jheimann@bbncc5.UUCP (John Heimann) (10/18/85)
**** Ken Rimey writes that there is a conservation law which states that nucleons (protons and neutrons) do not decay. In fact this is not true. There is a conservation law that says that the total baryon number of a system is constant (baryons include protons and neutrons and their antiparticles, with the latter having negative baryon number). Neutrons on the other hand do decay into protons - in fact beta decay is just Neutron ---> Proton + electron + antineutrino. The lifetime of a free slow neutron (i.e. one whose laboratory lifetime isn't increased by the time dilation effect) is on the order of seconds. Lucky for us nuclear forces inhibit the decay of most nuclear neutrons. Back in the fifties or sixties the AEC developed small power supplies for remote sites, called SNAP. They supplied electric power by heating a thermoelectric element via radioactive decay of an isotope. The systems were doing exactly what Ken suggests is impossible, namely deriving electricity from nucleon decay. This is not to suggest that Newmann's machine is really a SNAP generator - he'd get a pretty hefty dose of radiation from a few demonstrations of such a device. Has anybody noticed whether Newman wears a toupee, or has bad gums? I should mention that SU(5) unified field theories which were running around when I was last studying physics implied that baryon number wasn't conserved, and that protons could decay. I don't think anybody's ever seen a proton decay event, so I assume nobody believes SU(5) is the answer anymore. John