NEW FIFTH FORCE OF NATURE DISCOVERED? WELL, MAYBE… BUT I ...

So many people shared versions of this story that I have to talk about it, and for regular readers of my books, in particular The Nazi International and Grid of the Gods, you'll see why. The story relates to a discovery made in Debrecen, Hungary, on a electron-positron spectrometer, which led to an interesting discovery. Here's the article:

Has a Hungarian physics lab found a fifth force of nature?

Now here's the gist of the story, from the article:

A laboratory experiment in Hungary has spotted an anomaly in radioactive decay that could be the signature of a previously unknown fifth fundamental force of nature, physicists say – if the finding holds up.

Attila Krasznahorkay at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’s Institute for Nuclear Research in Debrecen, Hungary, and his colleagues reported their surprising result in 2015 on the arXiv preprint server, and this January in the journal Physical Review Letters¹. But the report – which posited the existence of a new, light boson only 34 times heavier than the electron – was largely overlooked.

Then, on 25 April, a group of US theoretical physicists brought the finding to wider attention by publishing its own analysis of the result on arXiv². The theorists showed that the data didn’t conflict with any previous experiments – and concluded that it could be evidence for a fifth fundamental force. “We brought it out from relative obscurity,” says Jonathan Feng, at the University of California, Irvine, the lead author of the arXiv report.

Now, note that the article also goes on to state very clearly that this finding has not been verified as yet, and could, of course, be overturned. But let's assume, for our usual high octane speculation, that it's true. If so, then what sort of force might we be looking at here? The current thinking is revealed here:

Gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces are the four fundamental forces known to physics — but researchers have made many as-yet unsubstantiated claims of a fifth. Over the past decade, the search for new forces has ramped up because of the inability of the standard model of particle physics to explain dark matter — an invisible substance thought to make up more than 80% of the Universe’s mass. Theorists have proposed various exotic-matter particles and force-carriers, including “dark photons”, by analogy to conventional photons that carry the electromagnetic force.

So what kind of force carrier is in mind here?

Feng and colleagues say that the 17-MeV particle is not a dark photon. After analysing the anomaly and looking for properties consistent with previous experimental results, they concluded that the particle could instead be a “protophobic X boson”. Such a particle would carry an extremely short-range force that acts over distances only several times the width of an atomic nucleus. And where a dark photon (like a conventional photon) would couple to electrons and protons, the new boson would couple to electrons and neutrons. Feng says that his group is currently investigating other kinds of particles that could explain the anomaly. But the protophobic boson is “the most straightforward possibility”, he says.

So what made me sit up and take notice? It was this reference to lithium-7:

The Hungarian team fired protons at thin targets of lithium-7, which created unstable beryllium-8 nuclei that then decayed and spat out pairs of electrons and positrons. According to the standard model, physicists should see that the number of observed pairs drops as the angle separating the trajectory of the electron and positron increases. But the team reported that at about 140º, the number of such emissions jumps — creating a ‘bump’ when the number of pairs are plotted against the angle — before dropping off again at higher angles.

Now, if you'll recall, lithium-7 has an odd, if not infamous, history in the story of mankind's thermonuclear "tests," for the infamous Castle-Bravo hydrogen bomb test, and its runaway yield that exceeded pre-test calculations by almost double the amount, was eventually asribed to our thermonuclear engineers not factoring in the fact that lithium-7 would enter the fusion reaction. This little "blunder", we are supposed to believe, led to a near disaster during the Castle Brovo tests. But as I pointed out in my Nazi International and Grid of the Gods books, Nazi physicist Ronald Richter had been talking about lithium-7 in fusion reactions months before the Castle-Bravo test, an historical and narrative inconvenience to the official narrative, which would have us believe American engineers and chemists were ignorant of the possibility.

Richter, in his subsequent - and secret - interviews by the US military, offered the view that nuclear plasmas, under certain conditions of stress, could act as a transducer of the zero point energy, and literally "gate" energy into the reactions from the configurations of local space at any given moment, and hence, thermonuclear bombs were not "closed systems" whose energy was solely dependent on the reactions within the nuclear fuel, but could, under certain circumstances, vary over time and place, all other factors being equal.

But now science is toying with the concept of a coupling force between electrons and neutrons, a force which, if confirmed, might account for these very same yield anomalies. And indeed, it may enter into the equation - no pun intended - of Richter's "open systems" view of such reactions. It's too early to tell, of course, but if confirmed, it shed some new light on the old mystery of those anomalous yields in the first years of thermonuclear testing. Time will tell.

See you on the flip side.