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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."
Witches weigh as much as a duck because they're both made out of wood. Everybody knows that.
Peter Meyers, a professor of physics at Princeton University who was not part of the research team, said the finding is the "sort of crack" that "has been sought for many, many years."
Great. It looks like it's not just the moderators, then.
bu they have restricted access since 09/11. You can't even hike in the woods around it anymore.
I think it was posted yesterday. It just didn't reach the front page.
That article had many more references, too...
Maybe I'll win that bet I made with my highschool physics professor that I could break at least one before I die! :)
Seriously though, this is cool stuff, I'd read the actual paper when it gets published but I'm sure I'd drown in a see of evil mathematics.
/~mikeg
I think that this is maybe not so surprising. Theories in particle physics are very unlike a lot of other theories. There's not much evidence sitting around for some of these things, and as new evidence comes in, the theories change.
This is true for any scientific endeavor, but the changes are much more rapid in things like high-energy physics.
In short, I'm just saying that it shouldn't be taken as a "radical breakthrough" just because someone had the muon equation wrong, because it was going to happen at some point.
Come on, give it up, that's
This was posted a few days ago, along with links to much better articles:
1 3
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/08/22212
What the experiment shows is that the plan-vanilla Standard Model doesn't perfectly match reality. This is a surprise to nobody.
The results give a tantalizing look at one region of this breakdown, but proclaiming "a new form of energy or matter" is a bit premature at this point. What this will actually do is help confirm, refute, or fine-tune a few of the new models that are replacement candidates for the Standard Model.
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.
I propose "cowboynealon"...
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
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.
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Here's a good "plain english" explanation of what happened.
Karma whore disclaimer: This link was stolen from the other article about this experiment.
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
Since neutrinos are so small, most of the time they passed through the nucleus without affecting it. The frequency of collisions told scientists about the electromagnetic forces that affect how neutrinos behave -- the so-called weak forces. The scientists found slightly fewer interactions with one of the weak forces than had been predicted by the Standard Model, physicists' current description of fundamental forces and particles. Since the model is very precise, scientists concluded that the difference was significant. (emphasis mine)
This is what I love about science. Here we have the Standard Model, formed from exhaustively detailed tests over the last 30 years. As the article states, the model is very precise, and slight deviations are significant issues. However, rather than scrap the entire idea, or announce that the tests were probably flawed, or decry the scientists who performed the tests as heathens and radicals, here we see that the community will embrace this new data and reform the model in such a way as to make it work.
This is the beauty of science. If something doesn't work out the way it was supposed to, if a theory doesn't fit with the cold, hard data, the majourity of scientists will go out of their way to fix the theory (not the data). Scientists are always going out of their way to keep each other in check; at any given time one scientist may be checking some prominent theory or another. It keeps them honest, and while the system isn't fool proof, it's damn tight.
Sometimes it's great to be a geek.
~Aaron.
student of animation and the fine arts
I really wonder if we might not be better of throwing the physics textbooks out of the window and starting over again.
At the risk of being slightly off topic, does anyone else get a little flustered with all the non-abolutes that seem to nearly accompany scientific papers? Examples from this very article:
"...prompting physicists yesterday to announce that they might be on the verge of finding a new form of matter or energy."
"While this discrepancy could be a fluke, then scientists who conducted the experiment said the odds were it represented something meaningfull..."
"If some hidden matter or energy did cause the discrepancy..."
"It could be a very big deal..."
"It would be very exciting if we find another force"
"...there is a high probablility that something is wrong with the theory"
Just something to think about, not really a big deal, but it would be nice for people to just tell it how it is.
Moon Macrosystems. Sun's biggest competitor.
I am always wary of results obtained by any physicists who have spent years and years seeking any sort of crack.
(Sorry about that)
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
i don't believe you. ideas have momentum, but historically, science has gotten more and more accurate at describing the natural world.
many times existing theory has inertia, but if the evidence is strong enough, the more correct hypothesis will subplant the weaker one.
now, if you are going to accuse people who resist new ideas of small mindedness, then you are doing them a great disservice. Skepticism must be on both sides of a scientific dispute. Fawning over and prematurely accepting new theory is just as bad for Good Science as being to stubborn to accept that your idea is wrong.
if you want to dispute this, show me some evidence. Recall that astronomy has gone from a geo-centric world (with heaven in the out spheres)to a helio-centric universe. Newtonian mechanics were replaced by general relativity. the whole history of science shows the same trends.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
...for why the experiments don't agree with the theory. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is...
:-p
Anyhow, if the results of all experiments had to agree with theory, undergraduate physics labs would have disproved all the laws of physics a long time ago...
"It take 9 months to bear a child, no matter how many women you assign to the job."
Its not that witches weighed as much as a duck... Its just that the duck has a higher dispacement of water pound for pound than your typical witch does.
And yes, PROPAGANDA is still up,
Bowie J. Poag
I think the principle of falsifiability has gone out of vogue almost entirely. Karl Popper, who popularized the principle of falsifiability, shifted to a weaker form of the principle in his own lifetime, and post-modern critiques of the principle have eroded its popularity greatly.
The main critique against the principle is that scientific propositions require auxilliary hypotheses to have any predictive value. When a specific prediction is falsified, it is possible to "get around" the problem by modifying the auxilliary hypotheses. Since such modification to auxilliary hypotheses is considered a normal part of the scientific process, falsifiability doesn't really work very well.
Or something like that... it's been a couple of years since I studied this stuff.
My nine-year-old daughter and I were having a discussion about a month ago. She was studying the bohr model of the atom in her science class. I became interested when she started talking about the nucleus. So I asked, "which particles are inside the nucleus?" She didn't know so I described protons and neutrons. Then I asked, "which particles are outside the nucleus?" She thought for a minute and said, "Croutons?"
My wife and I laughed for about a half hour, since she always steals the croutons from our salads at restaurants.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
These are five 'states' of matter, each one obtained (at least for the first four you list), by adding more and more energy into the system. I am not very familiar with bose-einstein condensates, but I believe (someone please correct me if I am wrong) they are a state of matter that occurs at energies close to absolute zero, and are thus just another step on the continuum with which most of us are familiar.
I think that examples of different 'forms' (to which they are referring in the article) of matter might be regular matter and antimatter, but don't quote me on that.
Disclaimer: I used to study gravity, not particle physics. That said...
Neutrinos only interact with other particles through the electroweak force (ignoring gravity for the moment). There are three bosons which "carry" the electroweak force, called W+, W-, and Z0. The discrepency with the Standard Model seems to occur with the Z0 (called the neutral current in the paper).
There are several things it could be other than a new force. The scientists will have to eliminate all forms of background noise and detector errors, the possibility that it was just some sort of hadron resonance, and a lot of other things.
It is amazing how sensitive particle experiments can be. I remember reading about one that had to filter out (among other things) the noise caused by the motion of the moon orbiting the earth in order to extract the signal.
That said, I think they may be on to something.
Excellent explanation of the BEC! Thanks Mr. Slippery!
karma capped
I could answer that, but you posted as AC, so I won't bother. Its a shame because it is a good question.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
going to sacrifice a couple karma points by going wildly off topic, but this is something that's been bugging me lately - the continual bitching when the occasional article gets rerun. (please note, i am not accusing the parent poster of this. that was just a helpful link for those that weren't reading the science section).
newspapers rerun stories all the time. the news networks are 90% recycled, content free info. as a general rule, /. does a pretty fine job of delivering up spanking fresh content, filtered for interest, packaged and delivered free (free, goddamnit!) to my desktop.
it wasn't that many years ago when i had to make do with the anemic science and technology section of the daily rag.
damn. i feel better. thanks /.
This is the voice of World Control. I bring you Peace.
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.
A few more labs need to repeat this experiment to make sure the result is accurate.
--Blair
P.S. If a neutrino is chargeless, how do you "fire" one at something?
Hold onto that thought, 'cause I'm about to blow a Mack truck-sized hole in it.
Do a google search on Alfred Wegener, and you'll see a guy who got his ass kicked all over the place for proposing a theory that contradicted scientific understanding at the time. And was harassed as vigorously as any religious heretic. Want more? Here's the frigging link.
Through the hoop, nothin' but net.
Do yourself a favor and check out Science's reaction to Darwin and doubters of Global Warning. Shocking behaviour all around, if you ask me.
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
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.
What the hell, I'll answer it, AC post or not.
There are two reasons. The first is that evolution is uniquely under attack -- there are cranks who attack relativity, plate tectonics, and other major, well-supported scientific theories (in fact, I'd go so far as to call all of these "laws") but few of them have the numbers or the potential power the creationists do. So Dawkins, quite understandably, feels defensive.
Second, without exception, creationists fail to mount a scientific attack on evolution. They either just say it contradicts the Bible and so must be false (the old school) or they use pseudo-scientific language and deliberate misrepresentation of scientific evidence (the new school.) What they don't do is attack the theory the way real scientists attack a theory, with hard evidence, because they don't have any.
But the new-school creationists have very good PR, and an amazing number of otherwise rational people are fooled by their rhetoric into thinking that "evidence against evolution" actually exists. This, of course, gets Dawkins' goat. And although I think his "undisguised clarity" may be a bit counterproductive, the more dangerous creationism gets, the more I find myself in sympathy with his outspoken exasperation.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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".
/ 1097corcoran.html
t .html
Just out of curiousity, do you any more info on this, or on applications for it? I buy that you can do this, but it seems hard to control this sort of potential except using nuclei?
It's actually quite easy to control the resulting energy configuration. The "allowed" energy levels depend on the size of the well (controlled when you etch it) and the electric potential between the inside and the outside of the well (which you can get "for free" by making the well on a semiconductor wafer and doping the inside and outside differently, or which you can fine-tune by having an electrode next to the well).
A decent introduction into quantum dots is here:
http://www.sciam.com/specialissues/1097solidstate
Scientific American has a few other articles on quantum dots, which you can find through their search page.
A collection of more in-depth articles is here:
http://www.mitre.org/research/nanotech/quantum_do
Applications include quantum computing (if you put multiple dots on a chip close enough together to interact with each other), and building semiconductor lasers with any frequency you like (even tunable frequency). More applications will undoubtedly arise; we've only just started to play with these things.
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Geee, maybe I can patent it.
.
And, therefore, F = m a is falsifiable, and is a theory (or a law, at this point), while 2 + 2 = 4 is unfalsifiable, and is a fact. Where's the contradiction?
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
<include IAAP.h>
We're pretty sure they have mass. Observations show that neutrinos can oscillate between different forms (i.e. cousins of electron, muon and tauon) and basic quantum mechanics shows that such an oscillation requires mass differences between the different types.
So, perhaps one type of the three is massless. And since we're only dealing with squares of masses, it may be that the masses are imaginary.. (i.e. square roots of negative numbers). Future experiments (in which I've participated at CERN :-) will tell more.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
----------
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
It is not the first time that the Standard modell has been modified.
:-)
:-)
For example in the begining there has been only
one generation of quarks and leptons.
(namely: up and down) But on electron collision experiments showed that there must be new generations: (now called
strange - charmed and beauty - truth.)
Until 1995, where experimental evidence was found, the truth quark was only a postulate based on symmetry considerations.
The same applies to symmetry conservation. For a long time CP (Charge conjugation with Parity) was considered conserved. But an experiment on T (Time inversion) violation showed if CPT was to be conserved, CP must be violated. Again the standard model had to be adabted.
And at the CERN (Eruopean Nuclear Research Center) in Geneva they believe, that they have fond some evidence for the so called Higgs particle, which is the cause for the mass of particles. A proof for the Higgs particle would be an enhancement for the Standard Model
Those examples show that the Standard Model of Particles and Interactions is not a static one.
It is almost like the linux kernel - if you permit this comparision - people send in patches.
If a patch is useful it will be released for the masses
Maybe we are entering a odd release stage now
I wouldn't make any long term plans based on this paper. The "one chance in 400" is misleading -- if you look at the paper, what it's really saying is that their experimental result differed from their theoretical result by three standard deviations (three sigma). On the face of it, this isn't very impressive. The trouble with straightforward statistical analysis in this fasion is that particle physics is hard. Experiments are being done at the limits of detectability, and often in ways that have never been done before. Because of this, it's extremely hard to tell what one sigma is, since it's entirely possible (and somewhat likely) that you just don't understand the pitfalls yet. Particle physicists have a rule of thumb for cases like this: a six sigma effect pans out about half the time. This is only a three sigma result, so adjust your expectations accordingly. A result like this is worth publishing, but won't persuade many people unless followup experiments get the same results (with *much* better statistics).
what have these guys been smoking? oh yeah, here it is in the article:
"Peter Meyers, a professor of physics at Princeton University who was not part of the research team, said the finding is the "sort of crack" that "has been sought for many, many years."
that explains it all to me...
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Yeah, that's fair enough.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
Well, yeah, it makes sense, but frankly, to me it sounds like the argument of a philosopher who doesn't really understand how good science operates. Any well-designed experiment or well-written report of observations will list the assumptions involved.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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
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.
One of my university leacturers told me why he decided to go the mathematics route.
"Mathematics and Physics are the last true blood sports. Kill one bird an EVERYTHING goes."
Funny when you realise the ramifications of this since ALOT of work needs to be reevaluated, etc, even when the results are "statistically" correct, since the explinations and models of how things achieved some result are now totally different.
-Tim
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.
The interesting thing to think about in all of this is that the goal of science is to find the "real" and underlying "truth". Obviously we are still a little way out from this "holy grail" however I would venture to say we have made considerable progress. Somehow, somewhere out there the truth does exist however, and we simply have to find it and realize it. Some would argue that there is no real truth since the universe is inherently chaotic and is constantly reinventing itself. If this were the case then the everyday ordinary things we take for granted (such as the earth revolving around the sun) could just all of a sudden change. Of course our evidence points otherwise, so we can probably safely assume that the "truth" does actually "exist". Now we just need to find it. You are correct in the saying science is a bunch of theories, because in fact until we hit upon the full truth we only have guesses, hypothesis and "partial truths" that may explain one phenomena or another. That is what makes science, particularily physics, so interesting it is a constant quest for "truth" which will never really end until we reach the omega point.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
www.haidacarver.com
Can't remember where I heard it, but there is a story about a Physics exam...
A group of tourists is being taken around the Physics department of a major university, and one tourist is puzzled by a long document mounted in a glass case in the foyer that they pass on the way in. When the tour ends in the same foyer, he asks the guide about the document.
``That's our exam,'' he is told.
Stunned, he asks, ``What? Don't you change the questions every year? Don't people just read it and cheat?''
``Well, no...'' the guide responds, ``we have a much better system. We only change the answers.''
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
It does not take a degree in Nuclear Physics to know that the probability this turns out to be experimental error is way more than 1 in 400.
And don't pine on about getting a Phd, no one gives a shit if you wasted six years of your life at Mulligan College in Jerkwater, Missouri.
Oxford UK.
They were published in Physical Review Letters, you were published in Slashdot
Last time I bothered to look I had 30 publications in the likes of Physics Review Letters. They mean absolutely nothing.
If there is an experimental error the referee is not going to find it.
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- In June we got the news from the Sudbury Neutrino Oscilloscope that from the detection rates of muon-type and electron-type neutrino's coming from the Sun we should conclude that neutrinos oscillate (change type) and are therefore massive, which is in full contradiction with the SM.
- In March this year the results of the 1999 data of the muon g-2 measurement at Brookhaven National Laboratory showed that the (anomalous) magnetic moment of the muon is not described correctly by the SM. This 'magnetic moment' indicates how much the spin of a muon is affected by a magnetic field (a bit like how quickly a compass needle reacts to a new orientation of the compass). This measurement generated lots of theoretical ideas for mods of the SM and/or signs of supersymmetry and what not.
- The Standard Model is ugly.
And I am now probably also failing to mention other important failures of the SM.Actually general relativity was in part inspired by Mach's principle, which basically asks the question - in a universe with nothing in it other than a single sphere, does it make any sense to consider that sphere to be rotating? Since there's nothing there to measure the rotation against, can you claim with equal validity that the sphere isn't rotating at all? Mach (IIRC) stated that the only way for this to make sense was that rotation could only be considered as being relative to the entire Universe.
Unfortunately for Einstein GR didn't really answer the question.
I think you're thinking of the Michelson-Morley experiment to measure the speed of light both when the Earth was moving towards and away from the source. This was a lot of the impetus for special relativity, not general relativity.
If you try to tell me that rocks fall up, you will need a lot better evidence than if you try to tell me that rocks fall down. This is a surprise?
... was it the early 1960s? ... thermal plumes were detected in the magma. Prior to that evidence had been accumulating, and people would periodically go back to the continental drift theory (I read about one of those in Science Digest), but every time it got dropped because there wasn't any mechanism, even though it would have explained a lot, and everyone knew that it would have explained a lot. Withing a few years of the discovery of the mechanism, the theory surfaced again. And this time it was accepted.
It it proper that unexpectable results demand a higher standard of proof. For many statements I don't require any proof at all. After all, I already believe them independantly. But if you try to tell me that Bill Gates invented the computer, then I will need quite a lot of evidence that I can personally check fairly easily before I even consider the idea seriously.
And the more time and effort I have put into learning (or creating) something, the less willing I am for someone else to blythly say "O, didn't you know that turtles can fly?", and the less willing I am to listen to that as other than fantasy (I had no objection when Terry Pratchett used that theme).
So when someone says that continents dance, it takes a good deal of evidence. Wegener didn't have it. He had an idea. It was an interesting idea, and matched a few geographic features. I made the same guess in grade school, though I didn't publish a paper about it. But all I had was an idea, and that's about all that Wegener had. His was more developed, but he didn't have any mechanism. He looked and couldn't find it. Neither could anyone else who was interested, until
Theories recognized as incomplete won't get accepted over current theories, even when the current theories are also known to be incomplete. Sorry, there are good reasons. There are also bad reasons, but there are a lot of good reasons, which mainly add up to "Why should I bother to learn a new bad idea to replace an old bad idea." It's too much work for no gain.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sorry, that's an almost true. Like nearly everything else.
A good report of a well designed experiment will list all of the assumptions that the experimenters thought of and considered important. It won't list the things that were considered too obvious. It won't list the effects that were considered too small. etc.
The real world may not be infinitely complex, but it is more complex and interactive than any intelligible procedure can handle. The trick is to find cases that are simple enough to be understood. That means where, e.g., you can ignore the friction when comparing the time for two balls to drop (a Galileo and his trough reference).
No, you can't simply depend on falsifiability. You also need to use Occam's razor. And it is known to be undependable. So you need to come up with several different approaches to the same point.
Falsifiability is a crude description of the real process. But it was simplified to cause it to be intelligible. And it is a necessary component. Not sufficient, but necessary. Even though, because of it's dependancy on Williams untrustworthy razor, you can never reach certainty. Ever.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
1 cup of water + 1 cup of alcohol yields less than 2 cups of liquid.
Therefore:
1 cup of liquid + 1 cup of liquid of integer arithmetic
It's not less than that, and it's a bit more, but it's not a universal truth for whereever people use numbers. Some people claim that it only applies to number theory, but that is an over-restriction. OTOH, only in number theory does the absolute certainty apply. (And even there, theories thought to be certain have been overthrown before, though not frequently.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.