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."

Comments

US Research

[tintruder]

Astounding findings such as this and their long-term implications for theory and eventual application certainly prove the worth of physics research programs.

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?

Re:US Research

[Malor]

Overall, money invested in science has historically paid off at better than 10-1. You see a lot of projects that dead-end or don't produce all that much of value, but every once in awhile you get a major, bonanza strike. Problem is, you can't tell which projects will be the big hits until afterward, so it looks like a big waste of money.

It isn't. We're still benefiting (enormously!) from the basic research done in the 1950s; they had ideas back then we still haven't fully tapped. Every time someone looks back at one of those obscure reports and says "hey, wait a minute!".... it's a payoff. We have long, long since paid off the money we invested in the 1950s, and made a handsome profit to boot. Everything after that is gravy.

Research... the gift that keeps on giving. :-)

Re:US Research

[goodviking]

And further, why does every dollar spent have to have a concrete application as it's ultimate goal. What's wrong exactly with the expansion of collective human knowledge as a goal in and of itself. If we base all of our policy decisions on whether we can use it to shoot someone or make toast, then we'll wind up with a lot of dead bodies and a lot of fancy toasters. I'm personally happy that we provide money for topologists and don't ask them to work on an assembly line.

Re:US Research

[Ohreally_factor]

I'm not saying that we should scrap all basic research.

Apparently that is what you are saying.

If you need to do basic research to attack an actual problem in the industry or another branch of science, it's perfectly fine. Researching something just for the sake of research, on the other hand, is nothing but gambling on the tax-payers money. I personally see it as immoral.

Do I need to explain the difference between science and technology to you?

Re:US Research

[Tackhead]

> Yeah, right. I've always been amazed at how Big Science constantly rakes in billions and billions of dollars without any real applications on the horizon. It's like the collider-boys sitting in their comfy chairs have a such an big and expensive machine that there's no way their research will ever be closed down. It would be too embarrasing to the ones who started funding them in the first place...
>
> Spend the money on Earth sciences or, heck, build a dozen stations on the moon and start beaming energy down here. That would benefit the whole world and it can be done NOW.

~ wavy lines as the Time machine takes us back to 1908, where the poster's great-grandfather is ranting at "Printdot" ~

Right on! Natural Philosophy constantly rakes in the Nobel Prizes without any real applications on the horizon. It's like that damned fool Rutherford sitting in his comfy chair watching his stupid contraption that throws helium ions into gold foil! Who cares if the atom is like a plum pudding or if it has a nucleus or not? There'll never be any practical application, why, Helium isn't even reactive!

Spend the money on Whaling science, or, heck, just chop down the trees, burn them all, use the heat to boil water, and spin a turbine connected to a bunch of big thick wires, and start sending the energy over here. That would benefit the whole world and it can be done NOW.

~ Thus endeth the flashback ~

Re:US Research

[Rasta Prefect]

Standard Model? How many applications has it produced?

Semi-conductors. Synchrotron Radiation and X-Ray Crystallography. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

Abstraction

[pubjames]

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?

Re:Abstraction

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole point of the scientific method is that you get a model that works; then, somewhere down the road, you find something new and your model doesn't work anymore, so you change the model.

Our thinking about how subatomic particles work - even to the most basic level that we have "particles" (well, wave packets, but..) that we envision as skittering around interacting and such - is only valid because it works.

The question "Well, then, what is actually going on?" is meaningless. You don't actually know, and so you make better and better models to find out. In the end, you may have a model based on thinking of atoms as little cats; that may not be "what's actually going on", but if it fits experiment then what's the real difference?

Re:Another nail in the Standard Model's coffin

[jpflip]

"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.

Re:This is why I love physics

[Noren]

If you're referring to that particular group of researchers, if you RTFA you can see that

Its discovery was recently confirmed by researchers at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, US

That's the beauty of actual science, other people can duplicate your results.

If you were suggesting a vast, global conspiracy of physicists has organized itself to fraudulently claim the existance of a particle which is of interest mostly only to them- then I think you need to adjust your tinfoil hat.