Physicists Postulate Existance of New Particle

corngrower writes "University of Washington physicists postulate the existence of a new particle called the acceleron which links dark energy with the neutrino. The theory offers an explanation for the recent discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe."

Comments

Intel Outside!

[NanoGator]

"University of Washington physicists postulate the existence of a new particle called the acceleron which links dark energy with the neutrino."

Acceleron... Neutrino... and it represents a particle whose value cannot be scientifically measured today. How about Itanion?

okay everybody has to do this at last once...

[shaitand]

I for one welcome our new dark energy overlords!

Subatomic particles are like programming languages

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

There's a zillion of them, of which only about 4 are of any use to most of us...

An acceleron?

[Cecil]

I've got acceleron in my computer.

Woohoo, that was the worst pun ever! Someone shoot me.

What?

[Dausha]

Is it just me, or are scientists trying to make science fit the theory? I mean, once upon a time people thought the Sun revolved around the Earth (now we all know the Universe revolves around me), and kept coming up with more and more complicated explanations regarding why the other planets retrograded. Finally, somebody had the balls to say that the Earth revolves around the Sun (but, based on my parenthetical statement above, he was still wrong).

Now, as I understand it, we have an assumption of science that requires that we account for mass that is not present. Voila! Dark Matter (or Energy, or whatever). However, since we cannot detect this new thing, we have to find a way to make that fit the mould. It seems to me that we are winding on-and-on down the rabbit hole. How long before there is a realization that this is just modern (or is it post-modern) retrograde theory?

Why does reality have to yield to theory? Can't it be the other way around? Do I have the karma to withstand a mod down?

Re:What?

[black mariah]

Is it just me, or are scientists trying to make science fit the theory?

It's just you. Scientists come up with a theory, then try to find out whether it is true or not. What you're describing is best referred to as pseudoscience, willfully bending facts and evidence to support one's own version of the truth. This is not real science. This is not trying to come up with an explanation to a problem. This is the equivalent of a conspiracy theorist being presented with papers that refute one of his theories, then writing those papers off as PART OF the conspiracy. It's idiocy at its finest.

Re:What?

[Alsee]

as I understand it, we have an assumption of science that requires that we account for mass that is not present. Voila! Dark Matter

You have it backwards. They are trying to account for matter that apparently *is* present, we just can't see it and don't know what it is.

There is lots of evidence that there is *something* there, we can see its gravitational effects on the stuff we can see. Gravitational lensing and orbital speeds. And there's plenty of other evidence I don't know offhand.

If you can somehow explain all of the evidence without "dark matter", well you'll be almost as famous as Einstein.

-

Re:What?

[hcdejong]

No. It's always a matter of trying to make the theory fit your observations. Adding stuff to the theory, and then trying to prove or measure that addition is a perfectly valid way of working.
Yes, sometimes a paradigm shift is needed. But that doesn't make the work done before it invalid. In fact, tracking the consequences of your current theory until you've painted yourself into a corner is a good way to find out if a paradigm shift is needed.
Of course, human nature makes adding stuff to a theory you already have a lot easier than coming up with a completely new idea.
Also, an entirely new theory will have to account for quite a lot. In this case, things like the components of an atom, the wave/particle duality, E=MC^2, etc, all of which took a century of work by the entire scientific community to figure out, will have to be explained by your new theory.

Re:What?

[Ayaress]

Much as I have a rule againt replying to posts that resort to insults, I always end up doing it.

Your problem comes from the fact that you, like so many other people, insist on a ass-backwards concept of how science works.

These scientists are not creating a theory. You don't have a theory unless you have observation to base it on.

They're making a hypothesis, which is just that - a hypothesis. They throw out a few ideas that give them some inkling of what to look for. It doesn't tell us anything, but it grows out of things we already know.

Then, they go to the observation, and try and see what there actually is. You don't need a hypothesis to do observation, but with extremely complex stuff like this, it's a good idea to know what you're looking for first, or you'll be hit with information overload. They've already got a few thousand particles on the books, so if they don't have an idea of a new one they're looking for, they'll never find it underneath all the protons and electrons and pions and morons. If the observations fit the hypothesis, they start throwing it all into equations.

When they derive equations that hold true, it becomes a law. Law still doesn't really tell you very much. So e=mc^2. It doesn't tell you anything useful about mass or energy.

Theory is the highest level of scientific understanding, and is not just far above theory, but it's actually higher on the scale than law (which is why the "If it was true, it wouldn't be a theory anymore, it would be a law" is wrong. You go from hypothesis to observation to law and lastly to theory).

It comes after you've made your hypotheses, observed confimation, and derived laws from the observation. Theory tells you WHY your hypothesis worked (or didn't, as they case may be), and why the laws do what they do. All the fancy things you can read out of e=mc^2 (like mass being variable, energy and matter being interchangeable, and so on) are Theory. Theory outranks law.

All we have here is hypothesis, nothing more. You're trying to equate hypothesis with theory, but they're completely different things, separated by two levels of understanding.

Re:What?

[ekuns]

Are scientists being close minded and protective of their current understanding, and plowing ahead on a path that they should, within reason, be able to predict is heading the wrong way?

I'm a particle physicist by training (although not by career). The answer to this question, IMHO, is "No." Most particle physicists I know -- of many dozens -- would prefer to find something that the current standard models clearly cannot explain. The problem is that with only a few tweaks, so far, the current standard model is been able to predict just about every measurement thrown its way, and with a dismaying degree of accuracy.

See, here's the problem. The standard model of particle physics accurately predicts all measurements made thus far to as much accuracy as people have been able to bring the calculations. Many consider the standard model to be quite ugly because it has so many "arbitrary" parameters with no underlying theory of where those values come from: It has about 20-ish measured values that go into it. Many of those arbitrary values are the measured masses of particles, and the measured interaction strength of the three forces (not including gravity).

All of the physicists I know and most of the physicists I've ever met in the particle physics field are quite willing to be pursuaded by a new theory, but no such theory has presented itself. Some have thought that string theory will be that paradigm shift, but so far there is not enough evidence to prove or disprove.

When a convincing quantum theory of gravity appears, that will probably fix many of the complaints people have about the standard model.

So the issue at hand here is some scientists who are making a hypothesis within the current framework, extending the current framework, to explain some seemingly unrelated measurements. This is not epicycles on top of epicycles, although it might appear as such.

From reading the article, it appears that this hypothesis is disprovable, and thus a strong scientific hypothesis. It will be interesting to see how this theory holds up against evidence.

Re:What?

[ekuns]

I guess you wouldn't believe me if I told you I knew more than might be immediately obvious

I hadn't yet made any assumptions about what you do or do not know. I aim to make as few assumptions as I can, because assumptions are so frequently incorrect.

And yes, many of these people I have in mind are even "scientists" by trade.

I'm open to believing this. I have definitely encountered some "true believers" in physics and in other sciences. Most of the people I know and knew did not fall into that camp, but there's a selection there because I tend to find "true believers" annoying. Because by definition they are not open to evidence.

I have changed my mind on major scientific issues several times during my life. I expect I will do so on major theories at least a few more times. I certainly hope so! The alterntative is boring! Personally, I hope that they do NOT find the Higgs Boson. It will be much more interesting if they do not find it, because it is getting more difficult with time to construct a theory that can explain why we haven't found it. If the Higgs Boson is not found in the next decade, that will have serious consequences for many current theories.

Along with that, I will say that very few of non-believers I know would say that quantum machanics "makes sense".

I understand what you are saying. But quantum physics really does make sense. It's just not intuitive, because our experience with the macroscopic world does not correlate well with the behavior of very small things. You're right in that I give huge value to a theory that predicts accurately, and that I value more highly a theory with predictive power than a theory with less predictive power that is more understandable.

To a point. Adding epicycles upon epicycles blindly can become an obsessive exercise in not looking elsewhere. The good news is that lots of physicists are looking strenuously for alternative theories. Practically all of these theories get disproven within a few years, but eventually, someone will find a cleaner more beautiful theory than the current standard model -- I hope! -- that has the same or better predictive power as the current model.

The big philosophical question once the math works is -- what does the math mean? Many physicists happily totally ignore that question and just rely on the predictive power. Some other people get the accuracy of prediction confused with the concept of whether the theory or model is "true." Hey, it's just a model! No-one I know thinks that the current theory is the end of the road. What does the math mean? That is an excellent question. I am hoping for a new theory that explains at least some of the following questions:

Why three dimensions of space, and not two or four? (I'm ignoring any "curled up" dimensions which we cannot participate in.) Why do the particles we know of have the masses they have? Are space and time continuous, or discrete? What causes mass to exist? Why three "generations" of quarks and leptons, and not two or four? Is there a reason that the (observable) universe has the amount of energy that it does, and not less or more?

Hmmm

[advocate_one]

observations don't match your theory???

postulate a new particle...

how about working on the existing theory so that it doesn't require yet another particle???

Re:Hmmm

[Oddly_Drac]

"how about working on the existing theory so that it doesn't require yet another particle???"

And if that particle actually exists?

There was a furor that surrounded the nuetrino when it was first thought up and they did think that it was so weakly interacting that they'd never find it. Turns out that several hundred tonnes of chlorine and some sensitive photodetectors embedded in a mountain do the trick.

The Higgs boson is another case in point; to find it in a collider requires extremely high energy collisions, but we don't have one. Do we write off the Higgs boson because we don't have a detector for it?

Re:I postulate the existence of...

[hdparm]

Surely, you could use some of these accelerons.

Re:When?

[selderrr]

yes, i find it fascinating indeed that a paradigm genius hasn't show up in the past 30 years. Or at least not on a scientific level with global implications... Has our science grown so specialised indeed ? Copernicus, Newton and to a certain degree also einstein & planck were universal scientists. Modern day scientists work themselves deeper & deeper in smaller and smaller subfields of an allready tiny science topic... Could it be that we are killing global paradigms ?

Re:When?

[Oddly_Drac]

"Could it be that we are killing global paradigms ?"

Nope, it's just that paradigm shifts seem a lot more obvious in retrospect once development has followed a decent amount of testing. It could be argued that we're currently in the grip of a paradigm shift that's affecting society as a whole, given that global, affordable communications have really started to take off in the past 20 years.

On the other hand, there isn't a lot of 'pure' research being undertaken, which means that you're limited to the postgrad, postdoctoral academic work these days.

Re:Curiouser and Curiouser

[erik_norgaard]

There are dectectors that do detect something which is generally accepted as being neutrinos.
The interact very weakly, has an energy less than 29 eV and travel close to the speed of light.

Since they interact so weakly they can be used to detect supernovas before the supernova is visible on the sky.

The problem is that the sensitivity of the current detectors does not allow to determine wether these has a mass and travel a little less than the speed of light or if they are massless. Neutrinos with mass can resolve the dark energy problem.

Another problem is that the detectors does not detect the amount of neutrinos to be expected.

They are NOT postulating!

[Xentax]

I actually RTFA (no, I'm not new here...), and I think the submitter is wrong about one thing.

As far as I can tell, the existence of this new particle is being *hypothesized*, and since there's discussion of using neutrino detectors to see if they're right, it may soon be *theorized*.

A *postulate* is something else - a statement that is accepted as truth, usually as the basis of a theory or argument. Here's a helpful definition.

I'm sure these people don't expect anyone to simply "accept as truth" the existence of accelerons, but rather want to go do experiments and turn their hypothesis into either a theory or a failed hypothesis.

A postulate is something along the lines of "Through a point not on a line, one and only one line can be drawn parallel to the given line."

That is, you can accept it as truth or deny it, but trying to actually prove or disprove it *experimentally* is difficult or impossible. There's either a logical counterexample, or not (or we haven't found it yet).

Xentax

Neutrinos.

[Christopher Thomas]

The problem is that the sensitivity of the current detectors does not allow to determine wether these has a mass and travel a little less than the speed of light or if they are massless. Neutrinos with mass can resolve the dark energy problem.

Actually, it's the dark _matter_ problem massive neutrinos address, and they only form part of the puzzle ("hot dark matter").

Dark _energy_ appears to be a repulsive force intrinsic to space. This proposed model is one take on a mechanism for it.

Neutrino mass has also been pretty conclusively demonstrated by observations of neutrino _oscillation_ (changing of flavour), which cannot occur if neutrinos are massless. This incidentally also solves the solar neutrino problem (the detectors producing shortfall measurements could only detect one type of neutrino, while solar neutrinos were oscillating between all three types in transit, resulting in many not being detected).

Most of these developments happened within the last decade or so. We're in a very interesting time for particle physics (between new observations, new mathematical approaches to applying string theory, and new approaches to modelling gravity that aren't string theory).