2010-01-19

Disappearing physicist?

I have never until today heard about Ettore Majorana, an Italian physicist who was a contemporary of Fermi. A new book about Majorana's life and mysterious disappearance is outright panned in Nature (last week, LINK) by Frank Close. While I certainly won't read the book under review, I can't help but be fascinated by this bizarre story, and may have to follow up with some additional reading.
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3 comments:

  1. robj13719 January, 2010 09:52

    That's who my experiment's named after. http://majorana.npl.washington.edu/
    Fermions can be one of either two types. Quarks and the charged leptons are all called Dirac particles, because they have separate anti-particles. Neutrinos, on the other hand, are neutral and might possibly be their own anti-particle. If they are, then they're Majorana particles.

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  2. .brian19 January, 2010 10:10

    I thought anti-neutrinos were different from neutrinos. How do you tell if they are their own anti-particle? This sounds made up.

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  3. robj13719 January, 2010 10:23

    omg i'll cut you.

    you hope to tell them apart by looking for a physical process called neutrinoless double-beta decay.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_beta_decay

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