Scientists are worried about the W Boson: 'Something is amiss' | Hacker News Reader

Scientists are worried about the W Boson: 'Something is amiss'

cnet.com

113 pointshsnewman59 comments

we'd have to change our understanding of how all the particles in the universe work.

Well, remember the new paper? We're pretty much entering that worst case scenario.

I believe you mean "best case"! There was much hue and cry after the Higgs discovery because the result, at least from the outside, seemed like "welp, we predicted a thing and found it and we don't have any new physics to disagree with; what a letdown!"

worst case here would be something like "oh, we thought it was 7 sigma, but actually we can completely account for the discrepancy because the instrument deformed slowly under its own weight for the last decade and now we're 4 angstroms off and we still don't have any new physics to disagree with!"

> the instrument deformed slowly under its own weight for the last decade and now we're 4 angstroms off

This was hilarious and plausible at the same time. Nice work!

Totally plausible indeed! One of the recent (past decade or so) major mistaken discoveries in particle physics was a cabling issue.

And from a different field, but closer to the quip: semiconductor lithography lenses' own weight causes stresses that cause birefringence in the optics that has to be explicitly corrected for. And that was true 20 years ago already.

(Recovering particle physicist here and thinking about this even much later gives me mild trauma. ;) )

> One of the recent (past decade or so) major mistaken discoveries in particle physics was a cabling issue.

Have more info on this or link about it?

I'm guessing the parent is referring to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...

"EM Drive" also probably counts.

From what I’ve been hearing, EM drive is more of “didn’t do the maths” followed by shoestring-budget “might as well try it, we have some spare lab space” work getting squished in between the serious projects.

Yes, thank you, that's the one I was thinking about. Apologies for not naming/linking it in the first place.

Thanks

The Pioneer spacecraft speed anomaly turned out to be forgetting to account for the small amount of thrust from photons generated by the heat of the spacecraft (~1kph per decade).

I thought they were, but with an oversimplified model.

It's like the six-sigma result of CERN OPERA experiment showing neutrinos travaling slightly faster than speed of light - which was ultimately caused by a fiber cable between clocks not being fully tightened and thus causing a tiny delay and messing up the measurements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...

Experiments can detect all sorts of things, including new unanticipated subtle experimental artifacts.

A reanalysis of data from a stopped detector wont continue to deform but nice try...

yep, I came here to say this. gaining understanding is a very good outcome.

SO WHAT if it means other things are wrong? we need to know what we are wrong about if we are ever to get any of it right.

Definition of Science:

1 a : a study where participants seek to disprove their own conjectures

  b: the practice of getting excited when proven wrong because it means more work

2 : a complex study where everything that can go wrong will go wrong, often small or trivial errors (frequently difficult to observe) leading to insanity within participants as they have an existential crisis coming to terms with a new world paradigm, only to then have it shattered (again) when they realize their mistake.

3 : being open-minded of what is possible.

The process of getting the world as it can be experienced and its cultural representation to converge by updating the latter.

Power is the same, but acting on the former.

Stay away from mirrors or that definition collapses on itself.

I'm intrigued by how you got to lighten the text on the second line of your comment. I don't see anything on the formatting help page [0]

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

The great new is the past model does not work in some cases and we can now reduce it. Qm and R both does not refute all past science. Unlike the model we are the centre of universe and got 4 elements etc which is totally overruled.

The question we still do not have any after standard model. Whilst we have some big question similar to ultraviolet crazy (like today vaccuum space has so much energy the world has been gone in 10 power negative 30 sec) etc.

Still waiting.

The fun thing about measurement physics is that you never know if your cool tool is measuring something in the universe, or if you are using something in the Universe to test and find bugs in your tool.

That's why you build another instrument that is demonstrably a factor of two more sensitive -- it either detects the new thing with much higher precision or credibly disproves the old measurement and makes forward progress at the same time.

If you can't do that, then you build another instrument that uses a different technique but reaches similar sensitivity. If the two instruments disagree, this will tend to lead to confusion and general wringing of hands. If at all possible, do the aforementioned higher-sensitivity plan.

"That's why you build another instrument that is demonstrably a factor of two more sensitive"

This is not possible

It definitely is. In this specific case, LHC will almost certainly yield improved mass measurements. Just as Fermilab published this result a decade after the Tevatron shut down, increasingly refined measurements like this will continue to emerge from LHC through ~2050 or so.

This article states that the most recent measurement agrees with others over the last decade. That is simply not true.

https://non-trivial-solution.blogspot.com/2022/04/do-we-have...

> this finally the sign of new physics, which we all have been hoping for?

I don't understand this mindset? Why (aside from creating jobs) is it good to discover that the universe is more complicated than we knew, or that we were wrong?

To me, what we want in "new physics" is explanations for unexplained phenomena, or resolutions to know problems/inconsistencies (like quantum vs gravity), or emergent effects that less to interesting applications.

> Why (aside from creating jobs) is it good to discover that the universe is more complicated than we knew, or that we were wrong?

Because this would give us hints to new degrees of freedom in the current models that seem to contradict each other but otherwise work extremely well in their respective their domains. Finding a crack in those hermetically closed models would be wonderful.

There are a lot of different teams.

Some teams are working trying to resolve the Quantum Gravity problem. I doubt this is useful for them, at least for now.

Other team are working in particle colliders. They get a Nobel price if they discover a new particle or a correction to the "Standard Model".

Hopefully both teams will meet somewhere in the middle. Perhaps a new experiment will give a hint about how to make quantum gravity work. Perhaps a new theory of quantum gravity will predict a result that can be tested in a particle collider. Don't expect this to be soon.

And there are many other teams that are working in one of the N-2 areas of Physics that are unrelated and their research is not affected by a Quantum Gravity theory or modification to the "Standard Model".

> is explanations for unexplained phenomena, or resolutions to know problems/inconsistencies

simply can't happen without

> is it good to discover that the universe is more complicated than we knew, or that we were wrong

When you know you have bugs in your code (or, in our case, an incomplete understanding of physics) finding new, unexpected behavior gives you new ways to identify the problem.

We know the standard model is wrong. It explicitly calls itself out.

New physics are the only thing that can guide discovery of the correct answer.

According to the chart here: https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/higher-w-boson-mass-...

It seems to align with measurements from:

* D0 I

* CDF I

* OPAL

* ALEPH

I do not know what refinements happened between D0 1/2, or CDF 1/2.

Potentially just a refinement in the strategy of the analysis and/or more compute/time. Not the first time a measurement like this was off due to poor blinding...

I watched the CDF presentation early yesterday morning at the April APS meeting. Nothing to indicate they were anything but meticulous in their data analysis and modeling. Keep in mind the main change in CDF II is a great reduction in uncertainty - the central value is not much changed from the original CDF results many years ago.

Tommaso Dorigo [1] covers a lot of the points where some of their assumptions/methods can be reasonably questioned but the effects would not push the result that much closer to the current SM theoretical value.

[1] https://www.science20.com/tommaso_dorigo/is_the_cdf_w_mass_m...

I must say, those error bars are impressive.

I just finished reading the three-body problem. So I had a chuckle. Just some good ol' Sophons.

A very good piece of journalism explaining the problem for non physicists.

For me personally, the discussion by the researchers about their guiding principles for conducting scientific research was a great reminder for all researchers..

As that section concluded :

"Science is organized in skepticism."

Very good? It feels patronising to me... "[I]t involves physics that'll explode our minds. Trust me."? "To get a W boson in the first place, you literally have to smash two protons together."?

Feels like it's aimed at 5th graders...

If anything deserves to be patronizing, it is probably high-energy physics. The reader should not expect to truly understand anything, or be able to deduce anything, after reading the pop-sci explanations of particle physics experiments.

Analogies have the problem that you never know where they stop, and so you can't safely reason any further from what you've been told. It is bad if you walk away thinking you know more than you really do.

If you're not reading the math, you're fundamentally in the business of being told simplified stories made up of lies we tell to children. If anything, the article that makes you feel like a 5th grader is honest. As far as I'm concerned, it might still be talking up to me.

Well argued. Once I was very into this and took pride in being able to read through Planck, Einstein and derive wave mechanics from first principles. At 50, when it comes to modern theoretical physics I do feel like a 5th grader again. I am still interested. While in other subject areas I remain at multiple PhD level we can't stay match-fit at every intellectual game forever. So I don't see this as necessarily being written for 5th graders, though I am grateful for good science writing to keep up interest for people like myself who are super interested but need the 5th grader down-talking to stand in for pages of equations that are now well beyond me to follow.

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Question from a noob. If the W Boson is heavier than we thought, could that explain dark matter?

I was wondering the same thing. Dark matter has never been observed. Its existence is based entirely on equations.

How about black holes?

Black holes are made of regular matter not dark matter because they interact with electromagnetic waves.

Dark matter interacts with light in the same way as a black hole does. They both have mass and therefore both bend space (and light passing through that space) around them.

It's already known that what we call dark matter in some contexts (e.g. the mass that holds galaxies together) is at least partly made of black holes. We just don't know if black holes account for 100% or 1% of the dark matter that we believe exists in a typical galaxy.

They’ve been both predicted and observed. Dark matter is a conjectural solution for an anomaly in the rotational speed of galaxies across their discs. In my opinion, it’s almost certainly a bodge, and if the W boson has a different mass to that expected it could account for what we call dark matter, as the implications go far beyond just the additional mass - if the mass is off, then perhaps the nature of the weak force is misunderstood - for instance, perhaps the mass variance is driven by a hidden variable, and that in turn could account for what we regard as “dark” phenomena.

It has been observed, by its effect on other things, and in particular because this effect isn’t always the same. Most galaxies’ stars orbit at the wrong speed, but some behave as expected. Most galaxies gravitationally lens the background more than expected, but in some cases (colliding groups) something that doesn’t shine or reflect any EM radiation is causing lensing next to the galaxy while the galaxy itself is closer to what we expect without dark matter.

If you wanted to get particularly philosophical, everything is observed by its effect on other things.

Sure, but my point was that dark matter is not just an artefact of equations.

That's right, observations were made that do not fit with our current understanding of physics (equations). That means our understanding is wrong. So instead of assuming the equations are wrong physicists invented an invisible type of matter. That is not science. Dark matter is nothing more than modern day aether.

they're not that much heavier than we thought, like 0.01% or something. heavier enough it means either the measurement or the physics is wrong, far too light to be dark matter. they're also extremely short-lived and also carry electric charge, so they're not even dark.

Not really - the universe isn't full of W bosons that we've miscalculated the mass of. But it's possible that the new physics that is proposed to explain the mass discrepancy also provides an explanation of dark matter. I would say that's unlikely though.

Remember that the Theory of Relativity came about because of discrepancies with Newton's laws of mechanics and observations of the planets' orbits.

Hopefully this opens doors for plenty of new research and discoveries.

Worried? No, no no... Something seem to be odd and that's wonderful. Discovery awaits.

I am champing at the bit for more information about follow ups. Are verification trials planned? Who is doing them? When can we expect answers?

Anyone in the know that can help me on this one?

I suspect these questions will be answered soon in an episode of PBS space time. Keep an eye out on their feed.

The theorists working on their own grand explanations take heart

No mention of how far away from the prediction the mass is?

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