Post by Fermilab

"Dear radioactive ladies and gentlemen..." ✉️ That is how physicist Wolfgang Pauli began a famous 1930 letter describing a new idea. At the time, physicists were facing a crisis: energy seemingly vanished during nuclear decay. To save the law of conservation of energy, Pauli proposed a solution — a neutral, nearly massless particle that carried the missing energy away. But Pauli feared he had proposed something impossible to find, worrying that no one would ever be able to observe it. Enrico Fermi later named this elusive particle the "neutrino", but it took experimentalists 26 years of chasing this cosmic ghost to finally prove Pauli right. As we celebrate #Neutrino70, we honor the decades of curiosity that turned Pauli's "impossible" idea into a new era of science. 🌌 📸: Pauli Letter Collection, CERN #PhysicsHistory #Fermilab #ParticlePhysics #neutrino #physics #science