Subatomic particles that appear to defy Standard Model | Hacker News Reader

Subatomic particles that appear to defy Standard Model

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56 pointslrondanini9 comments

Is it this paper they are talking about? http://inspirehep.net/record/1380182

"This result, which is the first measurement of this quantity at a hadron collider, is 2.1 standard deviations larger than the value expected from lepton universality in the Standard Model."

To see how much this is relevant see for example http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/five-sigmaw...

Usually physicists claim "evidence" for something at 3 standard deviations and "discovery" at 5 standard deviations.

I think you may be conflating deviation from expectation, which is just a percentage dependent on the width of the distribution, with statistical significance. An experiment with 5 std. dev. significance[0][1] could still confirm a value that is 2.1 std. dev. above the center of the range[2] that was originally predicted.

Corrections welcome.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation#Experiment.... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance#Strin... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation#/media/File...

No, he is right. In particle physics standard deviation from the normal distribution of results is used to show that a result is significant and new (i.e. a previously unknown partcle) rather than just random noise.[1][2] The 'sigma' notation is then used to show how many standard deviations away the result is, such as in the Higgs discobery, when a '5 sigma' standard was used to confirm discovery. [3]

The references linked probably explain this a lot better than I have.

    [1] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/five-sigmawhats-that/
    [2] http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/8752/standard-deviation-in-particle-physics
    [3] http://understandinguncertainty.org/explaining-5-sigma-higgs-how-well-did-they-do

Yes, you found the right paper, it is mentioned here: https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/features/3188

"The research paper, “Measurement of the ratio of branching fractions...,” The LHCb Collaboration, is scheduled to appear online August 31, 2015 and to be published September 4, 2015 in the journal Physical Review Letters."

I'm not a physicist, but I do follow physics news regularly and have a fair bit of understanding. From what I remember, many physicists are not entirely satisfied with the Standard Model and have been "looking to replace it" for quite some time, the main problem being that it was still the best at describing reality (or experiments results, which is about the same for physics).

Could somebody who is into the field answer how relevant this is, and/or perhaps point to a better source? The article is quite thin on substance, for example, that diagram of the LHCb experiment without caption feels weird, as if it had something to do but we're not even told!

We're not so much looking to replace the Standard Model (it works very well), but rather trying to figure out if there's something more, and preferably less complicated, under the hood. There are lots of hints that there's something more, and everyone is looking hard in lots of places to discover the next scrap of the treasure map.

If the tau were indeed found to exhibit substantially different decay properties from the muon, it would be major news within fundamental physics. The stated statistical significance of the result is quite low, you'll want to wait for more data (which are imminent at LHCb).

A different experiment, BaBar, also sees a similar excess, and the experiments roughly agree. Taken together, the results are near the threshold for "evidence for", but not "discovery of" a new result.

One upside to experiments with leptons (electrons, muons, and taus) is that they're simpler to understand. Anything involving hadronic physics (quarks, gluons, and the zoo of particles made from them, like protons and neutrons) is comparatively difficult to understand.

TL;DR: Stay tuned. The result is of potential importance, but not yet, and could fluctuate away.

No it doesn't:

http://www.cosmology.info/newsletter/2014.05.pdf http://www.cosmology.info <- the other papers referenced

http://lenr-canr.org/index/Summary/Summary.php sorry, 4000+ papers and many replications are enough for me.

then, unified theories like strings theory is absurd and not even a physical one.

0 explanation of electro gravity effects (Q-Thruster to start with).

...

And then BAM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q43sqytcdLE

I'm standing on the right side and the model I have adapted makes actually sense, so, no, it is nigher good, nor does it explain everything.

http://www.helical-structures.org/anal_algorithm.gif

[Let's ignore string theory...]

I think that "looking to replace it" is a wrong characterization. The idea is to "tweak and improve" it. If this experiment is right, it means that at very high energy there is a small correction due to a new force. (At low energy, the correction would be still there, but it's negligible.) It's not something groundbreaking like "the electrons actually don't exist, sorry".

(But this experiment is only a 2 sigma, so it may disappear when more data arrive.)

If you look critically at the standard model it does not make much sense at all. I studied physics and philosophy some years ago. Some time ago I stumbled across the Basic Structures of Matter - Supergravitation Unified theory (BSM-SG) from Stoyan Sarg and it rocked my world view like nothing else. For me this is Gallilo/Darwin/Einstein all over again, ignored or reticulated by the general community but far more advanced and precise. Even the Newtonian worldview was 100 years earlier already discovered but ignored. It even makes classically sense, not just mathematical.

From my perspective and this is also the general perspective of philosophy of science, not much changed in the last hundreds of years how we approach science. People hat to change the model they think in, because it takes a lot of time. In fact, it even got worse. Hardly anyone in science understands the fundamental problems of determining truth value and how hard it actually is. Some of the test methods have fundamental flaws, for example: A negative replication is no prove that it does not work in general, it only proves that the exact atom configuration you are running does not work. If there is any unknown unknown, which you can't know, you can't know if the replicated experiment contains all necessary requirements.

Most don't understand the difference between mathematical and classical logic, that are the building blocks of science.

It takes a critical position that takes time to get, but I got a very critical view on science in general. Not the scientific method, but the implementation: the humans doing science. Having experienced how the broader scientific community actually ticks, understood how many psychological phenomena influence the scientific process.

Some weeks ago I was at a hacker camp and attented https://media.ccc.de/browse/conferences/camp2015/camp2015-68...

So, after the talk I approached her, see seems very confident that the big bang happend, which I these days absolutly not, in fact, for me its as absurd as the flat world theory ;) So, I asked her about the alternative cosmology group and some of the phenomena they reference to, good read: http://www.cosmology.info/newsletter/2014.05.pdf

Having read nearly all of the papers they reference to, I go with their conclusion. The Big Bang did not happen.

She know none of the phenomena they reference to, none. Last year they found another quasar cluster btw, not as big as the one referenced, but they are more common it seems (is logical for me).

The problem is how we teach science, we highlight the stuff that makes sense in the model we are teaching, and ignoring the findings that do not make sense, until you reach a point where you can't. The point where the standard model made sense is long gone but as the saying brings it to a point:

Theories die out, when the last advocate dies.

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