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."

Comments

Re:Always wondered...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

All science is based on "educated guesses." It's just that some guesses are much more educated than others, and turn out to fit the facts pretty well. Relativity is one of those very good guesses, along with Newton's laws (and no, Einstein didn't replace Newton, just refined Newtonian physics in a small but significant way), Darwinian evolution, plate tectonics, Boyle's law, etc. ...

But this is the defining characteristic of science: everything, always, is open to question. Hypotheses that are borne out by experiment and observation turn into theories, and those theories which stand the test of time are honored by being called laws, but none of them are "facts" in the sense that they can't be proven wrong. This is the principle of falsifiability, and it is the one thing which sets science apart from religion, philosophy, law, and other areas of human intellectual endeavor which seek to make statements about our world.

So relativity isn't a "hard fact." Neither is gravity. But that gravity, and relativity, and evolution, and plate tectonics, et bloody cetera, will operate the way the theories say they will, is the way to bet unless and until something dramatically better -- and by "better" I mean "backed by lots of reproducible evidence" -- comes along.