Neutrons

One can never read too many books about neutrons so I'm tackling Neutrons, Nuclei and Matter by James Byrne. Neutrons do everything: weak, strong, electromagnetic, and of course gravity. Everybody who remembers high school chemistry knows that the nucleus of the atom is made up of protons and neutrons. Hit a nucleus hard enough, with a proton for instance, and neutrons may be liberated. A neutron on its own is radioactive: unleash a cloud of neutrons and half of them will have disintegrated into other things inside about 10 minutes. Neutrons can penetrate deeply into substances that are opaque even to X-rays and are so useful as probes that the UK government has spent 100s of millions of pounds building the ISIS neutron source (I know - an unfortunate name nowadays).

In solar flares, individual ions are accelerated to high energies. They collide with other ions and produce all sorts of by-products, including neutrons. Some of these escape from the Sun. If we detect them with spacecraft experiments they can tell us about the events of the flare. Even light takes eight minutes to get here from the Sun so the neutrons need to be pretty high speed if they're not going to decay long before they reach Earth. When they decay they glow faintly in X-rays; maybe we'll be able to detect this radiation.

Anyway the prompt for this posting was not so much the wee neutrons themselves as the Preface to Neutrons, Nuclei and Matter, which begins by discussing George Bernard Shaw, looks back into scientific history, references several poets and includes a quote from Shelley, who Byrne is sure "would have understood what many of our legislators and educators appear to have forgotten: that science is concerned first and foremost with revealing the secrets of nature, and scientists have more in common with artists than they have with accountants, politicians or lawyers." What a great start!