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SELEX at Fermilab Discovers New Particle
sellthesedownfalls writes "Scientists at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will announce on Friday, June 18 the observation of an unexpected new member of a family of subatomic particles called 'heavy-light' mesons. The new meson, a combination of a strange quark and a charm antiquark, is the heaviest ever observed in this family, and it behaves in surprising ways -- it apparently breaks the rules on decaying into other particles. See the Fermilab Press Release."
Many things will end up breaking the "rules" before it's all over.
IANAP(hysicist) ... Do these mesons occur in nature? If not, how can it be claimed a new "discovery." In the same manner, I can glue a poptart to a can of coke and "discover" a new product that has the edible goodness of poptarts and the drinkable properties of coke.
...it apparently breaks the rules...
Because it couldn't be that we've made a mistake. It was the naughty meson's fault.
-... ---
Stuff like this is utterly fascinating. It's another way to examine the universe and try to figure out how it works. Trying to figure out the strong force will help with figuring out nuclear properties. And since everything has nuclei....
Also, experiments like this might poke holes in the Standard Model, which could lead to new area to explore in High Energy physics. Who knows what nature has hidden at the fermi level?
And yes, I used to do particle physics, so this immediatly caught my attention.
If the data and rules disagree (and the data is valid) then "the rules" were never ever really correct. This is the most interesting and cognitively confounding element of science. So many experiments cause the perceived "rules" to change when in fact the true rules of the universe never change, only our approximations and estimations of them. This is why I wonder if so much of science is really just curve-fitting (F = m*a + delta, where delta contains relativistic effects, quantum effects, etc.) Similarly, I wonder if E = mc^2 + delta, where delta includes effects unseen because we haven't tested the formula over the entire span of possible conditions (energies, distances, mass concentrations, etc.)
As an aside, a friend in college was religious because of this very issue. He hated the fact that science couldn't "make up its mind" abut what was true or not -- for him, an erroneous certainty was more comfortable than a changing, but progressively more correct uncertainty.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I think this stuff DOES actually matter, I mean, physicists discovered quantum entanglement and now there's a the tantalizing possibility of the development unbreakable cyphers, quantum computers etc. Who knows what magical technology will come from these seemingly obscure discoveries. And I dare say that it doesn't take a physicist to come up with ways to harness these technologies, all it takes is a curious mind.
BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
... quantum physics would start to get pretty boring after a while.
It's always fun to find a fault in the theory and then find a way to fix the theory, especially when that fix is elegant and makes all sorts of really cool predictions that you could not have made before.
There have been times where the best fitting equations were just like you say. They had parts that didn't correspond to any real understanding. They just made the equation work. Those are emperical results.
Much science is about taking those emperical results and coming up with theory that explains what they mean.
That's because the "rules" are bounded on our existing knowledge. Way back when the rules stated that if you sailed for too long, you'd fall off the edge of the (flat) earth, or that the sun orbited around the earth.
I'd expect that in the future, what we take for granted as a rule will be stretched, shrunk, or even broken. I'm not sure when it will be "over," but chances are that we'll be over before we learn all we could about the universe (possibly due to misunderstanding how it works).
Yeah, so God did these amazing miraculous things thousands of years ago, then conveniently stopped. Where are the burning bushes today? Where are the cities being smote? Where are the heretics being turned into pillars of salt? Where are the booming voices of God from the heavens? Oh yeah, and don't forget... the Universe was created a few thousand years ago, too. Uh huh... RIGHT. Fucking idiot.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
It's true, it's not as easy to make discoveries as it used to be. This experiment for instance has 125 co-authors and finished in 1997, so it had to go on for years before that. And it's a small experiment by comparison. So perhaps it's not as easy for an individual to make contributions as it used to be in these fields. But you could probably still do a lot on a (relative) table-top with things like Bose-Einstein condensates, atom interferometry, etc.
That said, there's plenty we don't understand about the big issues. We don't know what most matter is. We don't know why the universe seems to be expanding faster than it should. We don't have any theory of quantum gravity. We don't know why galaxies formed, and why they formed so damn fast. We don't really seem to completely understand the strong force - and it's prying the lid off things like this that will get us there.
So, as a physicist, I'd say there's still cool stuff to be done. You just might have to work hard in a lab or behind a desk for years and years to do it.