Word: neutrino
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...smallest and most mysterious components of the universe. In their massive spark chamber with its inch-thick aluminum plates, Brookhaven's atomic physicists hope to trap and study elusive particles that now are little more than factors in abstruse equations. With luck, they may even capture the elusive neutrino...
Trapping a neutrino will be no mean trick. For the little particle is so small that it has no mass at all; it carries no electric charge and will be detectable only as a swiftly moving speck of energy. But the new Brookhaven spark chamber, designed by Drs. Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger of Columbia University, has already proved to be remarkably sensitive. The spaces between its plates are filled with neon gas, and when alternate plates are charged with 10,000 volts of electricity, bright streams of sparks streak across the chamber at jagged angles. Those sparks...
Detecting neutrinos with ordinary instruments is like catching bats with a steam shovel. Since they carry no electric charge and are vanishingly small, they pay little attention to matter. The average neutrino can probably pass through billions or trillions of miles of dense material without being stopped by it. Neutrons do, however, "interact" slightly with protons; so there is a very small chance that if a great many neutrinos pass through a material rich in protons, a few of them will be intercepted in a way that can be detected...
...three times an hour when the reactor was in operation, the detecting instruments registered "an event"-two flashes of light of exactly correct intensity and timing. This meant that a single neutrino (out of many billions per second) had hit a proton (out of billions along its path) and turned it into a positron and a neutron. After watching this happen for a total of 1,371 hours and taking elaborate precautions to eliminate false signals, Reines and Cowan announced that they had really detected neutrinos. AEC Commissioner Willard F. Libby congratulated them on their "magnificent accomplishment." Now nuclear physics...
...neutrino is abolished, physics may be threatened by a more sweeping revolution. Physicists would balk at admitting that matter or energy just disappears. They would try to explain where matter or energy goes to, and the search might reveal a new world of physics...