The Neutrino and the Sydney Opera House

The Neutrino and the Sydney Opera House Sounding like Aesop’sfables, the combined tales of the neutrino and the SydneyOpera House have a moral about aesthetic patterns in science and in art. In each of two separate cases (one involving the discipline of physics; the other, architecture ), aesthetic factors played a role in convincing theorists to believe in the reality of something that only existed in the mind-or perhaps better said, something that only existed “on paper.” In telling these two stories, and in putting forward my proposition that they contain parallel themes, I do not wish to be misunderstood. I believe in the relative autonomy of art and science, and I trenchantly object to what I call “Zeitgeisthistoriography ”-the belief that a necessary unity existsin all cultures such that a “spiritof the times”pervades all modes of thinking and acting [I].The link between the neutrino and the SydneyOpera House is not some mystical connection that necessarilyexisted between the scientistwho conceived of a new fundamental particle and the architect who designed a singular structure. Rather, the point is less mysterious: there are constraints in all aspects of human thought; these lead to similar patterns of thinking among theorists (independent of their areas of work);and aesthetic factors play a role in this interplay between constraints and patterns. One facet of the aesthetic dimension found in both art and science is revealed in the parallel stories of the neutrino and the Sydney Opera House. THE STORY OF THE NEUTRINO The idea of the neutrino was first conceived by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930as a solution to a problem involving experimental results in beta decay-namely, the radioactive emission of beta rays (veryfast moving electrons)-such that the Principle (or Law) of the Conservation of Energy seemed to be violated. In a now-famous letter that Pauli sent to a conference on radioactivityin Tubingen (which he did not attend), he proposed what he called “adesperate way out”of this problem-the postulation of an as-yet-unknownparticle that carried the necessary energy to balance the conservation equation. (Incidentally,at the time, only three elementary particles were known: the electron, the proton and the photon.) The radical nature of Pauli’sidea is revealed in part by the reaction of Niels Bohr, certainly no stranger to radical ideas in light of his landmark trilogy of papers in 1913on the quantum explanation of the atom. Bohr was more comfortable abandoning the Conservation Law in nuclear processes than adding another particle to the world [2] ! Pauli’spostulate came at a tumultuous time in his life,which may have been a factor in his “desperate”solution to beta decay. His mother had recently died, which had left him shaken; he was known to be drinking too much; and 5 days before penning the “neutrino”letter he divorced his first wife. Indeed, in a letter written 2 months before his death in 1958,Pauli recalled those days and spoke of the neutrino as “thatfoolish child of the crisis in my life” [3].A perhaps tragicomic footnote to all this was Pauli’sexcusefor missing the Tubingen meeting-he attended a ball in Zurich to which he said he was “indispensable”[4]. Q 1997ISAST LEONARDCI, Vol. 30,No. 2, pp. 81-83,1997 81 Ironically, Pauli originally named this particle a “neutron,”but in 1932 the term was used when the “real”neutron was discovered. The term “neutrino”was coined by Enrico Fermi, from an Italian word for a “little neutral object.”Little indeed: practically without mass, the neutrino was to havejust enough energy to balance the equation for the Conservation Law; we know today in beta decay that as a neutron transforms into a proton and an electron, the neutrino is ejected. But the neutrino eluded detection for more than 2 decades. Its existence and eventual detection, however, was seldom doubted (despite Bohr’s original qualms). In scientific publications from the 1930sto the 1950sthe neutrino was treated as if it were real-whereas, in fact, it only existed on paper. Then, on 14June 1956,Fred Reines and Clyde Cowan (experimental physicists working on neutrino detection who subsequently won the Nobel Prize in physics for this work) sent the...