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Article: Girth control.(research into neutrinos could lead to unified theory of the Universe)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Popular Mechanics
- Article date:
- October 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Hearst Communications, reprinted with permission of Hearst. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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By the time you finish reading this sentence, a trillion tiny bullets will have crashed through your brain. And lately, these subatomic particles--neutrinos--have been giving physicists a headache.
Not that anyone who plays with neutrinos hasn't been warned. "I've done a terrible thing," said the legendary physicist Wolfgang Paul when he proposed their existence more than a half-century ago. "I've invented a particle that cannot be detected." Pauli proposed their existence to account for the tiny bit of energy that seemed to be missing when a neutron broke into a proton and an electron during radioactive decay.
Compared to the three then-known ...