Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance
Is this (A.) asshattery (B.) legitimate but almost certainly mistaken, or (C.) something truly incredible?
The mystery of the varying nuclear decay
The current researchers claim a correlation between solar flares and the decay rate of manganese–54.
The data (see fig in link) is not very impressively correlated to solar activity.
That said, something does seem to be happening.
Some sort of correlation is there, but my guess is that they will eventually find that their measurement depends on temperature or barometric pressure or total daylight or snowfall or university steam usage or something that itself has a correlation with the Sun-Earth distance.
If I remember later, I’ll take a look at their paper to see if I can make an educated guess as to what their particular apparatus might be sensitive to.
Whatever happens apparently doesn’t happen to all radioactive decays – the Pu-238 on board of the Cassini spacecraft doesn’t show any correlation of decay rate and solar distance, as per this paper.
As regards the Brookhaven claim, to echo Pasta, suggestions of small, controversial effects that happen to have the period of exactly a year tend to give physicists the heebie-geebies.
Also, it’s hardly encouraging that it’s now being pushed by Ephraim Fischbach. The old “fifth force” controversy he triggered saw some interesting research done, but people were also privately saying some brutal stuff about his original paper from the start.