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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."
It's a bound state of two quarks. The charm quark is "heavy", i.e. relatively massive, while the the strange quark is less so.
Many things will end up breaking the "rules" before it's all over.
Now, I think this is the lifetime of the usual shorter-lived mesons, but still...
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- HST
allegedly true story:
when CERN finished the construction of LEP, back in the day, they had a problem when they turned it on. the beam wouldn't align to collide and they had no idea why.
upon further inspection, the problem was (allegedly) caused by a bottle of Heineken left behind in one of the beam tubes by a construction worker...
The best description of this phenomenon comes from James Ross in the official press release:
Stand clear of the doors. The doors are now closing.
Actually, they do occur in nature. Specifically, they occur when a sufficiently energetic cosmic ray strikes our atmosphere.
This is the same reason that many physicists laugh off the idea that they're going to create a mini-black hole that would sink to the earth's core and destroy us all. The universe is constantly running even higher-energy experiments in our atmosphere all the time - we just haven't placed our detectors in the right place! (To be fair to our hard-working particle physicists, you would need a VERY large detector hovering high in the air if you wanted to catch these things in nature.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
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.
The fire at Los Alamos has had one significant consequence. A secret scientific document was discovered in a bunker whose security systems were mostly destroyed by the fire. This document was leaked to the public last weekend.
Actually it reveals nothing that we didn't already suspect. But it does show that besides arsenic, lead, mercury, radon, strontium and plutonium, one more extremely deadly and pervasive element is known to exist.
This startling new discovery has been tentatively named Governmentium (Gv) but kept top secret for 50 years. The new element has no protons or electrons, thus having an atomic number of 0. It does, however, have 1 neutron, 125 deputy neutrons, 75 supervisory neutrons, and 111 team leader neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.
These 312 particles are held together by a force called morons, that are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton-like particles called peons. Since it has no electrons, Governmentium is inert. However, it can be detected as it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.
According to the discoverers, a minute amount of Governmentium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would normally take less than a second. Governmentium has a normal half-life of approximately three years. It does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganization in which a portion of the deputy neutrons, supervisory neutrons, and team leader neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium mass will actually increase over time, since, with each reorganization, some of the morons inevitably become neutrons, forming new isodopes.
This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to speculate that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as the "Critical Morass."
http://www.appleseeds.org/governmentium.htm
Please direct all bug reports to
The story is in an indeterminate state between truth and falsity, and apparently the number of bottles is in an indeterminate state between 1 and 2, and the theory of how they got there is referred to as the Heineken uncertainty principle.