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Experiments Poke Holes In Quantum Physics
fenrissmurf writes: "The New York Times reports on new measurements of muons, done at the Brookhaven National laboratory. The muons didn't behave as expected, and scientists are saying that the "classical model" is now in doubt." We just posted another story about this, but the NYTimes article is good. There's another NYT article about a certain quantum force that I thought was interesting, too.
You may think its fun (and sometimes it really is), but no such thing happened here: we've been expecting the experiments to diverge from the Standard Model since the day it was written down in the 70s. More than that, we've been hoping to see that failure for 30 years.
The really embarrasing thing is that we've built a model that has been so incredibly successful (no experiment has yet been confirmed to be in conflict with the Standard Model, including this one) that we haven't seen it break down yet! Hopefully, once they've finished analyzing the data from their 2000 run, the g-2 group will be able to push the error bars down far enough that we can finally say we've seen the Standard Model fail. But we won't know for a year or so, unfortunately.
This doesn't so much blow apart quantum physics as it does (hopefully) validate the supersymetry model of physics
This result doesn't actually favor any particular post-Standard Model physics scenario ... what it does say (if it holds ups) is that the successor model must provide a certain, definite correction to the muon anomalous g value. The paper mentions that this could be acounted for by a particular supersymmetric scenario with particular values of certain parameters; but, it could just as easily be accounted for by muon substructure at the 2TeV scale or other types of SM extensions. So, it really doesn't say anything other than "something else is (almost) definitely out there".
BTW, if you don't like the SM because it has 20 or so free parameters, you're going to absolutely hate supersymmetry: the absolutely minimal supersymmetric extension requires the specification of roughly 150 free parameters. Despite this, many people see it as the preferred extension of the SM for a number of extremely technical reasons that greatly outweigh the seven-fold ballooning of the parameter space.