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Murray Gell-Mann - Muon and electron neutrinos (83/200)

4,825 views · Published 24 May 2016 · 1:13 · Indexed 31 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2016 · Science & Technology

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New York-born physicist Murray Gell-Mann (1929-2019) was a theoretical physicist. His considerable contributions to physics include the theory of quantum chromodynamics. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. [Listener: Geoffrey West; date recorded: 1997]

TRANSCRIPT: Gerald Feinberg I think his name was, at… at Columbia had done the same calculation of the mu into e plus gamma with an intermediate boson and showed that it was too, too fast and there had to be something to prevent it from… from going–which could be two different neutrinos. Then Yang and Lee noticed something very important which was that if you had two different neutrinos you could distinguish them by doing experiments in which there were neutrino beams. Now that had been considered rather impossible… that had been considered next to impossible. But they pointed out that the cross-section keeps going up until you reach the cut off that comes from an intermediate boson, but for energies lower than that the cross-section keeps rising very steeply; so that at very high energies you could actually have neutrino beams and you could detect them, you could detect reactions induced by them. So… and then of course that was done and it was confirmed that the muon neutrino was different from the electron neutrino.

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