Reference no: EM132592294

"Dear radioactive ladies and gentlemen," is how physicist Wolfgang Pauli addressed a letter to his colleagues proposing the "desperate remedy" of adding a new, unobserved particle to the laws of nature. (Pauli was known as a stickler for grounding theoretical physics in experimental facts, which is why he considered his proposal of a particle no one had ever seen an act of desperation.) When Pauli penned this letter in 1930, he called this hypothetical particle the "neutron," although it was soon renamed the neutrino. Pauli's motivation for introducing the neutrino was to account for a discrepency in the measurements of a kind of radioactive decay called beta decay. His "desperate" prediction was borne out in 1956 when neutrinos were first observed directly.

Explain how Pauli was able to deduce the existence of the neutrino without it having been observed experimentally.