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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%...
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
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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I'm sure the scientists who wrote the paper never even considered that before submitting the article for peer review.