The Only Clue

Li Dong, who had already reached the entrance hall, stopped when he saw the message from Pauli.

Could even neutrinos no longer save the conservation of energy?

What did that mean?

Pauli was a staunch defender of the conservation of energy.

Throughout the entire history of physics, it would be hard to find anyone more stubborn than him on this matter.

In 1930, in order to refute Bohr's claim that energy conservation did not strictly hold in the microscopic world, he had actually boldly proposed a particle that had yet to be proven.

But now, he was saying in his message that even neutrinos could not save the conservation of energy.

Li Dong hurried back to the living room.

[Professor Li Dong: Sir Pauli, what kind of result led you to this judgment?]

[Pauli: Radium's magnetic spectrum.]

[Three months ago, I had several colleagues in Zurich reproduce the radium radioactive source.]

[They also remeasured its electron spectrum using a magnetic field and photographic plates.]

Radium—in other words, bismuth-210—

underwent beta decay and emitted electrons.

In Pauli's era, there were no precision instruments for studying beta decay.

Researchers at the time could only rely on magnets, slits, absorbers, and photographic plates to conduct their experiments.

Electrons passed through a slit and entered the target magnetic field. Because electrons with different kinetic energies were deflected to different degrees, they ultimately landed at different positions on the photographic plate.

Where the electrons landed, they exposed the photographic plate.

When the plate was finally developed, bands of varying darkness appeared across it.

The positions of those dark bands corresponded to energy, while their shades reflected the number of electrons landing at each location.

Together, these formed a complete electron energy spectrum.

[Pauli: However, after the photographic plates were developed, we unexpectedly found several very