Re: Heavy Protons & Life Without Hydrogen

Logan Kearsley wrote:
Suppose that free protons were slightly heavier than neutrons, so that free neutrons are stable but free protons will decay into a neutron and positron.

In this alternate universe, most of the baryonic matter would be clouds of neutrons, rather than clouds of hydrogen. Neutrons can fuse to form deuterons and helium nuclei, so there will still be luminous stars, but the critical mass for spontaneous fusion would be smaller. And, being made mostly of neutrons, stars would have drastically smaller radii for their mass, so the sun would be an extremely bright pinprick in the sky. And stars would grow in size as atomic matter accumulated, yes?

This doesn't work, alas. In this scenario, n + n doesn't give you deuterium, it gives you a dineutron. If you add deuterium by hand, it rapidly decays into dineutrons. Ditto for all the heavier elements. There'll never be any atomic matter, nothing ever except blobs of neutrons of various sizes.

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