Conservation of Protons in a Stable Nickel Nucleus

Abstract

THE conservation laws of Nature (for example, charge, energy and baryon number) are considered to be true, since there is no experimental evidence available which proves otherwise. However, there are some theoretical speculations available which consider violations of these conservation laws. Bondi and Gold¹, in their steady-state theory of the cosmos, consider a net production of protons out of ‘emptiness’, in order to keep the average mass density in an expanding universe constant. Feinberg and Goldhaber² remind us that all conservation laws rest only on experimental evidence, and that it is a useful question to search for the limits in which they hold. In this spirit, Backenstoss et al.³ and Giamati and Reines⁴ investigated the conservation of baryon number. Alväger et al.⁵ recently tested the conservation of neutrons in copper nuclei.