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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

Really? Because the article seems to say the complete opposite in multiple instances.

"Oh hey this thing doesn't match what is expected according to the standard model but yeah the standard model is tots fine bro."

> For example, in 2017, physicists working with LHCb, one of four large particle detectors fed by the LHC, found that B mesons, particles that contain a heavy bottom quark, decay more often to an electron and a positron than to a particle called a muon and an antimuon. The standard model says the two rates should be the same, and the difference might be a hint of supersymmetric partners, Ellis says.

So why is the standard model not in the trashcan?

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You never trashcan a model. You replace a model. You replace it with something else that is better.

Currently, we don't have a "something else" that 1) explains everything the Standard Model does in the same places with the same results, 2) also explains whatever anomaly.

>Really? Because the article seems to say the complete opposite in multiple instances.

Where is it saying that Physicists are trying to avoid anomalous data?

>"Oh hey this thing doesn't match what is expected according to the standard model but yeah the standard model is tots fine bro."

No one in the Physics community thinks like this. As I said it's very nearly the complete opposite, that if major problems in the model were found via experiment the person who found it would be cheering because they just guaranteed themselves a Nobel Prize. The problems with the Standard Model are widely known and deeply studied.

>So why is the standard model not in the trashcan?

Because despite it's known shortcomings it can still calculate 99.99% of scenarios with arbitrary accuracy. There's a reason Newtonian Mechanics are still taught, because for the cast majority of cases it completely works.

> So why is the standard model not in the trashcan?

Because there's not a strictly superior replacement yet.

All models are wrong, some are useful.

My understanding is that we currently don't have enough data to be sure that the B meson anomaly is real, and not just a statistical fluctuation - it is only a few standard deviations away from what is expected. (A few more years of data should resolve the question of whether it is real, one way or the other.)

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