Slashdot Mirror
New 'Mystery Meson' Sub-Atomic Particle Discovered
securitas writes "The BBC reports that scientists in Japan have discovered a new sub-atomic particle that defies current theories of matter and energy. The 'mystery meson' X(3872) was revealed while studying beauty quarks at the KEK High Energy Accelerator Research Organization Tsukuba meson factory. 'It weighs about the same as a single atom of helium and exists for only about one billionth of a trillionth of a second before it decays into other longer-lived, more familiar particles.' Scientists say the lifespan 'is nearly an eternity for a sub-atomic particle this heavy' and may require a change in current theory. Possible explanations for this include the particle being comprised of two quarks and two antiquarks, instead of the usual one-one pairing. More explanation and illustrations at KEK."
Do we know whether this particle violates the Standard Model? Because if it does, that could mean a real revolution in Physics.
Finding God in a Dog
It is always changing and bringing new and exciting information.
Save Sam and Max!
Too bad the US cancelled the Superconducting Supercollider some years back.
Why? It cost too much.
And how much are we spending in Iraq for benefits denied to our own citizens?
Priorities?
One thing I'm not clear about when we're talking about sub-atomic particles - how do we know we've got it right? I mean, the idea that these are particles - discrete physical entities if you like - comes from observations of effect and are, as far as I can tell, purely abstractions of what is actually going on. Sometimes abstractions - which of course helps the human mind get understand complex things - can actually mislead. How do we know we've got our thinking right about how sub-atomic particles work?
"Another Contradiction" is much too strong a statement. The Standard Model has two problems (1) it doesn't play well with gravity, so it can't be the "final answer", and (2) it is so ridiculously successful that no one knows quite where to go next in theoretical particle physics. The SM is more or less able to give the right answer to any question we're able to ask it, right up to the edges of black holes or the first tiny fraction of a second after the birth of the universe. There are some problems too complex for our calculational techniques and approximations (i.e. we can't calculate the physics of many bound states precisely or derive human behavior), but there aren't really any contradictions. The recently reported new particle is more likely to lead us to tell us our calculational approximations aren't very good, rather than that something fundamentally new (though one can always hope!) Particle physicists are always hoping to find something fundamentally wrong with the standard model - it's just an extremely good approximation to the right answer, and until the approximation breaks down you don't know how to improve it.
No it's not. Physics research has a lot of benefits. X-Rays, MRI, etc are all consequences of trying to study the atom.
So, what you're saying is "If you stick a bunch of subatomic particles together, they become more stable". Umm... if you stick enough sub-atomic particles together, won't you eventually get something that's kinda like a nice stable atom?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
The price for building the SSC was a small fraction of the cost for even the limited International Space Station we actually built, much less the original planned ISN they kept in the budget the year Congress axed the SSC. Spending a few billion on the SSC, which was guaranteed to either give us the Higgs boson or prove the Standard Model wrong (the exciting if unlikely option) and thus provide some new basic science strikes me as a much better investment than tens of billions on the politically motivated ISN. I'm willing to invest money on real space science (Hubble, Galileo, many others), but too much money that supposedly for science goes to political stunts like the Moon landing instead of projects of actual scientific value. I'm not sure how practical generating power on the moon is and beaming power down has obvious security implications.
For the poster who asked about how old the Standard Model is and why we haven't seen applications, the Standard Model was created in the 1970's so it's very young by physics standards. We're just beginning to deal with the implications of quantum mechanics for silicon chips and the basics of that area of physics were established in the 1920's. Technology lags physics by a substantial amount of time. However, the physics of particle accelerators themselves has led to enormous advances in medicine and manufacturing as such techniques are used to look inside the human body for disease as well as inside microprocessors for defects, so it's been far from useless even from a shortsighted perspective.