The Secret Life of the Neutron
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | The Secret Life of the Neutron |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Karl Teppo |
| Keywords | neutron |
| Published | 2009 |
| Journal | Unpublished |
| No. of pages | 12 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
NEUTRON. Search by scientists for the fundamental particles have had expectation that such a particle must be small. Because a neutron in isolation is observed to decay into a proton, an electron and an anti-neutrino in about 15 minutes, too much importance is given to the bits. There was debate early in the twentieth century about the energy expenditure of the Sun. This was based on assumption, early history evolution of stars had hot beginnings. Universe at large however is cold and the existing elements of the periodic tables show overabundance of neutrons over protons far over 50%!
Overview
The Secret Life of the Neutron is a wide-ranging essay in which Karl Teppo proposes that the neutron, not any smaller constituent, is the fundamental particle of the universe, and that the evolution of matter runs "top-down" — from cold, dense neutron matter that breaks down into lighter elements — rather than "bottom-up" from hydrogen built up by fusion and gravitational accretion. In Teppo's words the search for fundamental particles has been mistaken in its "expectation that such a particle must be small," and energy-conservation experiments "have concentrated on the high temperature end of the scale without realizing the answer lies at the cold end of the energy spectrum i.e. at the zero degrees Kelvin."
The mainstream account the paper sets itself against is the standard chain of Eddington's suggestion of solar fusion, Hans Bethe's 1938 CNO cycle, the building of heavy elements in stars and supernovae, and the formation of stars and planets by accretion from cold clouds — a picture Teppo attributes in particular to Fred Hoyle and calls "diametrically opposite" to his own. Against this he sets what he calls a Top-Down fission element breakdown: hard, cold, dark "neutron clumps" existed from the beginning, are still ejected from galactic cores along the spiral arms, and decay from the outside in, producing protons, hydrogen, and then progressively the heavier elements at an "interface" between the cold core and the outer layers.
Around this central idea the paper assembles a long series of astronomical and geophysical observations that Teppo reads as symptoms of hidden neutron cores: close-in giant extrasolar planets, brown dwarfs, pulsars, gamma-ray bursts, planetary magnetic fields, the Earth's internal heat and mantle plumes, the methane atmosphere of Titan, the nitrogen geysers of Triton, the rings of Saturn and polar X-ray emission from Jupiter. The style is essayistic rather than formal: there are no derivations, and the argument proceeds by accumulating anomalies that the author judges the accretion-and-fusion picture handles badly.
The argument
The neutron as the fundamental particle
Teppo's starting question is why the heavier elements of the periodic table contain so many more neutrons than protons — "often more than double the number of neutrons than protons in our elements," and in the abstract "far over 50%". He reads this as a fossil record of an era in which "protons were still part of the neutrons as a single entity," rather than as the outcome of fusion building nuclei up from hydrogen. On this reading the abundance of free protons as hydrogen gas is itself evidence of ongoing top-down decay in whatever part of the universe the radiation we observe is coming from, and the widely quoted figure that hydrogen is some 75% of the matter of the universe is an artefact of observing only the radiating regions — on Earth, he notes, hydrogen is "only the ninth and just one percent of the total."
The quarks of the standard model are dismissed as transient artefacts: the three entities apparently confined within the nucleus "must really be the vacuum vortexes split in threes for the 'quarks' or in twos for the mesons for a split second before they recombine." Taking the neutron as fundamental, he suggests, means "a lot of time may have been wasted in looking for a smaller one like the Higgs particle."
The Cold Eon Cycle and the Cold Collision
The universe is proposed to alternate between hot and cold eras. In the "Cold Eon Cycle" matter evolves down to zero-kelvin neutron galactic cores; the cold voids of the present universe, and what is presently called cold dark matter, are where that freezing-down is happening now. The birth event of a new generation of neutron clumps Teppo calls the Cold Collision (CC), from which superluminal jets are emitted in opposite directions; he asserts that in this process "speed and energy are equal to the fourth power of c."
Neutron clumps are then still ejected from galactic cores along the arms of the galaxy. Because neutrons "do not radiate directly," the clumps are dark — Teppo points to the coal-sack regions of the Orion Nebula — and are therefore, on his account, systematically misidentified by astronomers as old objects, dust clouds, brown dwarfs or supernova remnants when in fact they are the raw material of new stars and planets.
The c+ Rotational Fulcrum law and the "cold base"
Teppo postulates a "c+ Rotational Fulcrum Law": a below-zero-K neutral wind emitted from the poles of spinning neutron clumps, faster than light, which he takes to be the origin of the magnetic field. He identifies this superluminal neutral wind with what are conventionally called neutrinos, citing the detection of neutrinos about three hours ahead of the visible light from a supernova he labels SN 1978A as evidence that they travelled at c+. He offers a mechanical analogy for the effect: hold a pen off centre, rotate one end clockwise in a liquid, and "you would find ... the far end of the pen leaving a trace backward."
Permeating all of this is a "cold base" — an invisible, rotating, zero-kelvin medium at absolute zero which surrounds massive magnetic neutron-cored bodies such as the Sun, in which all radiation propagates. The light barrier is likened to the sound barrier: it holds speed at c only relative to this medium, and can in principle be broken. The cold base is also offered as the carrier of gravity in what Teppo calls RC Gravity (Radiation Coupled), in which the weakness of gravity is attributed to "the flow of the cold base entity displacing the cyclical void, in the core of nuclei of the atoms." The same rotating medium is invoked to bend starlight near the Sun and to explain anomalous drifts of the Pioneer and Voyager probes in the direction of the Sun's rotation.
Stars and planets as decaying neutron clumps
The astronomical section applies the scheme to individual objects. Giant extrasolar planets found very close to their parent stars — Tau Bootis is cited, orbited in three days seven hours by a planet four times the size of Jupiter — are said to be inexplicable if such planets form far out by accretion, but natural if all matter was originally in neutron clumps ejected from a galactic core. Stars ignite when protons forming at the surface of the clump begin to bond and radiate, which is why a star such as Sakurai's object can "flare up from the darkness and then disappear." The size of the original clump is said to determine the outcome: small and medium clumps make rocky planets, large ones generate more heat and magnetic flaring at the "interface".
Magnetic anomalies are read the same way. Neptune's offset magnetic dipole is attributed to a breakaway clump that rose nearly to the surface; Uranus's tilt, Venus's arrested rotation and hot atmosphere, and the reported six-minute slowing of Saturn's spin since Voyager are all attributed to internal neutron clumps. X-ray emission observed at the poles of Jupiter is offered as direct evidence of a rotating neutron clump in its core.
The Earth
Teppo applies the theory to the Earth directly. The planet's internal heat is said to come from the "neutron conversion interface to protons" rather than from radioactive decay and primordial heat; mantle plumes carry the products of neutron-clump decay upward, and he claims "there are too many neutron rich elements in these plumes to agree with current theories of volcano evolution." The Earth is held to be growing from the inside out as the dense core converts neutrons into lighter material, forming "'Crypto' continents" on the inner core that float up and, if beneath the oceans, cause tsunamis; earthquakes are treated as direct evidence of the clumps' power. Multiple clumps within the Earth are invoked to explain the off-centre magnetic poles and to predict a future magnetic reversal.
Wider speculations
The essay closes with more distant applications: dark energy is treated as "a natural consequence of the Top-Down cosmology of breaking down the density of the neutron clumps with their c+ neutral wind from the cores of the Quasars"; radiometric ages of about four and a half billion years for the solar system are questioned on the grounds that the observed angular momentum distribution rules out accretion; and the paper speculates that faster-than-light "long range neutron bonds" underlie both quantum entanglement and the speed of human recall, extending briefly to speculation about the persistence of memory after death.
Assessment
The paper's genuinely interesting move is its inversion of the usual arrow of nucleosynthesis. Asking why heavy nuclei are so neutron-rich, and treating that as primary data rather than as a by-product of fusion, is a legitimate question to press, and the observation that star formation is seen in the coldest, darkest regions is a real tension the accretion picture has to work to accommodate. The paper is also unusually consistent: one mechanism — a cold neutron core with a decaying "interface" — is applied uniformly from galaxies down to moons, which at least makes the scheme easy to state and, in principle, easy to test.
The difficulties are substantial and Teppo does not address them. Most fundamentally, the free neutron's roughly fifteen-minute decay is the paper's own starting point, yet nothing in the paper explains what binds a planet-sized or asteroid-sized "neutron clump" together. In accepted physics neutron matter is stable only under the gravitational compression of a neutron star of order a solar mass; a clump "15 to 40 times the mass of Jupiter," or one sitting inside the Earth or the Moon, would simply decay on the timescale the abstract quotes. This is asserted rather than derived, and it is the load-bearing step of the whole scheme.
The superluminal claims conflict directly with measurement. The neutrino burst from SN 1987A (the paper writes "SN 1978A") arrived a few hours before the optical brightening, but the accepted reading is that the neutrinos escaped the collapsing core immediately while the shock took hours to reach the star's surface — the timing constrains the neutrino speed to be extremely close to c, not above it, and direct terrestrial measurements agree. Likewise the "cold base" medium reintroduces a preferred frame of the kind the Michelson-Morley experiment and its successors were designed to detect; the paper mentions the light barrier as analogous to the sound barrier but offers no account of why no drift through the medium is observed. The assertion that in the Cold Collision "speed and energy are equal to the fourth power of c" is given without derivation or dimensional justification.
Methodologically the essay is a chain of anomalies rather than a theory with predictions. Sources are largely popular ones — New Scientist items, press releases from Chandra, general-audience books — and no quantity is computed from the model and compared with a measurement. Several of the anomalies cited have since acquired conventional explanations (hot Jupiters by planetary migration, for instance). The closing passages on memory after death and on personality transfer in transplant patients are far outside the evidence base the rest of the paper draws on, and weaken the case for the physics that precedes them. Readers should treat the astronomical sections as the substantive part of the argument.