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End spoilers

The only thing more awesome then science fiction is science. Well, except for the warp drives.

You have a lepton number of 2 on the left hand side (2 leptons, 0 antileptons), and a lepton number of 0 on the right hand side (0 leptons, 0 antileptons). Thus you’ve managed to propose a process that is an even worse violation of lepton number conservation!

If you try to draw the Feynman diagram for what you suggest, you find it doesn’t work. Plus, even if it did, it’s a 4-particle interaction (electron+proton+neutrino+antineutrino).

Furthermore, reverse beta decay is proton+electron–>neutron+neutrino.

Whether BA is a bad astronomer I don’t know, but the reaction he put in this post is definitely bad particle physics.

Imagine a virtual neutrino-antineutrino pair forming in the vacinity of a proton. Along comes an electron. The neutrino, electron and proton combine to form a neutron and the antineutrino wanders off on its own.

I think this is how you get the electron+proton -> neutron+antineutrino interaction without relying on the extremely improbably 3-way electron+proton+neutrino all arriving at the same place at the same time. I’ve never really understood what is meant by “an antiparticle is just a normal particle travelling backwards in time”, but in this case, the produced antineutron if regarded as a neutrino travelling backward in time is a neutring arriving rather than an antineutrino departing, so making that substitution, we have electron+proton+neutrino->neutron, which is just reverse beta decay.