Mario Livio states as follows: "In my own life as a scientist, there was one occasion when I felt that a deep secret of nature had been revealed to me. This was my personal brilliant blunder. I remember it with joy, even though my dreams of glory were shattered. It was a blissful experience. It arose out of work that I did with my colleague Andrew Lenard from Indiana University, investigating the stability of ordinary matter. We proved by a laborious mathematical calculation that ordinary matter is stable. The physical basis of stability is the exclusion principle, a law of nature saying that two electrons can never be in the same state. Matter is stable against collapse because every atom contains electrons and the electrons resist being squeezed together.
My blunder began when I tried to extend the stability argument to other kinds of particles besides electrons. We can divide particles into two types in three different ways. A particle may be electrically charged or neutral. It may be weakly or strongly interacting. And it may belong to one of two types that we call fermions and bosons in honor of the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and the Indian physicist Satyendra Bose. Fermions obey the exclusion principle and bosons do not. So each particle has eight possible ways to make the three choices. For example, the electron is a charged weak fermion. The light quantum is a neutral weak boson. The famous particle predicted by Peter Higgs, and discovered in 2012 at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), is a neutral strong boson. I observed in 1967 that seven of the eight possible combinations were seen in nature. The one combination that had never been seen was a charged weak boson. The missing type of particle would be like an electron without the exclusion principle. Next, I observed that our proof of the stability of matter would fail if electrons without the exclusion principle existed. So I jumped to the conclusion that a charged weak boson could not exist in a stable universe. This was a new law of nature that I had discovered. I published it quietly in a mathematical journal." Oh contraire; but what Mario Livio had not understood was that electrons can become bosons when they combine with photons to form the quasi-particle the polariton in condensed matter physics. Because they are bosons, Polaritons can be squeezed together in a special case called LENR. This squeezing can provide polaritons and the electrons that lurk within them with massive amounts of energy because one time fermions avoid the constraints of the exclusion principle. As a result of this marriage of electron and boson and the unusual conditions of their wedding, matter does fall apart when exposed to polaritons under these very special conditions. Mario Livio should get his old book of equations out and brush it off. Soon we will need that book of equations for reference.
