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| Beta and neutron decay |
On January 30, 2018, the Science
News magazine commented on an
article recently published in arXiv which states that in a universe without
the weak interaction, life would still be possible. When I read the Science
News article, I immediately thought of an objection that could ruin both the thesis
of the original article and its popularization. The first thing I did
was looking up the original article, to see if my objection was mentioned or denied,
but there was not a word about it. Next I detailed my objection in a comment in
the web version of the Science News article, but so far no one has answered me.
However, I think the objection is quite strong, and unless I am answered
satisfactorily, in my opinion these articles are discredited.
According to the
standard cosmological model and the
standard model of particle physics, there are four fundamental
interactions or forces in the universe: gravitation, electromagnetic
interaction, and the strong and weak interactions, which regulate the work of
atoms and elementary particles. In particular, the weak interaction
affects all the elementary particles: leptons and hadrons, unlike the strong
interaction, which affects only hadrons.
