A neutron is stable in a nucleus, but after about fifteen minutes in empty space, it turns into a proton. One of its down quarks flips, to become an up quark, turning the neutron into a proton. Again, the standard model needed some 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 electromagnetic nor strong forces act like this, so the standard model followed the by now standard practice of inventing a new field with new boson agents and charges. The new charge, called isospin (+½, –½), was retro-fitted to allow charm quarks to interact with down quarks but not up quarks, etc., as observed. But this time, the boson agents needed 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 if the equations worked, it was accepted practice to prove they existed by finding matching accelerator resonances, so when in 1983 CERN found a million, million, million, millionth of a second event in the expected range, weak bosons immediately joined gluons in the standard model pantheon. On this flimsiest of evidence physicists today claim that:
“Experiments have observed three bosons that carry the weak force” (Marurger,2011), p221.
In fact, bosons haven’t been observed carrying anything. What was observed was just an accelerator event that is compatible with their existence. By analogy, suppose witness in a murder case said “I saw this knife killing the victim” and produced it as evidence, but cross-examination revealed that he just made a knife compatible with the wound and showed it in court. No jury in the land would accept that evidence, so why does physics call the same thing proof? CERN observed the energy spikes it created, not bosons carrying any force. No evidence at all links the CERN signal to neutron decay, so it proves nothing, yet physics now accepts that neutrons decay when a tiny 4.8 MEv down quark emits a massive 80,400 MEv W boson! This is like saying that an ant gave birth to an elephant.
It doesn’t help that the equations allow a neutron to decay in any of three ways (Figure 4.14), as it could:
1. Emit a W– that decays into an electron and anti-neutrino (Figure 4.14a)
2. Emit a W– boson that is hit by a neutrino to give an electron (Figure 4.14b)
3. Interact with a neutrino and a W+ boson to give an electron (Figure 4.14c).
Three different causes might seem better than one, but are three different alibis for a murder better than one? That a quark could emit a W- into a field, or could absorb a W+ from one, is the sort of after-the-fact reasoning that science is supposed to protect us from.
Even worse, the standard model equations are reversible, so protons should decay in empty space as neutrons do. This prediction 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 predicts that protons will decay in space, but they don’t.
What then does a processing model predict? Recall that a neutron is one up and two down quarks, and a proton is two up and one down quark, so a neutron will change into a proton if one of its down quarks becomes an up quark.
Now add that a down quark is a photon head-head-tail collision, and an up quark is a photon head-tail-tail collision. Changing a down quark into an up quark then just requires a set of photon heads become tails.
Figure 4.15 shows that if a neutrino hits a photon head directly, it will turn into a tail and emit an electron. It follows that a neutrino hitting a neutron just right can turn it into a proton, as the beta decay equation describes (Note 1). However the reverse requires an electron to hit a quark, to turn its tails into heads, but getting an electron next to a quark takes a lot of energy, so proton decay only occurs in the heart of stars. This neutrino effect 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 follows that the weak effect, of neutron decay, can be attributed to neutrinos that are all around us. This predicts that neutrons won’t decay in a neutrino-free space, and that proton decay only occurs in stars, as it does. Again, the boson agents proposed by the standard model are entirely unnecesary.
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?