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Matter-Antimatter Bias Seen In Fermilab Collisions
ubermiester writes "The New York Times is reporting that scientists at Fermilab have found evidence of a very small (about 1%) average difference between the amount of matter/antimatter produced in a series of particle collisions. Quoting: '[T]he team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of ... muons ... slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.' This finding invites theorists to explain why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe, when the Standard Model suggests that there should be equal amounts of each." Here is the paper as submitted to Physical Review (PDF). The DZero team is looking forward to getting detailed data from the LHC once it ramps up operationally.
I'm trying to imagine what kind of sample size you'd need to represent, well, everything in the universe.
Sample size and significance calculations are generally done assuming an infinite population from which to sample, so "everything in the universe" is actually as close to perfect agreement between the math and the reality as you can get.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Because, of course, magically, no doppler shift will happen when you elevate c to 110%...
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What is, "there used to be a lot more matter and antimatter before they started canceling each other out and now we live amongst the debris"?
or, from my safety fifth-grader...
What is "the standard model is wrong"?
And I don't mean that in a bad way. The "flat earth" hypothesis was an _amazing_ deduction at its inception. It was only off by eight inches declination for every mile. This was a _tiny_ margin of error. But error compounds and so does any other form of tiny, so eight inches per mile, an error of ~.0126% (e.g. 8/63360) was enough to make the earth round.
Ta dah! 8-)
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OTOH this is what happened to the LHC predecessor at CERN when Fermilab was bleeding edge. I suspect that in 20 years the #1 accelerator will be our fellow Americans' one. (unless they win the race to have short-sighted politicians...)
And I think it is probably better to have only one "best accelerator" at a time. LHC will be able to confirm the data from Tevatron *and* do something more. And so will do the next Tevatron with LHC data.
This is one example where the Standard Model may be missing something or need tweaking.
Or the universe may be missing something and need tweaking. Don't rule out possibilities too early.
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I'm sure the scientists who wrote the paper never even considered that before submitting the article for peer review.
Your summation doesn't make sense. We have 1/0.01 = 100 = 10000%, so the total energy is 10000% of what it started as? The very first term in the series should be a clue that something is wrong: 0.99^0 = 1 = 100% already.
> Hmmm....black hole in the middle of the Bible belt...
You know, you really ought to visit the Midwest some time. But that might damage your prejudices, so I guess you'd better not.
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Yea, it just depends on which day of the week you subscribe to which theory.
The reality of it is ... they are theories and they continually keep finding new data that says the theories are at least partially wrong or in some cases bare no relation to reality.
Stop pretending you (or anyone else) understands the universe.
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They submitted a paper saying that they see a difference of around three sigma from what the SM predicts; they claim nothing more than that. Besides, we need to see the whole picture here: previous experiments agree with the SM prediction within 1-sigma, which is as good as it gets, while their result is a bit off. Their best fit disagrees more with the current combined BaBar/Belle best result than the SM prediction does to the BaBar/Belle numbers. This, combined with the fact that we've seen even bigger signals on the "b" sector simply die after some more data was collected, makes me say "bah" and wait. When they get to a seven-sigma disagreement, I'll be impressed; but I doubt they will. I believe D0's final paper on this will agree much better with the SM.
More likely the new best accelerator will be built in China. The chances of America "wasting" money on one anytime in the next two decades is slim to none.
The Universe has exactly what it needs.
Our interpretation of what it should have obviously needs tweaking -- or at the very least, we need better observations.
If your model doesn't match reality, it's not your reality that needs fixing. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.