Fermi's predictions live on

Yock, Philip

doi:10.1038/540199b

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Published: 07 December 2016

Theoretical physics

Fermi's predictions live on

Philip Yock¹

Nature volume 540, page 199 (2016)Cite this article

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Gino Segrè and Bettina Hoerlin's biography of Enrico Fermi — The Pope of Physics (Henry Holt, 2016) — is a delightful sequel to the inspiring Atoms in the Family, written by Fermi's wife Laura in 1954 (Univ. of Chicago Press). I find reviewer Graham Farmelo's judgement too harsh on the fallibility of Fermi's foresight (see Nature 538, 168–169; 2016).

In 1934, Fermi predicted (in a paper rejected by Nature) that particles actually change their identity in weak nuclear interactions; with his student C. N. Yang in 1949, he suggested that there were too many particles for them all to be elementary. These remarkable testaments to Fermi's foresight have survived as founding concepts of today's standard model of matter.

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Auckland, New Zealand
Philip Yock

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Yock, P. Fermi's predictions live on. Nature 540, 199 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/540199b

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Published: 07 December 2016
Issue date: 08 December 2016
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/540199b

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Xinhang Shen 7 December 2016, 15:58

As the standard model is based on the relativistic spacetime model, it can't be correct because relativistic spacetime model itself has been disproved both theoretically and experimentally (see ?Challenge to the special theory of relativity? March 1, 2016 Physics Essays). The most obvious evidence disproving special relativity is the existence of the absolute time shown by the universally synchronized clocks on the GPS satellites which move at high velocities relative to each other while special relativity claims that time is relative (i.e. the time on each reference frame is different) and can never be synchronized on clocks moving with relative velocities.