This was a most disturbing result.

Niels Bohr (not for the first time) was ready to

abandon the law of conservation of energy.* Fortunately, Pauli took a more sober view,
suggesting that another particle was emitted along with the electron, a silent accomplice
that carries off the “missing” energy. It had to be electrically neutral, to conserve charge
(and also, of course, to explain why it left no track); Pauli proposed to call it the neutron.
The whole idea was greeted with some skepticism, and in 1932 Chadwick preempted the
name. But in the following year Fermi presented a theory of beta decay that incorporated
Pauli’s particle and proved so brilliantly successful that Pauli's suggestion had to be taken
seriously. From the fact that the observed electron energies range up to the value given in
equation (1.7) it follows that the new particle is extremely light; as far as we know, its
mass is in fact zero. Fermi called it the neutrino. (For reasons you'll see in a moment, we
now call it the antineutrino.) In modem terminology, then, the fundamental beta-decay
process is

n → p+ e−¿+ ν́ ¿
e

* It is interesting to note that Bohr was an outspoken critic of Einstein’s light quantum (prior to 1924),
that he discouraged Dirac’s work on the relativistic electron theory (telling him, incorrectly, that Klein
and Gordon had already succeeded), that he opposed Pauli’s introduction of the neutrino, that he
ridiculed Yukawa’s theory of the meson, and that he disparaged Feynman’s approach to quantum
electrodynamics.