Enrico Fermi wrote the article “Attempt at a Theory of Beta Rays,” in which he intuited the role of the neutrino. He sent it to the British journal Nature, which rejected it, saying it “contains speculations too far removed from reality to be of interest to the reader.” Fifty years later, the Nature editorial board admitted that this was the biggest blunder the journal had ever made. The article appeared in Nuovo Cimento and soon after in German in Zeitschrift fur Physik. It describes how a neutron inside a nucleus can convert into a proton, emitting an electron (beta particle) and a neutrino.
