h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's very cool though...

The outcoming product of this decay is either:

beta-minus: Proton, electron and ANTI-NEUTRINO

or

beta-plus: Proton, positron and NEUTRINO

------------------------------------------------

Just in case someone wants to know exactly.

So a neutron consists of some matter and some antimatter? Weird.

Not really, a neutron consists of a neutron. It can decay into what was listed above, but they don't actually exist, as it were, until the decay takes place. A rather crude analagy would be, recycle a car body shell into a set of cutlery. The shell doesn't consist of the cutlery, but when it is recycled the cutlery can be made from it. As I said, crude, but it may help give you the idea .

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Ah, we're into Schroedinger's Cat territory here. This time, the corpse doesn't exist until it dies.

Wellll, if you're *going* to get technical...

A neutron consists of three qurarks, two down, and one up. And quarks consist of, er, quarks. Possibly something else, but so far as we know, they're elementary.

Neutrons aren't breaking down into their components. However, all alone without a nucleus to be in, they're not really very stable. So they decay after, er, 20 minutes or so? Is that it?

The decaying, however, doesn't follow quite well with the laws of conservation of energy and mass, does it? Can anyone explain this to me? Or do neutrons just have that much more mass than protons?

~Sirona

~Sirona

Yes, neutrons do have that little bit more mass than protons (939.6 MeV rest mass for neutrons and 938.3 MeV rest mass for protons, according to my diary).

20 minutes sounds about right for the half life of free neutrons (may be a little less, but I can't remember).

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