A neutron is stable in a nucleus but after about fifteen minutes in empty space, one of its down quarks flips, to become an up quark, turning it into a proton. The standard model needed an agent to cause this effect and as gluons couldn’t do it, it proposed a new weak force that:
1. Affects all matter. Electromagnetism affects charge, and gluons affect quarks, but the weak force affects all matter.
2. Violates parity-symmetry. Weak interactions are left-right different.
3. Has no bound state. Electromagnetism binds atoms in molecules, the strong force binds nucleons in the nuclei, and gravity binds stars in galaxies, but the weak force binds nothing.
4. Is asymmetric. Neutrons decay into protons but protons are stable in space.
Neither electro-magnetic nor strong forces act like this, so by now standard practice, the standard model invented a new field with new particle agents and charges. The new charge, called isospin, was retro-fitted to allow charm quarks to interact with down quarks but not up quarks, etc., as observed. But this time, the virtual particles proposed had to be heavier than protons, and a field that absorbed and emitted mass was unheard of.
Yet by now virtual agents were the fashion and the accepted practice to prove they existed was by finding matching accelerator resonances, however brief. Finally, when in 1983 CERN found a million, million, million, millionth of a second event in the expected range, weak bosons joined gluons in the standard model pantheon, and on this flimsy evidence it is now said that:
“Experiments have observed three bosons that carry the weak force” (Marburger, 2011), p221.
Yet no bosons were observed carrying anything, just accelerator events compatible with them. For example, in a murder case, suppose a witness said “I saw this knife killing the victim” and produced it as evidence, but cross-examination revealed that he just manufactured the knife to fit the wound. No jury in the land would accept that evidence, so why accept the same logic physics? CERN observed the energy spikes it made, not particles carrying any forces. No evidence at all links the CERN signal to neutron decay, but it is now said to occur when a tiny 4.8 MEv down quark emits a massive 80,400 MEv W particle, which is like an ant giving birth to an elephant!
It doesn’t help that the equations let a neutron decay in any of three ways (Figure 4.14), as it could:
1. Emit a W– particle that decays into an electron and anti-neutrino (Figure 4.14a),
2. Emit a W– particle that is hit by a neutrino to give an electron (Figure 4.14b),
3. Interact with a neutrino and a W+ particle to give an electron (Figure 4.14c).
Three different causes might seem good but are three different murder alibis better than one? That a quark could emit a W- into a field, or absorb a W+ from one, is the sort of after-the-fact logic that science should protect us from.
Even worse, the above equations are reversible so protons should decay in space as neutrons do. This led to a fruitless thirty-year search for proton decay, ending in the massive Kamioka experiment that estimated the free proton half-life to be over a billion, billion, billion years. The standard model expected protons to decay in space, but they don’t.
What then does a processing model predict? If a neutron is one up and two down quarks, and a proton is two up and one down quark, a neutron will become a proton if one of its down quarks becomes an up quark. And if a down quark is a photon head-head-tail collision, and an up quark is a photon head-tail-tail collision, a down quark will become an up quark if a set of photon heads become tails.
Figure 4.15 shows that a neutrino can turn photon head into a tail and emit an electron, so a neutrino hitting a neutron just right will turn it into a proton, as the beta decay equation describes (Note 1). However the reverse requires an electron hit to turn tails into heads, but getting an electron next to a quark takes a lot of energy, so proton decay only occurs in stars. Also, the isospin charge is then just the phase of the incoming neutrino, and the effect violates parity-symmetry because neutrinos do.
The weak effect of neutron decay is then attributed to neutrinos that are all around us. It doesn’t alter the remainder so it isn’t electromagnetic, no photons are shared so it isn’t strong, and it affects any head-tail photon mix which is all matter. It is also testable as it predicts that neutrons won’t decay in a neutrino-free space.
The W particles of the weak field, like the gluons of the strong field, are again unnecessary agents.
Note 1. In beta decay, a neutrino hitting a neutron can turn it into a proton by the equation N + ν → P+ + e−. Equally an electron can turn a proton into a neutron by inverse beta decay P+ + e− → N + ν. Why insert fictional boson particles into these equations?