Ettore Majorana's Vanishing Particle Predictions

Ettore Majorana, an Italian theoretical physicist, predicted the existence of both the neutron and the neutrino before his mysterious disappearance in 1938. In 1932, after Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot reported puzzling radiation from beryllium, Majorana interpreted their results as evidence for a new neutral particle with roughly the mass of a proton, effectively predicting the neutron before James Chadwick confirmed it experimentally later that year. In March 1938, at age 31, he disappeared during a trip from Palermo to Naples and was never conclusively found, leaving both his particle insights and his fate as enduring mysteries in the history of physics.

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