The interesting part for me is not that they created oxygen 28 but that when created it behaved completely differently than they expected from their current theory. Stable vs emitting 4 neutrons to become oxygen 24.
Any experiment that ends with "that is not what we expected" is a source of new inquiry.
To me the expectation that Oxygen-28 would be stable was naive. If they had a model that said it would, I would have looked very askance at that model for one very simple reason: Oxygen-28 has never been observed in nature. If it hasn’t ever been observed before that’s a very strong clue it has a very short half-life.
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