FOR a moment in the late 1920s, Niels Bohr considered the unthinkable: abandoning the notion of conservation of energy. He wasn’t calling for its wholesale rejection, only that it be disregarded whenever a neutron decayed into a proton and an electron, as some energy appeared to go missing along the way.
Wolfgang Pauli, who was wont to damn poor ideas as “not even wrong”, came up with a solution he called “a terrible thing” – an unknown particle to account for the missing energy. Since it had to be electrically neutral with little or no mass, it was called the…
