become
understandable by the assumption that in beta decay a neutron is emitted in
addition to the electron such that the sum of the energies of the neutron and
the electron is constant…