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9. THE NONEXISTENT NEUTRON

THE DIVIDING LINE BETWEEN EMPIRICAL SCIENCE, IN WHICH BELIEFS WERE BASED ON MEASUREMENTS, AND MODERN SCIENCE, IN WHICH BELIEFS ARE BASED ON BELIEFS !

AN INCREDIBLE CONCLUSION

The neutron was created by default.

It is the creature of a passel of misconceptions that lay hidden at the foundation of the scientific thought processes prevailing at the beginning of the twentieth century. Experiments leading to the creation of the neutron, performed over the first third of the twentieth century, exposed these misconceptions to the light of day. However, rather than examining them for what they were, bald assertions of belief, the experimenters blinked and, in the resulting blindness, created the nonexistent neutron.

Had the times been normal, the nonexistent neutron might well have remained nonexistent, or a least theoretical. However, with fast breaking technical developments in physics rapidly sweeping theoretical musings about the nature of matter into the looming World War II effort, the misconceptions quickly sank back to unexamined core beliefs. With no other explanation for the energy that was being discovered in boundary elements related to uranium and with the vast efforts poured into producing technology that could utilize this potential energy to further the war effort, the neutron was mindlessly accorded the status of fact, being the litany used to avoid explaining nuclear energy much as the words "gravity is a property of mass" are used to avoid explaining the cause of falling objects and the words "angular momentum is conserved in closed systems" are used to avoid explaining the cause of the Earth's rotation.

One of the misconceptions that led to the belief in the nonexistent neutron is the law dealing with the conservation of energy which states ideally that in an isolated system the amount of energy remains constant but which is generally taken for the proposition that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The law lends itself to the construction of mathematical models used to explain how systems behave under a given set of circumstances but has little to do with reality because the disciplines that wield it have little knowledge of, or interest in understanding the nature of energy. When new energy sources, such as electricity or nuclear energy are uncovered, they are calibrated to existing energy sources such as coal or oil by the amount of work they can accomplish or the heat they are estimated to produce and an explanation for their source is glossed over with meaningless words such as "moving charges" and "polarity" or "the equivalency of matter and energy." Heat itself is reduced to a form of energy involving motion, and while thought to be transported through empty space by radiation, is considered to be an imponderable while so moving, which is to say it doesn't exist between its source and its effect.

The conclusion that heat is an imponderable, that light is also an imponderable, and that the two are separate and distinct phenomena is the second misconception involved in the production of the neutron out of whole cloth. If heat is thought of as nothing more than motion in the matter that is producing or experiencing it, then it is not considered to be something in and of itself. It is not considered to be the movement of something from one place to another, but merely the transportation of an effect through space by undelineated radiation. Heat and light radiation don't exist between their source and effect and therefore become invisible in analyzing what might be at the basis of measurable physical effects.

A more subtle stupidity, Newton's Third Law of Motion, that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, is pretty obvious on a physical basis. If it weren't true, pool halls would go out of business and the rockets we shoot into space would never leave the ground. The law, however, describes the behavior of physical matter that is restrained by the physical force of attraction generated at the Earth's surface. The mechanics of this force, labeled gravity, and thought to be a property of mass, remain elusive, and as such, the way that gravity affects matter so as to restrain its motion is unknown. Any assumption dealing with how it acts on an atom, then, is premature. The conclusion that gravity restrains the electrons that orbit the nucleus of an atom in the same manner that it restrains the units that make up the nucleus is unwarranted.

A misconception passing the range of conscious analysis is to then go on and claim that Newton's Third Law of Motion applies to the movement of the electron itself. Without an understanding of the nature of energy, the motion of the orbiting electron remains unexplained. The same lack of mental acuity that allows acceptance of the statement that the force that moves released objects at an accelerating rate toward the surface of the Earth is a passive property of the matter doing the moving also results in the failure to discern that motion itself might well be an appropriate property, while causing motion is not. If in fact the motion of the electron in orbit around an atom's nucleus were the result of the electron's property to move at, say, the speed of light, then there would be no question that Newton's Third Law of Motion failed applicability. The electron itself would not be subject to the pull of gravity and its motion would be with respect to the nucleus of the structure of which it was a part, and not a particular planet toward which that nucleus was accelerating.

And what is the motion of the orbiting electron with respect to? What force would cause an electron's straight-line motion, with Newton's First Law of Motion here applicable if nowhere else, to bend into the circular motion that defines its orbit around the nucleus?

Polarity, a misconception of application, is probably the most unexamined concept ever carried thoughtlessly into unrelated domains of knowledge. This concept, dealing with the physical behavior of magnets has crept through hazy explanations for static and current electricity into the concepts used to explain the structure of the atom. The general rule, that likes repel and opposites attract, created as an observation to describe the physical behavior of magnets and codified as mindless law, was an insurmountable obstacle to figuring out what was happening in the subatomic realm where it has no applicability but where, because it lay hidden in the thought processes, was accorded supreme authority. If likes don't attract in the subatomic world, then all sorts of particles have to be created to hold structures together that would naturally form together if likes did attract. For instance, if there is an orbiting electron, and the electron is negative, the statement mindlessly carried over from watching toy dogs kiss requires that there be an oppositely charged particle created for the electron to orbit.

The final misconception underlying the creation of the neutron is the misperception that because we produce scales that allow us to measure the relative effect of the attractive force on matter, and then label the effect of that force on matter as weight, that the matter itself has weight. This misconception had its origin in Newton's corpuscles of matter. In order to prove that gravity was proportional to and therefore a property of matter, Newton had to mathematically compute the amount of force, and the only way that he could do this was to compute the amount of matter producing the force. To compute the amount of matter producing the force, he had to assume that matter was distributed uniformly by volume throughout the matter producing the force, the Earth and the moon. The exercise failed proof, but later day gurus saved Newton's matter/gravity hypothesis by decreeing that if volume couldn't predict motion, then motion could be used to determine the density of volume, the matter's mass. This resulted in the notion that matter has intrinsic weight when in fact the only thing that gives matter weight is the force that is causing it to move. The weight is the measurement of the force that it takes to overcome the force that is causing the matter to move. It is merely the amount of surface force, calibrated by spring, it takes to overcome the force of the Earth's attraction. Matter itself is passive in this struggle, just falling in the force if it can, and coming to rest against surfaces that are sufficiently strong to overcome the force that is making it fall.

By making the mistake of thinking that weight is inherent in matter, that it is a property of the particles that make up the matter, it became necessary to make up particles in matter to account for its weight when all that's necessary is to have a particle in the nucleus upon which the force of attraction can act.

A whole panoply of misconceptions, then, have gone into the conclusion that the conceptual neutron, a particle made up simply because there appeared to be no other explanation for what was measured to be happening, existed. There was no other explanation for what appeared to be happening because a commitment had been made to a belief that had no basis in reality, that the conservation of energy applied in a situation where energy itself might be a property of the particles being measured. Because the energy was not viewed as a property of the particle and therefore a result of the particle being released, the effect of the released energy was viewed as a reaction. Using Newton's Third Law of Motion to justify observed effects that required the creation of an unmeasured energy because otherwise the energy would be viewed as created, the neutron was created out of nothing to explain the source of the energy, the action that had to be producing what was viewed as a reaction rather than a release.

Once the neutron was created to explain a source of energy where no source of energy was necessary, the failure to understand the simple process involved in the production of energy created additional complexity because of commitments made on the nature of motion, that motion requires energy rather than being energy, on the nature of heat and light, that heat and light don't exist between their source and effect, on the applicability of polarity to the structure of matter, that matter is held together by particles that repel each other and on the nature of weight, that weight is intrinsic in matter rather than the measurable effect of gravity on matter.

With such well rooted concepts, invisible to the intellectual process, operating, -- "if you don't believe in the neutron, go stand under a hydrogen bomb" -- attempting to explain the creation of the nonexistent neutron when its existence is taken as fact should be as difficult as clarifying a caballa to Casper the Ghost.

However, it's not as difficult as one might imagine.

IMAGINE REALITY!

Imagine holding an unlit match about two feet away from a lit match.

The heat and light coming out of the lit match are expanding in an expanding sphere that is moving out and away from the surface of the match, the match itself being consumed as the heat and light move out and away from it. Of course, what is making up the heat and light cannot be the same thing that is making up the match because it has been empirically proven that heat and light do not have mass and are therefore imponderables with no existence between their source and effect. However, if a property of heat and light is motion, the definition of energy, then they don't need mass to exist.

Because heat and light expand over the surface of an expanding sphere after they leave the lit match, they diminish inversely with the square of the distance over which they expand, the distance from the surface of the match. By the time the heat and light get to the other match, two feet away, there is not enough heat and light left to produce an effect on the second match. Some of the heat and light simply bounces off the surface of the match, some of it penetrates the surface a small distance, and some actually goes right on through the unlit match to join the heat and light that has passed around the match, but the unlit match remains unlit because of the weakness of the expanding sphere of heat and light, which has diminished too much to ignite the match.

Now imagine moving the unlit match toward the lit match.

More of the heat and light from the lit match penetrates the surface of the unlit match, and more of the heat and light passes into and through the unlit match.

One of the things that we know, or should know about the unlit match is that it is made up of atoms which have clouds of electrons orbiting them. The electrons in these clouds of orbiting electrons are held in their orbits by an electrical charge in the nucleus of the atom.

If instead of viewing the heat and light as imponderables, we view them as flows of electrons, which, after all, are conceptual particles made up to describe an effect, then what might the effect of these flows of electrons be as they pass through the unlit match?

We know one thing about flows because we can sit by the side of a river and watch the water flow. We know that at every point in the flow of water, there is water. It is not the same water, but there is always the presence of water in a flow of water.

So, if we think of the expanding sphere of heat and light as made up of flows of electrons, we know that at any point in the flow, there will always be electrons.

If we make the simple assumption that electrons are orbiting the nuclei of the atoms that make up the match because one of the electron's properties is the property of motion, then we know that Newton's First Law of Motion would cause an orbiting electron to take off if the force that was holding it in place, restraining its straight-line motion, were to be removed.

We know that we can't remove a force that exists. However, if we can't remove something, how about replacing it?

The electrons in the expanding sphere of heat and light have a current presence because at any point in a flow there is always an electron. If a flow of these electrons were brought next to the nucleus containing the orbiting electrons, then the force in the nucleus that was being used up attracting the orbiting electrons would be occupied by the flow passing by and with nothing left to hold the orbiting electrons in place, they would depart in a straight line.

This is what happens when something burns, flows of electrons are replacing orbiting electrons which then join the flows, producing a conflagration in matter.

Another way of looking at the process is to say that the orbiting electron has more energy than the electron in the flow because the energy of the electron in the flow is being used up moving the flow. As the flow is stationary with respect to the nucleus, the orbiting electron is no match for the electrons that make up the flow. The orbiting electron is already in motion so, no longer having an exposed charge in the nucleus to which it can be attracted, it regains its full motion and departs the nucleus in a straight line. (One of the main reasons Modern Science is such a morass of inconsistent concepts is that it requires force in the subatomic world where motion can be accounted for by assuming it to be a property of the particle that makes up matter, and doesn't require force in the measurable world, where the predominate force, gravity, is assumed to be a property of the matter toward which objects move and the movement of matter in space requires no other force, because the matter is assumed to be moving in a straight line but for the force of gravity. These are the fervent beliefs of Empirical Science even though, in reality, a match produces more energy than it takes to ignite it and objects in space are neither moving toward one another nor in straight lines.)

Viewing combustion as a process that releases the energy stored in matter by replacing one field with another, as the unlit match moves closer to the lit match, the flows of electrons that make up the heat and light of the expanding sphere of the lit match replace the electrons orbiting the nuclei of the atoms of the unlit match.

As the unlit match moves deeper into the field of the lit match, this replacement increases in strength with the square of the distance until the rate at which the electrons are departing the nuclei of the atoms of the unlit match causes the match itself to ignite and itself produce an expanding sphere of heat and light.

This is field replacement, it is produced by eliminating the application of unfounded assumptions concerning motion, mass and polarity to the subatomic world and it is an alternate explanation to the neutron to explain the source of the measurable energy that the neutron was created to explain.

Instead of viewing radiation as a process of releasing energy, the normal conclusion that would be made by simply looking at what happens in physical reality, the effect of radiation, the release of energy, was viewed through the lens of the action and reaction of matter, intrinsic weight, the conservation of energy, the belief that likes must repel and thus the belief that the subatomic world behaved like loaded balls on a billiard table.

When a reaction occurred with no apparent energy source, instead of examining the assumptions about momentum underlying the nature of radiation and in the process, adopting a hypothesis other than Newton's Third Law of Motion, an invisible cue ball, the neutron, was created to explain the unexplained energy. The neutron was accepted as a substitute for the unexplained reaction because a particle could bring energy to the transaction. While there was no explanation for the source of the energy the neutron brought to the transaction, the source of the neutron's momentum, the neutron's energy didn't need explaining because momentum, the cause of straight-line motion, had been assumed away from the time of Newton, who assumed it away because he had no explanation for planetary movement.

By assuming away the source of the neutron's energy by saying it is derived from its momentum, obvious physical phenomena such as combustion go unexplained and concepts instead are entombed in words to prevent acute questions from bothering muddled minds.

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WHAT WE KNOW AND DON'T KNOW ABOUT MATTER

We have two ways to analyze matter and both of those ways give us insight into the structure of matter. One way is to put something on a scale and weigh it. The measurement of elements by weight with a scale produces a list of the elements going from the lightest to the heaviest.

If we then measure the electrical potentials of the elements that make up the list, we find that they produce repeating patterns, the repetition giving rise to the periodic placement of those elements by the varying strength of their charge so that the elements form a table that can be used to predict the existence of other elements.

Both of these properties of matter, weight and electrical potential, are obvious in physical reality.

That matter is held together by a force is apparent and that different matter requires different levels of force to move it against the attractive force produced by the Earth is also apparent. Thus, the periodic table can be explained simply by viewing matter as being made up of atoms with nuclei composed of a unit on which the attractive force acts and which itself produces some sort of attractive force that holds the units, and the atoms together.

We know that the attractive force that causes matter to move is not the same attractive force that holds the matter together because, instead of a steady progression from light to heavy, the force that holds the matter together varies in repetitive cycles as the elements become heavier.

What we have made out of this limited knowledge is quite remarkable!

Atoms are composed of a nucleus that contains protons and neutrons. Because atoms are conceptual, so small that we only imagine to be able to image them by using the variations in electron beams bouncing off the surface of matter to form a picture of the variations that occur between that surface and the environment it occupies, we think of specks of matter as made up of billions of atoms.

But when it comes to producing a picture of the atom itself, we have no hesitancy in coming up with precise figures with respect to the various conceptual particles we make up to make the atom up.

Thus, the lightest element, hydrogen, has one proton and one electron orbiting the proton with the next lightest element, helium, having two protons and two neutrons in the nucleus and two electrons orbiting the nucleus. As the nucleus becomes larger, the number of protons, neutrons and electrons becomes larger, with the number of negatively charged electrons, which produce the repetitive periodicity of the periodic table, matched by an equal number of positive protons in the nucleus, and neutrons added to account, along with the protons, for weight. As the weight of the element increases, however, the electrical potential that produces the repetitive periodicity of the elements dictates that there cannot be more than eight electrons in the outer shell. The electrical potential, or valence, is an atom's ability to combine with other atoms. The numbering system that represents electrical potential is represented by assigning a specific number to the atom, with "1" being highly reactive and "8" being nonreactive. The logic for this system is that atoms with a valence of less than "8" can combine with other atoms until the atoms of the resulting molecule have eight electrons orbiting them in some combination of orbits. This state of matter, in which no charge is measurable, is inert, electrically neutral. With the charge of the electrons balancing the charge of the nucleus, the external charge of the matter is neutralized. If the numbering system is converted to a comparative charge, then the lower the valence, the higher the charge.

Hydrogen nuclei therefore carry a higher charge than helium nuclei, helium nuclei forming into an inert gas.

As the number of electrons and protons increase with weight, the electrons are layered into shells, with the outer shell containing from one to eight electrons, and inner shells added as necessary to accommodate the increasing numbers of electrons. The number of protons determines the element, with neutrons, controlling atomic weight, capable of producing isotopes of an element as they are gained or lost.

Because the further we move from reality when we attempt to describe reality, the more exact we can become, describing what occurs in the nucleus is quite precise. When an element undergoes what is called alpha decay, it emits an alpha particle which is a bundle consisting of two protons and two neutrons. This is the nucleus of a helium atom. The remaining nucleus now has two fewer protons, and thus two too many electrons in its outer shell. These two electrons sort of wander off. The result is not an isotope, but a different element, one lower down on the periodic table because of the change in weight and electrical potential. Thus, atoms of uranium-238 emit a helium nucleus and become atoms of thorium-234. An atom can also lose or gain an electron and in the process, gain a charge, become ionized.

This numbering system is not even considered representative, with say a uranium atom actually having 238 zillion protons and neutrons and the thorium atom actually having 234 zillion, with the atom capable of emitting four zillion protons and neutrons and approximately half that number of electrons. Once the periodic table was constructed and numbers assigned to it, all matter, predicted or miscategorized, had to subsequently be fit into the numbers on the table. Thus, when we think of radiation, we don't think of a lot of atoms each emitting a lot of particles, we think of a lot of atoms each emitting a single particle or maybe four. This atomic preciseness is necessary in order to produce radiometric dating which, based on the conversion of atoms to isotopes, is needed to justify the time thought necessary to produce the species that is making up the specific contents of the atom.

Beta rays, as opposed to the alpha decay that produces a helium nuclei, result when one of the neutrons in the nucleus emits an electron, converting itself in the process into a proton. This produces a change in the electrical potential of the atom without changing the atom's weight. When an element produces beta rays, it's producing a flow of electrons, but because a flow of electrons is a lot of electrons, and the protons in an atom, limited in number, are incapable of giving up a lot of electrons, these electrons have to come from different atoms with a whole bunch of atoms having to contribute to a single beta ray.

How this might occur is anybody's guess.

Finally, gamma decay involves the protons and neutrons in the nucleus engaging in a little hoe-down, emitting electromagnetic radiation as they dosi-do to a Maxwellian two-step. Because neither the weight nor the electrical potential of the atom is affected, this electromagnetic radiation, in the form of gamma rays, is, like heat and light, an imponderable, without existence (unless it happens to be bullying electrons around in the Compton Effect.)

In reality, the atom is probably made up of electrons which, unaware of our Nobel laws dictating their existence, and thus not required to repel each other, form into units of matter which, when the last electron that can be attracted is attracted, form into nuclei which, when the last unit that can be attracted is attracted, attract either an orbiting cloud of electrons, other nuclei, or both to form into matter.

The proton is merely a neutron that has lost an electron, just like our current concept, except that the proton contains billions of units made up of electrons and there is no neutron. A hydrogen atom is a proton with an orbiting electron, just like our current concept, except the proton is actually a conglomeration of billions of units made up of electrons and the electron is a cloud of trillions of orbiting electrons.

The electrical potential determines the size of the orbital clouds and in turn is determined by the charge produced by the units in the nucleus, a charge that, because it depends on the remaining charge after the units in the nuclei come together, gains and wanes as the nucleus becomes larger, and the number of units in the nucleus directly determines the weight. Thus, while helium is four times heavier than hydrogen, the orbital cloud of a hydrogen atom contains twice the orbital electrons of the helium atom because, in accordance with the valence numbering system, the charge of the hydrogen nucleus is twice the charge of the helium nucleus.

If there are no neutrons in the nucleus, then exactly where did the neutron come from?

FROM LIGHT TO SPARKS TO DARKNESS

Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the light bulb. The light bulb is the production of resistance to a flow of electricity in a vacuum and the resulting release of the resisted electrons. A battery or generator produces an electrical flow in a circuit. A light bulb consists of the vacuum contained in a bulb and placed as a load on the circuit. A resistance in the bulb, the filament, retards the flow of electricity. When the electrons that make up the flow of electricity in a circuit encounter the resistance of the filament, they are organized into heat and light, and in the process are used up so that they have to be replaced in the circuit, giving the electric company a basis for sending us our monthly bills.

For a decade or so after the development of the light bulb, this was exactly what was thought to be happening. Led by the German physics community, light was considered to be made up of the same thing as the electricity that produced it, with the mechanical process of the filament merely being one of organizing the electricity into light. Unfortunately, the British Royal Society had already decided some years before the discovery of the light bulb that light didn't exist, it was merely a wave, a disturbance of some sort of undetectable medium. Light could not therefore be coming out of the filament. The light might be coming out of the filament in the same way that the heat, a phenomena different from light, was coming out of the filament, as a form of electromagnetic radiation but neither heat nor light were ponderables, had mass, weight, existed, so that the light, while caused by the electricity moving through the filament, was unrelated to the electricity itself.

In order to empirically prove that light was not the same as the electricity that produced it, and settle the argument in the process, the filament was removed from the light bulb, leaving a gap in the circuit within the vacuum. The point at which the electricity entered the bulb was named the cathode and tagged as negative while the point at which the electricity would have left the bulb was styled the anode, with its analog being positive. If the anode was fashioned into a cylinder, then the electricity from the cathode could be directed down the center of the cylinder where it would exit the end of the bulb, made into a tube to accommodate the shape of the cylindrical anode.

Whatever was coming out of the tube, however, was invisible, and only by pointing the tube at something that would evanesce could it be determined that the cathode tube was producing cathode rays.

Using a glass pane covered with zinc sulfide as a target that would evanesce, the rays emitted from the cathode ray tube could be observed in the form of, surprise, light.

So we got a light bulb that produces light, we modify it so it doesn't produce light but something else, something we can't see, to prove that the light isn't the electricity that is producing it. We then make what we can't see visible, we get it to produce light.

And we use this to prove that light isn't made up of the electricity that produces it!

Light was considered to be different from what was causing the spark because the location of the spark could be moved by moving a magnet next to the cathode ray tube.

Empirical Science has no idea what the structure of light is, or why, because light diminishes as it expands, and does so uniformly, the structure of light might involve, as does the structure of matter itself, the neutralization, the balancing of the charge produced by the particle that makes it up. However, being ignorant of facts, which are eliminated willy-nilly in the name of modeling closed systems, has never stopped Empirical Science from establishing mindless conclusions that forevermore rule its thoughts, blinding it to the light of day.

Finding that cathode rays could be deflected by a magnet was decisive in dictating the conclusion that the flow coming out of the cathode ray tube was not the same as light.

Thomson assumed that the deflection meant the rays were made up of negatively charged particles and borrowed Stoney's name for a charged particle, the electron, as their name so that cathode rays were made up of the electricity that produced them.

Light, however, was not a particle, it was an imponderable. As it could not be deflected by a magnet, it was chargeless.

Light was therefore not made up of electrons and was not the same as the electricity that produced it!

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WHY WERE PARTICLES NECESSARY?

The sparks produced by flows of electrons being emitted by a cathode ray tube were, in the spirit of building a body of knowledge that could simulate understanding by being words, named scintillations. Although rays from uranium were discovered by their ability to penetrate photographic plates, they could also produce scintillations on zinc sulfide coated panes of glass. By placing "absorbing" metal foils between the uranium and the zinc sulfide coated glass, the radiation's energy could be determined by the number of foils the radiation could pass through and still produce a spark on the zinc sulfide coated glass. The more energy the radiation had, the more energetic the particle that made it up was considered to be.

This sort of analysis assumed momentum in the radiation, so if motion is going to be assumed, it might as well be assumed for one particle, with the different effects being the result of the way the particle is configured or the way it is released. Empirical Science, however, can't measure the cause of motion, only the motion, so the motion exists and the cause is ignored. This allows it to create particles that assume momentum to explain the missing force when applying Newton's Third Law of Motion to the subatomic world and ignore reality, the field emitted by combusting or otherwise disintegrating matter, as a source of force.

The three forms of radiation, alpha, beta and gamma, were analyzed by assuming their energy was proportional to the number of metal foils, or in the case of gamma radiation, the thickness of a lead sheet, that the radiation could traverse with charge intact, the charge being what sparked the coated pane. The first, alpha radiation, was considered to be low energy radiation because it was quickly absorbed. It couldn't travel through many layers of foil and still spark the coated glass. It was thought to be composed of alpha particles, helium atoms without their orbital electrons. Beta radiation was more energetic, passing through more layers of absorbing foil and was analogized to the cathode rays because the two survived a similar number of absorbing foils while producing similar sparks on the coated glass. The beta particle that produced beta radiation was labeled an electron and the terms used interchangeably. The third type of radiation, gamma radiation, was very energetic, the most energetic of the three and thus analogized to Maxwell's electromagnetic radiation, placed, because of its penetrating ability, at the short wave, high frequency end of the radiation spectrum.

Because gamma radiation was considered to be a part of the electromagnetic spectrum along with heat and light, and therefore an imponderable, there was no gamma particle.

Why were some types of radiation considered to be made up of particles and others not?

During the nineteenth century, light was considered to be a wave and a wave required a medium for its existence. When the Michelson/Morley experiment showed the medium to be a figment of the scientific imagination, Maxwell's dummied up proportionality equations were adopted to save the concept of light as a wave. These equations produced a fuzzy idea that attempts to explain light's motion. Because inductances were similar to magnetic lines of force -- breaking either with a circuit produced a flow of electricity -- and because electric flows could establish and collapse inductances when they were started and stopped, the equations viewed light as the proportional interaction of collapsing magnetic and electric fields. The light wave was propagated by the force of the two as they alternately collapsed (with the energy producing the establishment, like the energy of the alpha, beta and gamma radiation, or of the neutron, simply assumed.)

By adapting Maxwell's equation to explain light, British science showed itself to be blindly committed to light as a wave, damn the medium!

However, if the radiation from the uranium and the cathode ray tube were considered to be a wave phenomena and not particles, they could not be used to bombard matter. If they had no physical existence, then they could not be used in the service of Newton's Third Law of Motion to cause reactions in matter or react to collisions with matter. Without collisions, no mathematical calculations could be made using Newtons Third Law of Motion, and the nature of matter could not be probed.

Because Empirical Science needed particles to explain reactions, the line was drawn through the electron, it being considered both a beta particle and a moving charge, with the alpha particle on one side and the gamma radiation on the other.

By showing that beta rays were deflected by magnetic fields, the British were able to satisfy themselves and the world that the beta rays were different from light, laying to rest the lie that the First World War was fought over the issue. As a result, Newton's Third Law of Motion was established as the sole method of probing the secrets of the atom. The corollary to the gamma radiation, theoretically massless, was an electron with some mass and the less penetrating alpha particle with more mass.

Because the billiard analogy derived from Newton's Third Law of Motion now controlled the way the structure of matter was to be probed, the billiard ball with the most mass, the alpha particle, was selected to do the probing.

If alpha particles were to be the cue balls, then a source of alpha particles had to be obtained.

A RELIABLE SOURCE OF ALPHA PARTICLES

If instead of thinking about a match being immersed in the expanding sphere of emissions from another match, its atoms becoming more active as the field replacement increases, we think about a fixed field in which a range of elements exist, we can see that lining up the elements by weight creates a boundary for an element's existence at the upper level of the field. This boundary, which can be analogized to the point in the field at which the elements that make up the match head start to emit, is dictated by the existing field at the surface of the Earth. Instead of the field, the temperature, being raised until it affects the stability of a particular element, the field limits the elements that can stay together, that can exist in that field. Atoms above a certain weight, with more than a certain number of units in their nuclei, are unstable and simply cannot continue to exist in this existing temperature without breaking down into simpler elements. On a molecular basis the point is the melting point, while with respect to an atom's orbital electrons, the point is the ignition point.

Our concepts concerning the existence of matter were unfortunately shaped by, of all people, Darwin. Early in the nineteenth century, Prout had posited that all atomic numbers and thus elements were multiples of the atomic weight of hydrogen. After Darwin, Lockyer recast Prout's proposition in terms of evolution, with all elements being descended from hydrogen. This ridiculous notion has been dressed up in quantum folderol so that today we have the heavier elements being manufactured out of helium located in the centers of the stars, a fantasy given fairy tale life by the skeptical Sagan's oft asserted claim that we are made of star dust.

The measurable reality is that, instead of heavier elements being formed at higher temperatures, elements break down when heat is applied to them, with the highest level of heat needed to break down the lightest element.

That's why engineers use heat to crack petroleum!

The converse, that elements that are too heavy to exist in a certain field can't exist in that field is measurable by the fact that radioactive elements need to be in molecular balance with lighter, more stable elements to survive in the existing field. It is only after they are extracted from the molecular structures that give them stability that they begin to break down, their breakdown measurable by the activity, the emissions they produce, as they seek to become stable in the given field.

Thus, the lighter elements that makes up pitchblende yield uranium, a heavy element at the boundary, with the highest number of units in the nuclei of the atoms that make it up. The uranium has remained stable in the pitchblende in much the same way that zinc remains stable at temperatures over its melting point of 420C when it is in molecular balance with copper to make up brass. The molecular combination allows it to remain stable in a much higher field than it could otherwise exist. When uranium is isolated from pitchblende, exposing it to the existing field, it begins to emit in much the same manner that the match begins to emit, with the difference that the match has to be ignited at a point so far above the existing field of the elements that make it up that it burns furiously to regain balance with the surrounding field (an atomic analogy being to the actual ignition of the units in the nucleus of the atom itself by nuclear fields, the highest possible field, resulting in nuclear explosions.)

A less unstable, and thus more endurable element, radium, obtained from uranium by the Curies, was very effective in producing cancer, so it came into widespread use in treating cancer patients. A by-product of radium treatment was an inert gas, radon, and radon was a particularly good source of alpha particles.

Because radon was easy to work with, was plentiful as a by-product of radiation therapy, did not require a power source and produced an abundance of measurable alpha particles, it became the tool of choice to probe the secrets of the atom.

It was the scattering of alpha particles by gold foil that led Rutherford to deduce the nucleus of the atom.

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A QUESTION OF RECOIL

When the nucleus of the atom was deduced, there was no neutron. Alpha particles, helium nuclei with an atomic weight of four, were thought to be made up of four protons, the positive charge Rutherford theorized for the center of the atom to hold the negative electrons in orbit.

Rutherford's experiment with gold foil involved directing a flow of alpha particles at the foil so that they would bounce off at an angle. A glass pane coated with zinc sulfide was placed to catch the bouncing alpha particles. Because the alpha particles were bouncing all over the place, the angle produced by their path was bisected with a lead shield to ensure that they weren't hitting the glass pane directly from the source.

The thought process underlying the experiment is simple. A particle, the alpha particle, is emitted from radon. It travels as a result of its assumed momentum until it hits something. When it hits something, it has an equal and opposite reaction, Newton's Third Law of Motion, and it bounces off of whatever it hits. The reason the alpha particles were scattering was that they were bouncing off of widely separated atoms, revealing the space that separates the atoms and thus the nuclei of the atoms.

Because the alpha particles could be used like projectiles, they could be used to probe the nature of matter that was otherwise too small for measurement. A subatomic picture could be created similar to the way that X-rays produced pictures of bones. However, where X-rays produced a picture by having their straight-line motion blocked from affecting a detector, producing a picture on photographic film by exception, the picture produced by the alpha particles had to be deduced applying Newton's Third Law of Motion to their recoil. If an alpha particle was supposed to be going in one direction and it produced a spark somewhere else, then it had to have hit something and bounced off or at least been deflected.

We can see what happens to billiard balls (or light bouncing off a mirror, for that matter.) We can measure the angles because we know that for every action there has to be and equal and opposite reaction.

We can't see subatomic particles, we can only see sparks, but when the sparks appear out of alignment with their source, we can draw the particle's path from the source and the particle's path to the spark, and locate what it bounced off of by where the two paths intersect.

Using billiards, the analogy is extended to recoil particles. If one particle is emitted from the source and another particle produces a spark, then the second particle is considered to be a recoil particle. When hydrogen nuclei were identified, their recoil was more energetic than alpha particles. Thus, if an alpha particle theoretically hit a hydrogen atom, the alpha particle, being a helium nucleus with four times the mass of the hydrogen nucleus, mathematically produced a much more energetic recoil in the hydrogen nucleus than if the alpha particle hit a helium nucleus of equal mass.

The billiard analogy, however, is deceptive. Subatomic particles clearly can be blocked, leaving an image of the blocked area on photographic plates and they can clearly be scattered, producing a picture of sorts of what is scattering them.

But what is the evidence that they can knock particles about so that the particles being detected are recoil particles?

The proof is in the notion that, because recoil particles have different energies, their momentum is being obtained from the alpha particles.

Applying Newton's Third Law of Motion to the different distances the particles passed through layers of metal foil, and using the different distances as an indication of the particle's energy, the energy was assumed to be transferred to the particle by its collision with the alpha particle. The alpha particle's momentum was transferred to the helium or hydrogen nuclei, with the helium or hydrogen nuclei recoiling as a result of the impact, and the hydrogen nuclei recoiling further because of the mass differential.

But, without a source for the motion of the alpha particles, the application of Newton's Third Law of Motion was actually being used in reverse, to compute the momentum of the alpha particle by assuming its energy was being transferred to the recoil particles whose relative energies were measured by the number of metal foils they could traverse.

This mirror misanalogy is not uncommon when balancing equations is the tool used to define reality. A mirror misanalogy is a reversal of hypothesis. One side of an equation has to contain a mathematical representation of the hypothesis and the other the mathematical computation of the predicted fact. When the hypothesis is found not to predict the outcome, it is altered until it does. Soon the outcome is predicting the hypothesis, the most notorious example being weather models. In mirror misanalogies, the failure of the hypothesis to predict the outcome results in the outcome being used to compute the hypothesis, which then becomes fact. The granddaddy of all mirror misanalogies is Newton's matter/gravity into mass/gravity, where because matter could not be used to predict the inverse square law, the inverse square law is used to compute otherwise unmeasurable mass.

The evidence that the particles were recoiling as a result of being hit by an alpha particle was the fact that different particles traveled different distances through intervening metal foils, an unfounded assumption without knowing the source of the alpha particle's momentum.

By ignoring the source of the alpha particle's motion by computing its force with reference to the reaction it was assumed to produce, an alternate source for the movement of the "recoil" nuclei was also ignored because the same force moving the alpha particle could also be moving the "recoil" nuclei, meaning the "recoil" nuclei would not be recoiling.

THE SOURCE OF THE ALPHA PARTICLE'S MOTION

When an unlit match is immersed in the field of a burning match, it is fairly easy to see the expanding sphere of heat and light. The elements that make up the match head are stable for temperatures at some level above the normal field of the Earth to keep them from igniting when they shouldn't. But eventually the unlit match moves deeply enough into a field to ignite, and when it does, the orbital clouds of the atoms that make up the elements of the match head burst out in the movement of electrons which we see as structured light and feel as heat.

Empirical Science, of course, says that light is made up of insubstantial photons and that because light is sensed with the eye and heat with other senses, the two are separate and distinct, but then Empirical Science bases its knowledge on naming things rather than understanding process.

An electron with the property of motion, the property of moving at the speed of light, solves a lot of problems. One of the reasons that light was considered an imponderable was that its motion couldn't be explained. If motion is assumed for the electron, then different levels of motion, different energy levels don't have to be assumed for alpha, beta and gamma radiation.

Energy becomes the release of the particles that are held together in matter, motion, of course, being the definition of energy.

With motion assumed for electrons, the source of motion for the alpha particles can be found in the production of the beta rays, which are electrons. If electrons are considered to be in motion unless they are restrained, then when elements are composed of boundary atoms that are breaking down in the existing field, the process of breaking down releases electrons in the form of beta radiation. As the breaking down process means that the atoms that make up the element are themselves breaking down, then individual units, or stable combinations of these units are also a by-product of the breakdown, the nuclear disintegration.

These units, formed into what we measure as alpha particles, helium nuclei, do not themselves have motion. The only motion they obtain is by being caught up in the departure of the electrons, the beta radiation, with the electrons imparting part of their motion to the alpha particles.

Thus, the only momentum the alpha particles have is the momentum obtained from being caught up in the storm produced by the departing electrons.

If the alpha particles obtain their momentum from the beta radiation, then so would the particles that were considered to be targets of the alpha particles. Instead of particles striking the detector as a result of the recoil from being hit by an alpha particle, the particles hit the detector as a result of the momentum they obtain from the beta radiation.

But the recoil nuclei are found to have different levels of energy depending on whether they are helium or hydrogen nuclei. If the lighter hydrogen nuclei move through more layers of foil than the heavier helium nuclei, doesn't that prove that they are in fact recoiling?

The quantity and quality of the scintillations produced in the detector control our picture of what is occurring when various gases are exposed to radiation.

What exactly is a detector detecting and what is actually happening when, as in the case of a particle "absorbed" by the metal foils, a detector ceases to detect what it is designed to detect?

And as an added fillip, what happens when a detector detects something it wasn't designed to detect?

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REGISTERING UNSEEN PRESENCES FOR OUR SENSES

When we are dealing with the subatomic world, we can't use our senses to produce a picture of what is going on and we can't create rulers to define reality because our rulers are made up of what we are trying to measure.

We can only produce secondary measuring devices, detectors which, like mediums hovering over crystal balls, register unseen presences for our senses.

Because detectors become our senses, it is of the utmost importance that we understand how detectors work, more important even than knowing what they detect, because if we don't know how a detector works, then we have no way of knowing what it is detecting!

The process of Empirical Science, however, is to make up something that needs detection and then create a detector that will detect it!

The Geiger Counter is a prime example of a detector produced to detect what it was designed to detect, created as it was to produce an electronic depiction of the subjective sparks on panes of zinc sulfide coated glass. It is a sort of reverse cathode ray tube, an anode wire inserted into the center of a cylindrical cathode placed in a tube filled with gas. Detectable events ionize, which is to say, field replace, the atoms of gas, releasing electrons which complete the circuit, allowing a current to reach the counter, in the case of the Geiger Counter, a noisemaker that goes "click." When enough detectable events release enough electrons to complete the circuit between the anode and cathode, a click ensues, and the clicks are used to represent whatever it is that is being detected.

Ignoring the fact that Empirical Science doesn't know what electricity is, what causes it to flow or even why it needs a circuit to flow, any detector it designed to detect by representing clicks couldn't detect anything if the detector was set in a manner that whatever it was detecting always completed the circuit. In such a case, the detector would just be a complete circuit.

Therefore the detector had to be calibrated in such a way that it was an incomplete circuit before it begins to detect. This means that whatever is being detected is just that portion of the population of detectable events that exceeds the population the detector has been calibrated to detect.

The detector can't be used to detect alpha particles until it can be set to separate them out from the background radiation, the beta radiation. If an experiment involves the measurement of alpha particles, and those alpha particles are being accompanied by the electron flows that make up the beta rays, then the detector has to be set to eliminate the background beta rays. When radon emits detectable alpha particles, it is also emitting beta radiation that the detector has been calibrated to ignore. Once the detection of the beta rays has been eliminated, however, the beta rays are eliminated from awareness.

In fact, they are still there. They are just undetected!

As in the case of the creation of the nonexistent neutron which masks the nature of energy by assuming momentum, the reality that the detector eliminates might well be more important than the reality that the detector does detect. As empiricists were only interested in experiments requiring a reaction, they focused on alpha particles rather than the beta radiation which produces the very field in which the various atoms, like an unlit match in the flame of a lit match, were being immersed!

The question of whether the detector is detecting recoil particles concerns detectable events that cease to be detectable. If the recoil nuclei are receiving energy from alpha particles rather than being swept along by the beta radiation, then their ability to spark the detector depends solely on the energy they bring to their passage through the metal foils. However, the nuclei may well just be losing their ability to spark the detector.

They may be reaching the detector, they just may no longer be capable of detection!

If this is the case, then their detection would have nothing to do with the energy they received and there would be no need to create an energy differential based on the recoil analogy to explain the fact that different particles travel different distances through the layers of foil.

Whether or not particles are sparking the detector depends on how the particles spark the zinc sulfide atoms which in turn requires knowledge about how the atom is constructed, what it is made up of, what the alpha and beta rays consist of and how one striking the other produces light.

Using the analogy of the two matches, we can see that the alpha and beta rays, both of which have an exposed charge, are field replacing the atoms that make up the zinc sulfide as they pass through the zinc sulfide molecules. The atoms that make up the molecules give up their orbiting electrons in sufficient numbers to produce light as a result of field replacement. This explanation is consistent with the size of the scintillations, with the alpha rays producing brighter strikes than the beta rays.

If the particles that pass by the zinc sulfide molecules have to have an exposed charge in order to spark the molecules, then the helium and hydrogen nuclei would cause the molecules to spark only so long as they had exposed charges. They would have exposed charges only so long as they didn't have orbiting clouds of electrons.

When the helium nuclei are separated from the radon nuclei and swept along by the electron flows, they have no orbiting clouds of electrons. However, the nuclei begin to collect orbital clouds as soon as they are separated. If helium nuclei are traveling in a vacuum, there are no atoms available to provide a source for the necessary electrons, the only electrons being those occupied in sweeping the nuclei along. However, when the nuclei begin to pass through a gas or a medium such as air, or even the metal foils, they begin to collect electrons to fill in their orbital clouds of electrons from the orbital clouds of the atoms available in the environment.

Completing their orbital clouds transforms them from helium nuclei, alpha particles without orbital clouds of electrons, into helium atoms, alpha particles with orbital clouds of electrons, and as such, undetectable.

They may well hit the detector, they are just incapable of producing a spark.

The beta rays, on the other hand, are themselves flows of electrons and will continue to spark the detector so long as the flows can maintain their integrity.

When the number of foils the hydrogen nucleus moves through is compared to the number of foils the helium nucleus can pass through, the hydrogen nucleus is considered more energetic. However, the hydrogen nucleus has an orbital cloud twice as large as the orbital cloud of the helium nucleus. It takes a proportionally longer time to complete its orbital cloud than the helium nucleus and thus travels proportionally further through the intervening metal foils before it does so.

Both nuclei are being swept along by the beta radiation. The helium nucleus just complete its orbital cloud more rapidly than the hydrogen nuclei, and in doing so becomes undetectable sooner.

The made-up recoil, the transfer of momentum created applying Newton's Third Law of Motion to subatomic particles becomes a labored explanation for a simple reality!

One of the most pervasive misperceptions in Modern Science, the belief that a detector can validate a theory by detecting a particle the theory predicts, is evidenced by the cold fusion imbroglio. The process of fusion was conceptualized and then radiation produced by the conceptual process of fusion predicted. Anything predicted will eventually be found, it only takes enough patience, money and the ingenuity to produce the right detector to find it, although, to be truthful, nuclear radiation detectors are a bit too ingenuous, being things of sophistry, their theoretical underpinnings so tenuous as to make them candidates for the Empirical Hall of Fame next to the current concept of the aether as a medium for gravity waves.

Producing a specific detector to detect a specific type of imaginary radiation precludes knowledge of what other things the detector might also detect. If a detector that was accidentally left on detects when there were no experiments around producing the particles which the detector was designed to detect, the detection could easily be dismissed as aberrant. But when the detector is brought into play for experiments where it has no applicability and it still detects, what it detects is mistaken for what it was designed to detect and all hell breaks loose.

The controversy over cold fusion is not a conflict over whether cold fusion is feasible, hell, hot fusion isn't even feasible, its search having been carried on for decades in deference to the age old adage, let milking cows milk. The controversy is over the exposure of the integrity, or rather lack of integrity of the fusion detector itself and thus the quantum theory the detector purports to validate.

If a detector detects something that it wasn't designed to detect, then what it was designed to detect is called into question!

SPLITTING THE ATOM

The experimental apparatus designed to analyze the theoretical recoils involved in alpha particles striking the atoms of various types of gas was an airtight chamber with a radon source placed at one end and a detector, to record scintillations, placed at the other end. Alpha particles from the radon source entered the chamber, supposedly collided with atoms of gas in the chamber, the nuclei of the gas atoms theoretically recoiled as a result of Newton's Third Law of Motion, and the results were recorded as scintillations on the detector.

After producing systemized measurements by bombarding hydrogen and helium with alpha particles emitted by the radon, the view of the hydrogen nucleus as Rutherford's proton began to emerge. Once the hydrogen scintillations were identified, however, they started showing up after the chamber had been evacuated!

At first, it was thought that the hydrogen scintillations were protons being emitted by the radioactive source. Radioactive matter, however, had never been observed to emit protons and it was decided that the hydrogen nuclei had to be coming from somewhere else.

A search for their source began.

A chamber evacuated of air that still has something in it implies that that "something" is air. Air can be dry or humid and is made up of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide. If it is humid, it also contains atoms of hydrogen and oxygen formed into water molecules. To find out which was responsible for the scintillations, the chamber was filled with each of the suspected gases in turn.

Carbon dioxide, oxygen and humidity didn't materially increase the hydrogen scintillations. Using Newton's Third Law of Motion to explain the result, the experimenters concluded that the alpha particles were being slowed down and thus did not have the energy to affect the atoms of gas.

Because some of the atoms of gas, the oxygen and nitrogen, were not hydrogen atoms and were too heavy to theoretically recoil when struck by helium nuclei, what were these experiments really designed to show?

As with most experiments, the desired conclusion was known in advance. Under normal theoretical considerations, the only situation in which the hydrogen scintillations could be expected to increase would be when the air was humid because that was the only situation in which hydrogen atoms would be available. The experiments, however, weren't designed to knock hydrogen atoms out of water molecules.

The thought process underlying the observation that hydrogen scintillations were being produced from an evacuated chamber was that stray atoms of nitrogen or oxygen had stayed behind. The alpha bombardment was thought to be knocking protons, hydrogen nuclei, out of the nitrogen or oxygen nuclei!

When carbon dioxide, oxygen and even humid air was found to reduce the number of scintillations, the experimenters looked at the reduction as the result of the alpha particles losing their energy by their passage through the gas. However, an environment with plentiful oxygen would provide hydrogen nuclei with a source of electrons, which, with their higher charge, they could use to fill in their orbital clouds, making them undetectable when they reached the detector.

When dry air was found to increase the scintillations, the experimenters viewed the energy of the alpha particles as being undiminished when in fact, there were just fewer oxygen atoms around for the hydrogen nuclei to use as a source of electrons to complete their orbital clouds leaving more with detectable charges to reach the detector and produce scintillations.

The hydrogen scintillations that resulted when the chamber was filled with nitrogen gas, however, allowed the experimenters to use the precise numbering system from the periodic table to explain where the hydrogen scintillations were coming from. The helium nucleus with four protons was slamming into the nitrogen atom which, with an atomic weight of fourteen, had fourteen protons. Seventeen of the protons fused (transmuted) into the oxygen isotope O17, leaving one proton, the hydrogen nucleus, to be picked up by the detector.

In reality, the only place that the hydrogen nuclei can come from is the nuclei of atoms, be the atoms the radioactive material or the material placed in the chamber and only then by release. The way the hydrogen nuclei are released is through the field replacement occurring from the field of the environment acting upon the units in the atom. With radioactive elements, the number of units in the nuclei is greater than can stay together in the field in which they exist, the field of temperature at the surface of the Earth. It releases units packaged into helium nuclei. With the atoms in the chamber, the field is the field produced by the beta emissions from the radioactive material, the very radiation eliminated from the detector's range. Just as one match will burst into flame when it is moved too close to another burning match, so will the nuclei of the nitrogen atoms begin to lose units packaged into the lighter hydrogen nuclei in the higher field produced by the beta emissions from the radioactive source!

Alpha particles were not knocking a hydrogen nucleus out of a nitrogen nucleus, the beta radiation was replacing the charge holding the units of the nitrogen nuclei together, with some of those units being released as hydrogen nuclei and, swept along by the beta radiation, reaching the detector before they could obtain orbital clouds of electrons.

The extent to which the hydrogen nuclei could be detected depended not on the momentum of the alpha particle but rather on whether they could maintain an exposed charge, which, in turn, depended on the number of available electrons in the environment!

Why doesn't the radioactive element breakdown into hydrogen nuclei?

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A QUESTION OF EMISSIONS

Describing alpha, beta and gamma rays as helium nuclei, electrons and electromagnetic radiation in that order is not very informative.

What exactly is being emitted from the radioactive source?

To understand what is going on, we need a description of what is going on, of how these emissions are tied to the nuclei of the radioactive atoms.

Uranium undisturbed in pitchblende deposits is not radioactive although the assumption that it is decaying and producing vast deposits of radon gas beneath the surface of the Earth has sold a lot of radon detectors over the years. Uranium in pitchblende is in molecular balance with the field, the temperature, in which it exists like the elements in alloys are in molecular balance with respect to the alloy's melting point rather than the melting points of the individual elements. The field is the temperature at the surface of the Earth. When the pitchblende is mined, its physical surfaces are exposed to molecular imbalance, exposing isolated uranium atoms which begin to emit, causing the pitchblende itself to break down, further isolating uranium atoms to produce additional radiation.

With motion being a property of the particles that make up the atoms, and with the magnetic assumption of polarity removed from the atom so that the physical law that likes repel can be repealed for the subatomic world, what is being emitted is either electrons or units made up of electrons, with the electrons regaining their motion upon being released, motion being the definition of energy, and the units being swept along to the extent that they cannot be held together in the nuclei of the atoms because the field is too strong for them to remain together.

Why are helium nuclei, rather than hydrogen nuclei, produced as the nuclei of the atoms that make up radioactive matter break down to the extent necessary to reach balance with the existing field?

Because hydrogen atoms cannot exist in the existing field, the temperature at the surface of the Earth!

If hydrogen atoms could exist in the existing field, we wouldn't have water and we wouldn't have the life it produces sitting around asking questions about hydrogen atoms. Hydrogen combines with other elements for much the same reason uranium needs to be in combination with light elements if it is to survive in the existing field. Hydrogen seeks balance with other elements so that the resulting molecules will be in balance with the existing field.

Keeping in mind that we are dealing with a nucleus containing billions of units rather than a single proton, the units that come off of the nuclei of atoms immersed in a field that is stronger than will allow them to exist have to come off in a package containing enough units to maintain its balance with the existing field. Alpha particles in the form of helium nuclei are actually made up of the lowest number of units that can exist in the environment in which the radioactive atoms are breaking down, and they are being separated from the nuclei of the radioactive atoms because the field is too great for the units of the radioactive nuclei to stay together and maintain balance.

The hydrogen nuclei on the other hand, are not separated from a nucleus by the field that exists at the surface of the Earth. They require the much stronger field produced by the beta radiation in the chamber itself which breaks out the units in smaller packages than can exist in the normal field.

The beta rays sweep the alpha particles and hydrogen nuclei along after they are separated, the beta rays being the electrons from the clouds of orbiting electrons of the radioactive atoms which are being released by exposure to the field and which are regaining their motion, the release occurring without frequency because combustion is not occurring.

Which leaves the gamma radiation.

The gamma radiation is emitted in a manner that makes it more penetrating than the beta radiation. The distance the two travel through a barrier is what is used to distinguish the two. However, if the relative distances they travel are the result of the same particle being released with different stores of energy, the measurements can be attributed to two different methods of release rather than to two different forms of radiation.

The beta radiation is made up of flows of electrons released from orbital clouds while the gamma radiation is made up of electrons released from the units themselves, the units that make up the nucleus and which are in turn made up of the same particles, electrons.

As the field builds up within the radioactive nucleus from the emissions, which move in all directions and thus are moving toward the center as well as out, creating a strong nuclear field in the units, some of the units themselves come apart into their constituent electrons.

The orbiting electrons were already expending energy orbiting the nuclei so that when they regain their motion, they regain only a portion of their total energy.

The electrons that make up the gamma radiation, however, were totally immobilized in the units that make up the nucleus, and when they regain their motion, they regain their total energy. Here, with momentum being a product of acceleration, it really is a question of which is more energetic, with the electrons released from stable positions in the units regaining far more momentum than those being released from orbits where they are already in motion.

IMAGINE THE ASTONISHMENT!

Because gamma radiation was so much more energetic than alpha particles, Bothe began experiments using gamma radiation to determine if elements heavier than nitrogen could be split in the same way that the alpha particle was thought to be splitting the nitrogen atom. Mounting polonium, a source of alpha particles comparatively free of gamma radiation, he began to bombard elements in search of one that produced large amounts of gamma radiation. Elements such as boron and aluminum produced gamma radiation, but also disintegrated, producing hydrogen nuclei in the process. These elements couldn't be used because the hydrogen nuclei they produced could not later be separated from the hydrogen nuclei that were supposed to be knocked out by the gamma radiation. When lithium and beryllium were bombarded by the alpha particles, however, they emitted gamma radiation without emitting hydrogen nuclei.

Beryllium, in fact, emitted one heck of a lot of gamma radiation, estimated at ten times the amount of energy received from the alpha bombardment.

Chadwick, who frowned on Bothe's experiments to start with because gamma radiation was not a particle and shouldn't be able to knock anything out of anything, looked askance at this observation because it violated the law dictating that the energy produced could not exceed the energy source.

Bothe's result, however, wouldn't be a surprise to anyone who was looking at the beta radiation field replacing the beryllium nuclei. After all, if we take ten unlit matches and move them into the field of a lit match, the ten will ignite just as easily as the one and produce ten times the energy that one match produces.

The Joliot-Curies, however, oblivious to Chadwick's theoretical disagreement concerning Bothe's results, used the gamma radiation from beryllium as a source of bombardment. When they placed paraffin between the gamma radiation source and an ionization chamber, they found that the bombardment resulted in an increase in the current in the ionization chamber, an observation similar to increased clicks from a Geiger Counter. Because they believed that the detector was recording hydrogen recoils, they could estimate the energy produced by the gamma radiation at three times the energy created by the gamma radiation. They published their results, using the energy of the gamma radiation from the beryllium to account for the detection of the hydrogen nuclei.

The Joliot-Curies' results wouldn't be a surprise to anyone who was looking at the gamma electron radiation bathing the bonds of the hydrocarbon molecules. The orbital clouds holding these atoms together regain their motion, the molecules fall apart, and the individual nuclei are swept along, with the carbon nuclei already in balance and thus undetectable, and the hydrogen nuclei sparking the detector or at least flicking its needle.

Chadwick, however, objected strenuously. He took some measurements of the radiation being produced by the beryllium and found that the radiation was more energetic when it was traveling in the direction of the alpha radiation than when it was traveling in the direction opposite the alpha radiation.

Having concluded that gamma radiation was one of Maxwell's electromagnetic waves, he claimed that, like light, it should propagate evenly in all directions.

He therefore claimed that because the radiation being emitted by the beryllium was not being emitted uniformly in all directions, it was not an electromagnetic wave and therefore could not be gamma radiation.

Anyone who remembered that the polonium source was emitting beta radiation would have realized that gamma radiation emitted in the direction of the beta radiation would lose some of its energy when compared to gamma radiation that was being emitted in the direction of the beta radiation.

Chadwick was therefore arguing with limited awareness!

But that didn't stop him from arguing!

Duplicating the Joliot-Curies' experiments, with the addition of a detector that registered the results by deflecting the needle of an oscilloscope which turned the sparks into a mechanical event that could be calibrated, Chadwick found that the "beryllium" radiation was knocking hydrogen nuclei out of the paraffin.

When he substituted heavier elements for the paraffin, he found that the number of "recoils," the number of hydrogen nuclei registering on the detector, remained the same as the weight of the element increased. The same beryllium radiation knocked out hydrogen atoms in elements with different weights.

This wouldn't be a surprise to anyone who was looking at the beta electron radiation bathing the various heavy atoms.

But if anyone were thinking in terms of Newton's Third Law of Motion, as was Chadwick, that for every action there has to be an equal and opposite reaction, then the same energy knocking hydrogen nuclei out of increasingly heavy atoms would be astonishing.

Why?

It would violate the principle of energy conservation, that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, the momentum of the beryllium radiation being unchangeable.

Gamma radiation did not exist between its source and its effect, it had no mass, or if it did, it had very little of it, the Compton Effect showing that it could merely deflect electrons. Therefore, saying that gamma radiation could strike a hydrogen nuclei, a proton, and cause it to recoil would be like saying a grain of sand could knock the cue ball off the billiard table!

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THE BIRTH OF THE NONEXISTENT NEUTRON

The Joliot-Curies were about as elegant an authority as could possibly exist in the Empirical Science of the time.

If Chadwick could knock the Joliot-Curies off, their authority would recoil to his benefit!

Chadwick had carefully crafted his experiment to make the Joliot-Curies' claim that the gamma radiation bombardment of the paraffin was knocking the massive hydrogen nuclei into the detectors appear frivolous so that the Joliot-Curies would look silly.

Because very little about Empirical Science has to do with describing what is actually happening in reality, authority is the only basis for making or accepting any statement concerning physical reality. Authority in turn is derived from consensus agreement as to which explanations, which concepts, actually, which beliefs, will be accepted as proven correct.

One of the best ways to undermine authority is ridicule, and in fact, Empirical Science, and to a greater extent, Modern Science, which bases its measurements on accepted beliefs rather than on measurements in physical reality, uses ridicule to dispose of any beliefs that oppose, and thus endanger the accepted beliefs of the consensus.

If something can be dismissed as laughable then it doesn't have to be entertained as a serious challenge to accepted beliefs. This tried and true method is as old as religion, and science is a more rigorous belief system than most religions.

Between Chadwick and the Joliot-Curies, it was an "either/or" situation in spite of the fact that explanations concerning physical reality are never "either/or" situations.

No explanation for any physical effect can ever be more than a mere interpretation of fact!

What made the Chadwick/Joliot-Curie controversy an "either/or" situation, however, was the made-up belief that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. This belief was created to limit reality so that mathematical systems could claim they actually described reality. Applying such a belief to physical reality without an adequate definition of energy, without knowing what it is meant to create or to destroy energy, or even what energy is, is asininity at its most pervasive.

But things like the conservation of energy are beyond textbook learning, they are basic to the mind, like gravity as a property of mass, authority unto themselves, so that to argue against Chadwick's use of Newton's Third Law of Motion, itself basic to the mind, by claiming that gamma radiation could "knock" the protons out of the paraffin would be arguing against the conservation of energy, committing suicide instead of retiring from the field of battle, disgraced, but alive. Graceful disgrace, after all, invites sympathy and Nobels, which rapidly followed.

Chadwick thus had a clear field to come up with his neutron, something that he had long cherished displaying. "It is evident" he said, "that we must either relinquish the application of the conversation of energy and momentum in these collisions or adopt another hypothesis about the nature of radiation."

If an attempt had been made to deal with the nature of radiation, not adopt another hypotheses, for there was no hypothesis about radiation to start with, but rather an attempt to come to terms with what energy is, Chadwick might have uncovered the source of the radiation's momentum. If he had abandoned Newton's Third Law of Motion, he might have realized that what happens when a match is immersed in the field of another match is actually the result of subatomic processes.

But Chadwick was intent on creating his neutron and as a result, with the Joliot-Curies vanquished from the playing field, the neutron became a reality!

The neutron had no charge. That was why it could penetrate the same distance that gamma radiation penetrated. It had a mass equal to the proton. That was why it was able to knock the protons about so that they produced hydrogen deflections in the detector. And to put the neutron in the nucleus of the atom, it was only necessary to convert a proton into a neutron because of the similar mass, the proton's mass being one electron shy of a neutron.

Protons could thus match the number of electrons in orbit to determine charge, protons and neutrons could be added together to produce weight, and the world could rest assured in the knowledge that its comprehension of the basic nature of matter and energy was complete.

THE AFTERMATH OF THE MISCONCEPTION OF THE NONEXISTENT NEUTRON: A WEALTH OF MISCONCEPTIONS

Not recognizing the effect of beta or gamma radiation on atoms, but instead applying both polarity and Newton's Third Law of Motion to the analysis of atomic structure has resulted in an atom with an unimaginably large number of subatomic particles, not many of the same particles, as is the case, but many different particles, so many in fact that the number permitted has had to be limited by international agreement. In order to get around this international limitation (which is actually a limitation on the proliferation of Nobels), the number of particles is increased without increasing the number of names by producing particles that mirror each other because of assumed polarity and the number of particle effects is increased without increasing the number of names by creating particles that can be mixed and matched in different combinations so that different mixtures can produce the same particle with different effects.

It's a mess, and an incomprehensible mess at that, but it is a mess derived from the failure to recognize that energy is the release of the particles that make up matter when that matter is immersed in radiation, requiring instead an equal amount of energy to produce the energy we measure. The equal amount of energy is provided by making up particles and then giving those particles momentum which, because it is assumed, assumes away the source of the energy.

Without the release of particles in a field to explain energy, particles like the neutron keep having to be created to explain the energy by assuming they have momentum, and still more particles have to be created to explain the energy the new particles produce when their energy doesn't balance the energy the new particles produced to account for the unbalanced energy.

It is an endless balancing act, Charlie Chaplin reducing a table to rubble by mis-sawing one leg at a time, only it is our understanding that is being reduced to rubble.

Because matter becomes more stable toward the center of the periodic table, gamma radiation cannot at its normal energy level split atoms with higher atomic weights. Thus, cyclotrons, linear accelerators and superconducting supercolliders are crafted that accelerate charged particles so that they smack against targets at tremendous velocities, literally blasting the atoms of the target into smithereens. Repeating patterns are gleefully picked out from the billions of resulting swirls and tracings created by allowing the trajectories of the various smithereens to expose photographic plates. The patterns are then ingeniously crafted into particles to explain motion and energy. The goal of this puerile process is to find the ultimate particle that explains everything and has resulted in quantum mechanics, an incomprehensible body of pseudo-knowledge created by supposedly sane theorists that claims, among a multitude of other litanous idiocies that the same particle can be in two different places at the same time!

And all that is really happening is that bits and pieces of the units that make up the nuclei of all atoms are flying off depending on the angle and force of impact, and the strength of the background radiation and surviving depending on the size of the piece and the availability of electrons in the environment, until they in turn disintegrate into gamma radiation or recombine into or with atoms.

Ignoring the effect of radiation in the release of energy, and instead creating the neutron out of whole cloth didn't solve the energy equivalency problem because the alpha particles were still producing ten times the amount of energy the alpha particles were bringing in under Newtonian third law computations and the beryllium radiation was still disintegrating atoms. To magnify the matter, Fermi found that beryllium radiation could activate light elements for short periods of time, and when the light elements were placed near a source of hydrogen, the radioactivity was enhanced immeasurably. The unimaginable amount of energy that became theoretically possible as a result of such ruminations was more than conversions from horsepower to steam, or steam to electricity could contemplate.

Looking around for some sort of analogy to correlate the production of nuclear energy, the actual ignition of the units in the nucleus of the atom by a very strong field, with the apparent absence of a source, Meitner's gaze fell on Einstein's great conceptual equation, e=mc2, its use in explaining nuclear energy in turn accepted as validation of Einstein's attempt to describe a universe in which space and time themselves were quantifiable.

E=mc2 is a conceptual equation because each of its terms represents a concept. The "c2" requires that the speed of light be defined in short units so the number produced becomes conceptually unimaginable, conveying a sense of the massive amounts of energy bound up in matter. If the distance light travels in a second were classified as "1" as most standard units are, then its square would be "1" and the resulting energy minuscule. The "m" mass is an unknown quantity. It is the imaginary matter produced by applying an inverse square measurement and the mass/gravity concept to the movement of matter in space. It includes black holes and dark matter, things that, besides being nonexistent, are unmeasurable. The "e" is, well, energy is a concept all its own, without any comprehensible definition other than motion.

The conceptual meaning of the equation, that energy is made up of the matter that produces it, even opposes the current empirical understanding of matter and energy. The equation says that matter is made up of the energy it can produce, that the units in the nuclei of atoms are made up of electrons, as are the orbiting clouds surrounding those nuclei, and that if all of these electrons were released at once, there would be one hell of a lot of heat and light, and that conversely, matter is the structure produced when the motion of the particles that make it up is immobilized.

However, Modern Science considers heat and light as imponderables, phenomena that do not exist between their source and effect, and as a result, not made up of the matter that gives them off. Modern Science, therefore, while using muddled thinking to justify the production of large amounts of energy in the compression of small amounts of unstable matter, actually does not believe that matter is made up of the energy it gives off when it comes apart, and therefore cannot believe in the equation e=mc2.

The concept of equivalency of matter and energy, however, was sufficient to direct trial and error experimentation to the practical conclusion that compressing unstable atoms with an implosion would result in the sudden release of energy. Thus, even though it wasn't understood that the release was actually the release of the particles that make up the units in the nuclei of the unstable atoms in the form of gamma radiation as a result of the nuclear field replacement produced by the implosion, technology was able to purify sufficient amounts of unstable elements and engineer a method to control and direct the implosion so that the resulting field would be high enough to replace the field holding the units in the nuclei of the individual atoms together and produce a nuclear explosion.

Science is the production of technology from the trial and error manipulation of physical reality.

It is not theory!

Theory is the creation of pictures of how physical reality might work.

Most science, most technology, occurs in spite of modern scientific theory which, being mathematically based, limits physical reality to the allowable terms in equations.

Today, when theory has nothing to do with physical reality, when Empiricists dance around the ceremonial fire blowing smoke and waving mirrors, crying out black holes and dark matter, warped space and compressed time to draw attention away from the simple fact that they can't explain why a ball drops or the sun comes up, theory is quick to claim credit for the advancements of science, denigrating the producing technology in the process, casting Edison's light bulb into the darkness of quantum mechanics which claims exquisite precision for its predictions.

This exquisite precision comes from quantum mechanic's basic dictate that nothing can be known until it is measured, removing the difficulty involved in building specific detectors to verify nonexistent facts and allowing quantum mechanics to claim responsibility for virtually everything, a claim, that at last estimate, includes one third of the momentary value of the world's economy, most of which can be laid at Edison's electrification model.

The real problem is not theorists. There is not enough of them.

The real problem is pseudo-theorists who ossify theory into canon so that the scientist, the engineer, is limited in the exploration of the possible.

Copyright 1997 Peter Bros

 

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