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Neutrino Experiment Restores Standard Model Symmetry
perturbed1 writes "A Fermilab press release announced that MiniBooNE's latest results have salvaged the Standard Model of particle physics. The experiment ruled out the simple neutrino oscillation interpretation of the 1990s LSND experiment. Neutrinos have a tiny amount of mass, required by their oscillations, as observed in solar, atmospheric, and reactor neutrino experiments. Combining this mass with the LSND experiment's results required the presence of a fourth but 'sterile' neutrino, breaking the 3-fold symmetry of particle families in the standard model." Nice to see some good news out of Fermilab after the CERN debacle.
Can Fermilab next restore Newton's model? That speed of light thing is hampering processor speed and space travel.
Space travel I can understand, but don't you dare try to pin processor speed limits on the speed of light. If you want a fast computer, you can do it just fine under the present model. Simply compress 1 kg of matter into a black hole of radius 1.485e-27 m. In the 1e-19 seconds before evaportion due to Hawking radiation, you can perform 5e50 operations per second. It only gets you 1e32 total operations on 1e16 total bits, but it's fast. If you can't do that, you only have yourself to blame.
(Yeah, yeah, borrowed from here.)
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
This isn't exactly what most scientist would consider "good news". We already know that both the standard model and the general relativity are wrong or at least incomplete, but they continue to pass every experiment, including this one...
The reason they keep trying is because they hope to finally find something different from what those theories predict: this will probably open a very exciting period of progress for our understanding of the universe.
More infos: start from unsolved problems in physics and click links.
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
The Los Alamos results seemed fishy, so I think most particle physicists expected the sterile neutrino interpretation to be disconfirmed.
"Nice to see some good news out of Fermilab after the CERN debacle"
So it would be bad news if an experiment showed something you were hoping you wouldn't get? That isn't science. Science is being happy when your experiment successfully tests the hypothesis, regardless of whether it confirmed it or not. A success is in gathering more data, a failure having the experiment give no useful information.
Neutrino oscillations are a process by which different types of neutrino can turn into each other. The elementary particles (quarks, leptons and neutrinos) all come in three "families". We are made of the lightest family: up and down quarks (which are the constituents of protons and neutrons) and electrons. Members of the heavier families are unstable and decay rapidly into lighter particles.
However, it turns out that the weak nuclear interaction can mix quarks of different families. Down quarks turn out to be somewhat mixed with strange quarks of the next heaviest family due to this effect.
For a variety of reasons, it was natural to ask if neutrinos were mixed in the same way. In particular, this could account for the unexpected deficit of electron-type neutrinos from the sun. Various terrestrial experiments were done in the 80's and 90's to try to detect this effect, including LSND.
Neutrino experiments are extremely difficult and subject to all kinds of backgrounds, making them highly susceptible to errors in calibration and calculation. The LSND results were at odds with everything else that had been seen, but the stakes were high and no one wanted to give up on a result that might be right although it was not widely believed by people outside the LSND collaboration itself.
The experiment described in TFA has tried to independently reproduce the LSND results. This is somewhat easier to do than the original experiment because you can design things so that you are most sensitive to the most interesting region. They have failed to find the effect that the LSND result would predict if it was due to neutrino oscillations, and it is likely that this is the end of it.
The article never says so, but the most likely cause of the LSND result is some error in analysis, particularly in accounting for backgrounds and instrument effects. This kind of thing happens, particularly in neutrino physics, where the background processes are fundamentally many orders of magnitude stronger than the effects you are looking for, and have to be designed out with the most excruciating care.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
or other people as well think that the magnet explosion was no accident? I bet that now CERN scientist are going to retaliate by aiming their neutrino beam at FermiLab trying to mess with their experiments.
GP is right, it's NOT good news, it just breathes new life into something that is more description than theory. The Standard Model is just a "good story" of how the universe works, akin to the "earth, air, fire, water" model of elements (albeit with more predictive power) that was replaced by chemistry.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Go to the MiniBooNE web site and guess whether the photomultiplier tubes used to detect the event are either 1520 or 1280.
This could explain an error. At least in their web site, as the correct answer is 42, as everyone knows!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Cosmology predicted that quite some time ago as myself and collaborators show in this PRL paper from over a year ago. And there were many other papers with similar conclusions as well... The only problem is that particle physicists never believe cosmologists! :)
So what more do you want out of science? Science is empirical and descriptive; if you start introducing theoretical components that are non-empirical, you move out of science and beyond the realm of empirical verifiability. There be monsters.
IAALS.
You're right, it wasn't an accident, but don't look to Fermilab. Who has the most to lose if we finally figure out the ultimate secrets of the universe? That's right...
God. The forbidden Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden was just the first barrier. Exploding magnets are just God's way of saying "Discovereth not the Higgs Boson, for in what day soever thou shalt discover it, thou shalt die the death." Of course, the scientists are all like "Yeah yeah, that's what you said about the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and that worked out OK. We'll take our chances." And God is all like "Grrrr! Frickin' arrogant humans! Why did I give you free will, anyway?" And the scientists are like "What-ever, you won't be such hot shit after we've bagged the boson, dude!" and God is like "Oh crap, you're right! I'm so scared! Look at me shaking! And oh by the way, have you checked the accelerator alignment lately? Muhahaha!"
You've just given a meta description of string theory.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I say it's bad news because the standard model is freaking boring.
I still hope to see real interstellar travel before I die (not sticking a bunch of corpsicles in a solar sail powered coffin and sending them out into deep space for a million years), and considering I'm 30 now, I hardly find that likely if the standard model turns out to be right.
Honestly, for those of us who want to see the human race EVER reach the stars (before we succeed in creating another Dark Ages or get smashed by a meteor), the worst news we could possibly get is that the standard model is spot on.
The land shall stone them with the bread of his son.
Neutrinos are the required result of nuclear fusion within the Sun. They are not charged particles and they will travel through a light-year of lead. Now that Sudbury has been scrapped, there remains a severe deficit of neutrinos coming from the Sun for the nuclear fusion model.
They're not asking the question because that is not at all what this result implies. This result does not rule out all neutrino oscillations, but rather deals with a specific result (produced at Los Alamos, not Sudbury) which significantly complicated the neutrino oscillation theory by requiring an additional fourth type of neutrino. The neutrino oscillation theory used to describe the yield of various species from the sun is still quite intact, I believe.Firstly nobody really believed he Los Alamos results principly because some of the collaborators removed their names from the original results paper and published another paper in the same journal issue in which they voiced considerable concern over the validity of the results. If you can't convince your own collaborators it is very hard to convince anyone else.
Secondly neutrino oscillations are not in the Standard Model and the problem with the LSND result was that it could not be reconciled with the other neutrino mising results from SNO and SuperK. So while this results is still very interesting it simply confirms that a simple neutrino mixing EXTENSION to the the Standard Model may be sufficien without needing to invoke more exotic alternatives.
I submitted this story to Slashdot, but sadly, I see that my original wording has been altered by kdawson. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of my original post, but I would like to clarify what I *meant*. First of all, I do not consider this "good news" -- but "good results." The MiniBooNE team clearly worked very hard to get here so a big "Congrats" goes out to them. You could not rule out the LSND result, just because "we did not expect it" and "found it fishy." The unexpected results are sometimes the best ones and in science, remember: one scientist's junk is another scientist's signal. The CMB discovery story is the best example to this. Secondly, the neutrino mass indeed does not belong in the standard model, which already several people have pointed out. What belongs in the standard model is the number of lepton families. It is good to see it confirmed that no "sterile" neutrino is needed to explain the results. Yes, cosmologists have had some say in the subject matter already, but it is good to see it confirmed. This is, afterall, how physics is done. "I told you so" is never a good thing to say in physics. You never know what comes out next afterall. I do not believe that Standard Model has been salvaged by this result nor do I want to live with the Standard Model for the rest of my life. There is already plenty of evidence that the Standard Model is not a sufficient model for explaining all the physical phenomena we observe and soon, I hope soon we will have evidence what that new "something" might be. At this point, I would also like to take this chance, as a physicist who works at CERN, to reply to the highly excited conspiracy theorists: Calm down! CERN, Fermilab and other physics labs are not part of corporate America! Yes, of course, I want CERN (and my experiment, in specific) to be the one who finds the Higgs, but I am willing to bet all my fortune, little as that may be, on that Fermilab's calculation mistake was not intentional. Yes, we, physicists are a funny bunch, with lots of things to argue and get excited about. But, we do have a common goal in life, to dig deeper into the mystery of the universe. And a common understanding -- that the truth *will* reveal itself and you can not determine when it does.
I'm perhaps offtopic and misguided on this posting, but that by no means makes me a crackpot. There is nothing about the Sun that was predicted by the fusion-only concept. You give mainstream theories far too much credit. Every week that passes sees additional anomalies with stellar evolution and the Big Bang Theory. To you, they are merely small problems that will eventually be figured out and assimilated into the bigger picture. Unbeknownst to you, when those anomalies are rearranged and presented within the context of laboratory plasma physics, all of those anomalies suddenly make sense.
Chances are that you have read none of the EU publications. You are not even aware of the arguments being made or the fact that the numerous independent pieces of anomalous space data all unanimously point to electrical plasmas in space. It's not a sparse patchwork of ideas. It is an overwhelming flood of data from all points of observation that simultaneously point to one single conclusion. And yet you offer the opinion that you are fluent enough that you *know* that the EU Theorists must not be correct. You offer people no actual reasons to believe that I'm a crackpot other than the fact that I believe in an against-the-mainstream theory. And yet the mainstream gravity-driven theories cannot account for 95% of all matter in the universe -- much of which appears, as only electricity can do, to *repel* other matter by your own theories' admission. Your favored mainstream theories are based upon ideas about plasma that we know to not be true from laboratory plasma physics, and yet you cling to them because the people around you do. You confuse the comfort of consensus for the notion of being objective, or for that matter even supported by data. You relish the feeling of being part of a team or club where everybody thinks the same, and where everybody is working towards a singular goal in harmony, already knowing what you'll find before you even look. You ignore the fact that this is not how science works. In a worst-case scenario, you will not realize that this is a mistake until perhaps you are far too old too do anything about it. If you feel a deep urge to understand your surroundings, you will eventually regret the fact that you commented on a subject that you know little about. The thought that you could have possibly dissuaded objective people from investigating a subject matter that you had lost your objectivity on (and which you will eventually turn out to be wrong on), will eat at you. But, like others, you'll convince yourself that you did no harm. It is all a part of human nature.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Thanks for the clarification, and for not shooting off a hostile or demeaning response.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
If you cared, you could easily find many pages debunking the "electric universe" theory. e.g. http://www.tim-thompson.com/electric-sun.html
There are no shortage of crackpot physics theories supported by allegedly upstanding scientists. Often it's not even anyone's fault. Someone sees a sliver of evidence for some wild theory and latches on to it, wildly grasping at straws to support it. It's human nature, but most scientists manage to overcome the desire to selectively interpret evidence for their own purposes.
http://www.steorn.net/
http://www.rexresearch.com/coler/coler2.htm
http://www.blacklightpower.com/
http://www.relativitychallenge.com/
http://www.thefinaltheory.com/
If you want to debunk current science, start by learning modern physics and the experiments used to defend modern physics. You can't effectively criticize theories when you don't know what they say or how past experiments have validated them.
The above crackpot sites might not even be wrong. It could be that the scientific establishment is corrupt, misinterpreting evidence, and unreasonably trying to squash competing theories. However, the way those crackpots are going about trying to disprove currently accepted physics is simply the wrong way to go about it. If any of them would design a repeatable experiment that conflicts with existing theories, they'd become instantly famous. Why don't they? Either they're lazy or they're frauds. In either case, they have no business calling themselves scientists.
Wallace Thornhill accurately predicted *all* of the anomalous results from the Deep Impact Mission to Comet Tempel 1. Results that remain anomalous to NASA to this day were all natural byproducts of EU Theory. Did it make him famous? No, not really. People still blew him off. It is a fact, actually, that pretty much all of the anomalies in the space sciences today have an electrical explanation. Nobody really cares, to tell you the truth. We live in "interesting" times, I suppose.
...). These simplifications are useful for doing math because it allows them to avoid using Maxwell's Equations and model plasma as a superconductor -- even when the plasma stretches light years in distance. Contemplate the concept of a plasma that's light years across instantly neutralizing. It's silly. Now, if you remove that assumption and permit the plasma in space to act as plasma in the laboratory does, then you are effectively giving resistance to the plasma. With resistance, plasma conducts electricity. It's not space that deprives plasma of its conductivity. It's the astrophysicists.
It may seem to people who have not read the Electric Universe materials that Tim Thompson puts the issue to rest. This is far from the case.
Although I can certainly see major problems with some of his analysis (like the notion that neutrino flavors change in only one direction), I do not personally have the capability to evaluate all of Tim Thompson's arguments. Few people do. Does that mean that he is the only person capable of formulating an opinion on the universe? No, it does not. Does it mean that he is more qualified to evaluate the situation? No, not even. It is oftentimes worse to know something wrong than to not know anything at all. It is a fact that astrophysicists are unanimously taught in school that electricity plays no important role in space. Those people were educated before it became apparent that space is filled with plasma, and these educational programs persist in spite of the fact that Hannes Alfven, the father of plasma physics, tried in vain to convince the astrophysicists that electricity does flow through space. We know from the laboratory that plasma is electrical in nature. It is a gas that consists of a certain percentage of charged particles. Plasma is in fact *highly* conductive in our laboratory experiments. Astrophysicists are taught that they can ignore this fact in school in a class called magnetohydrodynamics. In that class, they are taught that plasmas can "instantly neutralize" and that plasmas have frozen-in-place magnetic fields (look it up on wiki "if you care"
Plasma is unique in that we know from the lab that its physical interactions induce electric current, and vice-versa. If you accept, as astrophysicists do, that plasma pervades 99.999% of all space, then out of necessity, it's inevitable that electrical currents will result from violent physical interactions in space.
Astrophysicists are oftentimes taught in class that it would require more energy than exists within the universe to completely strip the electrons from all of the atoms in a teaspoon of salt. Some education there! That assumes that the plasma universe started in a neutral state. We know no such thing.
One could then argue, well, if plasma in space was electrical like the stuff in the lab, then we'd see evidence of this in our observations. And in fact, we do. Every single week that goes by, in fact, there are images of z-pinches that we observe within the laboratory in NASA press releases. This week, in fact, we saw two such images:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070406_red_r ectangle.html
http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.