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'
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 55.0 ms ] thread'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)
Clearly we need to throw the theory away and start from scratch.
[this being the internet: /s ]
The epicyclist in this case was Bohr - his idea was that maybe conservation of energy is just a suggestion.
Reines was awarded a Nobel prize in 1995 for the discovery.
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.