In his lecture on symmetry in physical law, Feynman said:
Using a very strong magnet at a very low temperature, it turns out that a certain isotope of cobalt, which disintegrates by emitting an electron, is magnetic, and if the temperature is low enough that the thermal oscillations do not jiggle the atomic magnets about too much, they line up in the magnetic field. So the cobalt atoms will all line up in this strong field. They then disintegrate, emitting an electron, and it was discovered that when the atoms were lined up in a field whose B vector points upward, most of the electrons were emitted in a downward direction. Therefore if we were to put it in a corresponding experiment in a “mirror,” in which the cobalt atoms would be lined up in the opposite direction, they would spit their electrons up, not down; the action is unsymmetrical. The magnet has grown hairs! The south pole of a magnet is of such a kind that the electrons in a β-disintegration tend to go away from it; that distinguishes, in a physical way, the north pole from the south pole.
This doesn’t make sense to me.
I understood that the Wu experiment found electrons were emitted in the direction of Cobalt atom spin and, therefore, in the direction of the B vector, not opposite it as Feynman writes. Where have I gone wrong?
