The photoelectric effect won’t work, Eric - unless you include this as a premise
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_theory_of_light … which is an interesting solution in a way. That is probably what you had in mind. The next best short answer is the known physics of electron capture cannot work with a proton on earth at all … ever … at least not in any kind of symmetry, since the neutrino (with its extra mass + spin balancing), should be captured - not emitted, in order to balance the more important parts of the equation. If you have to invent some kind of a heavy electron first – then you propose two miracles instead of one. ‘Conservation of miracles’ at work… The curious part is that the W-L proponents must realize that there is a huge neutrino flux which could be tapped into for this purpose, but they do not go there as a general rule. Never mind the solar variety is the wrong kind, as a general rule, since we have the kludge of neutrino “flavor oscillation”, but catch-22 can it be stretched to cover antiparticles? Another miracle required. The neutrino has always been a place-marker at best, just this side of fiction. Even today it still means: check back in a few years and see if we can provide real data. The superluminal saga is a case-in-point. Jones From: Eric Walker <[email protected]> wrote: Hasn't someone here rebutted the physics of e-c capture? The rebuttals I've seen involve the p + e- -> n + v reaction that is usually understood to occur between an inner shell electron and a proton in a nucleus, or of the heavy electrons that Widom and Larsen propose. An important assumption is that neutrons are not coming about through some other pathway involving electrons. I'm personally rooting for a photoelectric effect in which gammas or X-rays take part (although I have no basis for rooting for one theory over another). One obstacle to any e-c capture explanation appears to be the great mass of the W- boson; I have no opinion here. I suspect we're not being creative enough yet, though, and that as soon as we are willing to suspend disbelief at the possibility of neutron capture as a starting point, clever people can come up with a whole range of interesting and falsifiable hypotheses. Regarding the experiments, there are numerous reports of helium, tritium, low-level gammas and isotope shifts; there are even reports of very low levels of neutrons, which I'm not inclined to dismiss, although people who know much more about these things suspect that they're in error. Eric
