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.

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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?

[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: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?

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