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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.
I think it was posted yesterday. It just didn't reach the front page.
That article had many more references, too...
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.
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.
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 am always wary of results obtained by any physicists who have spent years and years seeking any sort of crack.
(Sorry about that)
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
Absolutes and hyperbole are the refuge of the close minded. They are simply not ruling out any possibilities without further confirmation.. this is an excellent practice I feel. They suspect they could be onto something big, but don't want to "over hype" it.
"The wise man is the one who realizes that he knows nothing." - Socrates
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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
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
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/
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.
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.