Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

The Nobel Prize went to two physicists honored for the discovery that neutrinos have mass . Their discovery was a major contribution to what is now known as the "standard model" of the elementary particles. Until their turn-of-the-millennium work, the widely shared opinion was that neutrinos (like photons) don't have mass. This consensus had led -- don't ask me why-- to a further consensus on how many of them ought to be detectable on earth. And that, in turn led to some confusion because the quantities actually detected were much smaller than what they 'should' be. So these are experimenters who managed to clear up a split between other experimenters and theorists. The theory had to be revised so that the experimental results, the actual quantity detected, could be accommodated, and their work showed how that could be done.  A victory for pragmatism in science, the hospitable homeland of pragmatism. I enjoy this time of year for a number of reasons, n...

A quote from the cover story in the May 2015 issue of Harper's. As early as the 1930s, scientists knew that in the process of radioactive decay, an atom's nucleus will release an electron. They were puzzled, though, by variations in the electron's energy level. The law of conservation of energy dictates a mathematical tidiness, whereby all such differences had to be accounted for. The Swiss physicist Wolfgang Pauli suggested a solution: Perhaps the electron was accompanied by an undetected 'ghost particle' which was more energetic when the electron was less so, and vice versa. The particle came to be called the neutrino, or 'little neutral one.' Pauli thought it might never be detected because it would hardly react with matter.   That is Pauli's visage above.