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SELEX at Fermilab Discovers New Particle

Posted by michael on from the ad-infinitum dept.

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."

8 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Rules by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Many things will end up breaking the "rules" before it's all over.

    1. Re:Rules by Tyler+Durden · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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).

      Or even, maybe it never can be "over". Perhaps there will always be weaknesses in theories to explain weaknesses in older ones, ad infinitum. All theories are simply models to reduce the workings of the universe to a form we can make sense of. There may be no perfect model.

      I forgot who said this, but there's a quote that reads something like, "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagined, but it may be stranger than we can imagine."

      --
      Happy people make bad consumers.
  2. Stupid question! by saderax · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Stupid question! by p3tersen · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Do these mesons occur in nature?

      Doubtful.

      If not, how can it be claimed a new "discovery."

      They "discovered" that nature behaves in a certain way. How is it not a "discovery"? You can't call it an "invention" because it's not like they're designing these particles before creating them.
    2. Re:Stupid question! by Cecil · · Score: 3, Insightful

      By your definition, I'm not sure that anything at all can be called a discovery. That would make it a pretty meaningless and useless word, wouldn't it?

      If no one has ever seen a meson like this before then -- regardless of whether they've been flying around the universe for billions of years -- I consider it a discovery, because we (humanity) have never noticed it before now. It's new. It's a discovery.

      --
      Random and weird software I've written.
  3. No such thing as "breaks the rules" by G4from128k · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  4. Re:Johnson Rod by Billy+the+Mountain · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.
  5. It's a bit more than curve fitting by erice · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.