#1  
Old 08-04-2021, 01:26 PM
morls (Stephen)
Space is the place...

morls is offline
 
Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Melbourne
Posts: 696
New force of nature?

This has hit the news, sounds like a big deal...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/07/s...rookhaven.html

quote from the article:
“This is our Mars rover landing moment,” said Chris Polly, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill., who has been working toward this finding for most of his career. The particle célèbre is the muon, which is akin to an electron but far heavier, and is an integral element of the cosmos. Dr. Polly and his colleagues — an international team of 200 physicists from seven countries — found that muons did not behave as predicted when shot through an intense magnetic field at Fermilab.

The aberrant behavior poses a firm challenge to the Standard Model, the suite of equations that enumerates the fundamental particles in the universe (17, at last count) and how they interact.
“This is strong evidence that the muon is sensitive to something that is not in our best theory,” said Renee Fatemi, a physicist at the University of Kentucky. The results, the first from an experiment called Muon g-2, agreed with similar experiments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2001 that have teased physicists ever since.

At a virtual seminar and news conference on Wednesday, Dr. Polly pointed to a graph displaying white space where the Fermilab findings deviated from the theoretical prediction. “We can say with fairly high confidence, there must be something contributing to this white space,” he said. “What monsters might be lurking there?”

“Today is an extraordinary day, long awaited not only by us but by the whole international physics community,” Graziano Venanzoni, a spokesman for the collaboration and a physicist at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, said in a statement issued by Fermilab. The results are also being published in a set of papers submitted to several peer-reviewed journals.
Reply With Quote
  #2  
Old 08-04-2021, 02:11 PM
AdamJL
Registered User

AdamJL is offline
 
Join Date: Sep 2010
Posts: 2,100
Let's be honest here... the Standard Model was never going to last. There's only so much you can discover when you're

1. stuck in a moment of time (if we exist as a species for a few million years, it's still 0.000000000000000000001% of the life of the universe)
2. too big to see the small stuff, to small to understand the big stuff (the scale from the planck length to humans is bigger than the scale from humans to the entire observable universe)
3. can't intuitively see most of the electromagnetic spectrum (visible light is an incredibly small portion)
4. still can't explain literally 95% of the universe (68% + 27%).. we do so by calling it Dark Energy and Dark Matter.
5. Very hard to describe the house you're living in when you're stuck in the basement. How many rooms, what shape, where does it end, what's it made of, what does it look like from the outside. You need outside observation.

I mean let's be honest - we're always going to be discovering New Things, and that's cool. Any model anyone comes up with in the next thousand years will still be limited by our sheer insignificance in the scale of the universe and that model will always be changing. We will never have a Theory of Everything.

With all of that said, I still think this is an awesome discovery. This is what science is all about.... Finding out what we don't know and trying to fill the gaps.
Reply With Quote
  #3  
Old 06-07-2021, 10:10 PM
bgilbert (Barry gilbert)
barryg

bgilbert is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: tamworth
Posts: 64
QED and the The muon anomaly?

The concept of causality led us out of the dark ages, to question it seems to be leading us back to mysticism and the belief in the supernatural. Quantum mechanics (QM) proudly embraces these pre-renaissance ideas. QM’s boast about the beauty of paradox’s such as Schrodinger’s cat. Whenever a problem in the standard model occurs, new physics, new dimensions are proposed and general relativity is questioned. Remember the “Pioneer anomaly”. Well, they are at it again with the “muon anomaly”. QED and measurement are in disagreement at the umpteenth decimal place! Remember that QED boasts that it is the most accurate theory in the whole of physics. The truth is that QED never predicted anything, it was always catching up with ever more precise measurements. QED was hand tuned to match only two precise measurements: The Lamb shift and the anomalous g-factor of the electron. Ironically this could all be blamed on Einstein’s absurd “photon” that reintroduced mysticism and magic back into physics. Einstein eventually became disenchanted with the revolution he initiated and was reported to say, “All the fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to answer the question, “What are light quanta?” Of course today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself. “
Reply With Quote
Reply

Bookmarks

Thread Tools
Rate This Thread
Rate This Thread:

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT +10. The time is now 10:04 PM.

Powered by vBulletin Version 3.8.7 | Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Advertisement
Testar
Advertisement
Bintel
Advertisement