Slashdot Mirror
Neutrinos, Muons and the Standard Model
scorp1us writes: "I can't believe I haven't seen this posted yet. Apparently experiments in particle physics aren't holding to theory. The result: a search for a new form of energy or matter. Read about it in the Post. No wonder witches weigh as much as a duck."
I think it was posted yesterday. It just didn't reach the front page.
That article had many more references, too...
You are a moron.
I found it interesting that these "results" ended up in the media before being accepted by the Journal they are publishing in.
In science, especially physics, there is a tradition of review which has caught many claims such as this before.
It is likely that they have missed some minor force or effect in thier Standard Model calculations, or that we simply need to understand neutrinos better.
Until a Physical Review Journal accepts research, and even sometimes after that, it should not be viewed as anything more than fantasy.
A quick search of the Fermilab site found some more specifics than in the Washington Post article: a press release, the paper itself: A Precise Determination of Electroweak Parameters in Neutrino-Nucleon Scattering, and some slides [PDF] from a Fermilab seminar.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
"On a statistical basis, that would be a 1 in 400 probability of happening as a result of chance. "
That doesn't seem like a big deal to me. That sounds more like a problem in the experiement. I don't think anyone should be jumping for joy at this discovery until they duplicate it in another test.
This *is* a duplicate experiment - or close to it. Check the previous Slashdot article on the subject. This project is measuring a value that was measured by three previous experiments. Two of the previous experiments gave a very wide range for results, and the other one gave a narrow range for the results consistent with this experiment's results.
The more I read about modern physics, the more it seems our current models are flawed. I recently read an article in 'wired' about programmable materials made from 'atoms' which do not contain a nucleus. Simply lots of electrons forced into atom-like patterns.
:).
:).
I really wonder if we might not be better of throwing the physics textbooks out of the window and starting over again.
Bear in mind that "Wired" is not known for its contributors' understanding of science
It sounds like a second-hand description of "quantum dot" technology. This is where you create a potential well in a conducting material and confine an electron within the well. Because the well is small, you get only certain energy levels permitted for the electron, just as in an atom. By changing the properties of the well, you change the properties of this "fake atom".
There are many examples of materials where electrons aren't bound to individual atoms. Metals are a great example of this.
All of this is perfectly consistent with the models of how electrons and atoms behave (look up "Schrodinger's Equation" in a first-year physics text for a description of the model used for this).
Summary: Most perceived flaws are the result of bad or oversimplified explanations
Totally different. The Nobel guys found a new state of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate.
There's already (at least) 5 states of matter: solid, gas, liquid, plasma (gas so hot that it gets ionized - the sun's made out of it), and the recently confirmed Bose-Einstein Condensate (gas so cold that weird quantum things start to happen).
You've also got the degenerate states of matter found in white dwarfs (where the electrons squeeze together), neutron stars (where the electrons smush into the nucleus), and black holes (where...well, it all breaks down there). These don't seem to be counted in the usual enumeration of states of matter, but then they've never been produced on Earth, they're really still theoretical.
What they'd be looking for out of this new discovery is more along the lines of a new fundamental particle or force.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
none of them are "facts" in the sense that they can't be proven wrong. This is the principle of falsifiability
I think that you meant "they can be proven wrong".
Galileo was jailed despite his 'strong evidence' ..what was his evidence just not strong enough ?
No, he called the pope an idiot in a book he published. Bad move
Reboot macht Frei.
No, I meant "can't." 2 + 2 = 4 is a fact, and you can't prove it wrong, period. (This is why mathematics, despite being called "the queen of the sciences" and immensely valuable to just about every branch of science, isn't a science in itself. It's ... something else, really, its own field of endeavor.) But F = m a, while borne out by an enormous amount of experimental evidence and almost certainly true, _can_ be proven wrong if in fact it _is_ wrong. Now, if you just assert that F =/= m a, you're most likely wrong, and I feel free to heap upon you the same scorn Richard Dawkins shows for creationists ... but if you're right, science (uniquely) gives you a mechanism to show that you're right. Er, until someone else does a better experiment and shows us that we're both wrong, of course ...
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
P.S. If a neutrino is chargeless, how do you "fire" one at something?
How about a beam of relativistic charged particles that decay and release neutrinos as a byproduct? Relativistic beaming means most neutrinos in our rest frame are being beamed in the direction of propagation.
Err, actually, this part of the standard model has not borne anywhere near that many tests. The number four comes to mind, two of which were not accurate enough to pinpoint this problem, and two of which have suggested it's wrong. So not, it has not in fact endured any testing on this particular issue. So far, it has failed every time. The only problem being, "every time" means roughly "twice", as I understand...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
----------
Could you give some examples of what you're talking about? For the record, I work in biotech, and pretty much our whole business is built on falsifiability; I've never heard a working scientist argue seriously against it.
----------
I'll take a stab. Suppose I say "It's raining outside." This sounds like a classicly falsifiable statement. But is it? If you look out the window and don't see rain, it may be that I was wrong. Or (I could perversely argue) it could be that you (incorrectly) assumed that
1) by "outside" I meant "outside, near this building" not "outside, somewhere"
2) the rain would be all around, not just on the side of the building with the window
3) the rain drops would be large enough to see
4) there would be enough rain drops to notice
5) it would still be raining by the time you looked
6) enough photons would interact with enough raindrops before reaching your eyes that you would detect the rain (instead of all missing)
7) the window really is a window, and not a clever high-res display
The hard core rationalist claim that "all it takes is a single counter example to disprove a theory" doesn't really work. In practice, then, we deal with a sort of fuzzy-falsification, and come up with estimates (w. specified confidence levels) that an assertion is true or false. A single test can't really topple a theory since you can't know for sure that the problem was in the theory and not in your test.
Make sense?
-- MarkusQ
I'll take a stab. Suppose I say "It's raining outside." This sounds like a classicly falsifiable statement. But is it? If you look out the window and don't see rain, it may be that I was wrong. Or (I could perversely argue) it could be that you (incorrectly) assumed that
[deleted various arguments]
All this goes to show is that your "classicly falsifiable statement" is a bad theory. This is why actual theories are either much more complicated, taking into account all sorts of possibilities (as you detailed), or are very explicit (as in the F=ma form).
Making a statement, in casual language, as you did, is not thorough enough. For example, one could say "Nothing can go faster than the speed of light.", but that isn't the actual theory. In fact, the theory is just a set of mathematical equations that show (among other things) that the mass of an object increases by a factor of (1/sqrt(c^2-velocity^2)), so that unless something can have an infinite mass (or a resting mass of 0), it can't go at the speed of light. And other fun things that all, together, show that nothing can travel at the speed of light.
A single test can't really topple a theory since you can't know for sure that the problem was in the theory and not in your test.
Sure, testing errors are always possible, but this is what repeatability is all about. A single test , run multiple times, can definitely topple a theory. If two separate people do the exact same test and come up with the same disagreement with the theory, then the chances of testing error are much smaller. The point is that if a theory can't explain a discrepancy, then the theory is either wrong or incomplete.
2+2=1. 4 doesn't exist in base 3.
2+2=0. 4 doesn't exist in base 4.
2+2=22, where + is defined as concatenation
Do any of these details change the fact that 2 added to 2 is 4? (And by the way, 2+2=11 in base three. Base three doesn't have a fourth digit, but that doesn't make 1=4. Likewise, 2+2=10 in base four.)
The point the original poster was trying to make, which you seem to have totally missed, was that mathematics and science have different concepts of "proof." In science, proof is based on experiment and observation. In mathematics, proofs are perfect and immutable. 2+2=4, always. It cannot be proven wrong by experiment, because the concept of "doing an experiment" is outside the domain of math.
Godel says otherwise. There are true things in mathematics and the physical world which cannot be proven or disproven. If you don't believe this, then please provide me with a proof or disproof of the Axiom of Choice.
Again, you are only confusing the issue. I doubt Godel would approve of this kind of obfuscation, even if you did use the words "axiom of choice." Yes, axioms are assumptions, and cannot be proved. But proof in the real world (tm) is a different ball game. Remember, you can't mathematically prove anything about the real world. All you can do is make a mathematical model and assume that it's true. Then, you can begin proving things based on your initial assumptions. But at some point your model will break down. Planets are not perfect spheres; newton's law is not completely correct; gasses are not quite ideal. Usually these deviations are minor, but sometimes a serious conceptual error comes up, like a force you forgot to include or a particle you didn't even imagine could exist. Science is based on probabilities, not on certainties.
The point of this thread is not that mathematics is "better" than science, or vice versa, but that they are different fields. A mathematician who tried to prove something by finding a lot of examples would be laughed at. A scientist who tried to disprove Einstein's theory with number theory would be dismissed as irrelevant.
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
As a former experimentalist in the field (they gave me the Phd so I couldn't be all that bad) I am not getting excited.
The problem is that the experiments are simply not accurate enough to jump up and down in celebration for such a miniscule deviation.
What I am really suspicious about is that the number of observations is much lower than expected. That can happen because you just missed some particles you should have seen.
You can have a deviation that is 'significant' at twenty or a hundred standard deviations and it can still be the result of experimental error rather than a flaw in the standard model.
Given the way the physicists write their programs I would not be at all surprised if this turns out to be no more than the result of a flaw in PAW or GEANT. A physicist will go off to beg congress for a billion dollars to four experiments on the same accelerator (e.g. LEP) so that each can cross check the results of the other. Then they will all share the same analysis programs even though they are known to be riddled with bugs. And don't start on about the Web, first off the Web code was not built on a twenty year old code base from the dawn of Fortran, second there were multiple versions of the code written from the very start. In 1992 there were 10 browsers and at least 5 Web servers.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
And here is the text I linked to if the link goes down:
electroweak theory,
a unified field theory that describes two of the fundamental forces in nature, electromagnetism (see electromagnetic radiation) and the weak interaction. The electroweak theory derived from efforts to produce a theory for the weak force analogous to quantum electrodynamics (QED), the quantum theory of the electromagnetic force. Although the weak force fails to meet a requirement for that theory-that it behave the same way at different points in space and time-because it acts only across distances smaller than an atomic nucleus, it was shown that the electromagnetic force, which can extend across interstellar distances, and the weak force are but different manifestations of a more fundamental force, the electroweak force. This made it possible to formulate a unified model that predicted the existence of mediating, or messenger, particles. The electroweak theory, for which Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam, and Steven Weinberg shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics, was confirmed in 1983 by the discovery of the W and Z particles, two of a number of elementary particles it predicted.
So then, there are 3 fundamental forces of nature: gravity, electroweak, and the strong force.
Please throw your old physics primer away, it is outdated.
Okay, if you do 400 experiments, you can expect 1 would be in the 1-in-400 bin on the tail of the histogram. I'm sure the Standard Model has endured way more than 400 tests.
Not via this specific experiment it hasn't! You're comparing apples and oranges. That 400-1 test is the probability that this given experiment turned out the way it did by pure chance. If they repeat the experiment and get the same results then you will have a P-value of 160,000 to 1 to explain.
P.S. If a neutrino is chargeless, how do you "fire" one at something?
Well, it isn't like loading a gun with bullets and then shooting them. Accelerating an existing neutrino is pretty hard. Usually what you do is create them when you fire them.
A trivial example would be putting cobalt-60 (beta emitter) in a solenoid. Electrons fly out one end and the antineutrinos come out the other.
I guess my point wasn't that a theory that is clearly unfalsifiable can be scientific, but rather that the criterion of falsifiability isn't a good test for how scientific a theory is. Any theory can be protected from falsification by the introduction of ad-hoc hypotheses, but just because a theory contains ad-hoc hypotheses doesn't make it unscientific.
Let's take for example the criticism of Lakatos. When the perturbation of the orbit of Uranus was conclusively demonstrated, one might have said that the Newtonian theory of gravity had been falsified. To wit, an auxilliary hypothesis was introduced: "perhaps there is another, unseen, body causing the perturbation". In this particular case, the offending body (Neptune) was discovered shortly thereafter. But what if, for some reason, Neptune continued to evade terrestrial observation? Would that invalidate the entire Newtonian program? Not at all, it would merely have remained an ad-hoc ancilliary hypothesis.
Obviously, when a theory becomes too full of such ad-hoc hypotheses we become doubtful of its viability as a working scientific model. And rightly so -- the Copernican model of the cosmos replaced the Ptolemaic model for exactly this reason. But does that mean that the Ptoemaic model was unscientific?
There's already (at least) 5 states of matter: solid, gas, liquid, plasma (gas so hot that it gets ionized - the sun's made out of it), and the recently confirmed Bose-Einstein Condensate [colorado.edu] (gas so cold that weird quantum things start to happen).
There are also higher temperature states above plasma. A plasma is a gas that's so hot the kinetic energy of the atoms is larger than the binding energy of the electrons and they get stripped.
If you raise the temperature more (a lot more) above the binding energy of nucleons in the nucleus, all nuclei break down and you have a gas of just protons and electrons.
Beyond that, there might be a state where the nucleons themselves break apart into a "quark-gluon plasma". This hasn't been experimentally discovered yet, but it's what they're looking for at RHIC.