Slashdot Mirror
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.
For some experiments, 1% might be attributable to error. I've never done practical particle physics, though. Does this fall under experimental error, or is stuff like this usually re-creatable to seventeen decimal places?
I may not know much science, but I do know that margin of error is important.
That would not be a "discovery" but a confirmation. Many physicists have suggested such hypothesis in the past. Even more have suggested asymetry in time -t that at various ages of the universe the fundamental constants may have been different to what they are now.
There are a few pieces of evidence suggesting this (the rate of decay of Oklo's uranium COULD be explained that way - though a natural fission reactor is a more plausible one), and several physicists have conjectured that the fine-structure-constant may have changed over time, and that would be an explanation for the wrong speed of galaxies that wouldn't require cold-dark-matter.
Our estimates on the age of the universe have changed 4 times in the past 2 decades - generally, it got younger with the current consensus at about 13-Billion years.
Of course if any of the fundamental constants had changed over time or in different regions of space - in the end, it's simply a matter of how you travel through space-time, then that means all bets are off. The fundamental constants determine the laws of physics. Thus far, outside of singularities like the big bang or black holes (and Stephen Hawking thinks we don't even need THOSE to be singularities) there is no really strong evidence for it. It's possible, but unlikely - and if true, means it's mathematically impossible for us to understand the universe.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
If the laws are uneven in time, that could lead to perpetual motion among other interesting consequences.
For example, pretend that the speed of light is variable over time and remember that E=mc^2. On earth, we build a matter-antimatter annihilation laser and point it at a base in space. When the speed of light speeds up to c=1.1 the normal value, we fire off the laser, converting 10 g of matter into 1.08749377 petajoules. The light energy travels for a time, during which the speed of light slows back down to c. It hits a set up in the space base that converts the light back into matter. We divide by normal c, and are left with 12.1 grams of matter. We mail it back to earth, and send 10 g grams back to the laser (to repeat the process). The other 2.1 g is used as starship fuel, worth over 180 terajoules. Don't rinse, but repeat.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
The Tevatron is so thoroughly outclassed by the LHC that they have to take advantage of every opportunity to make a press release and show that they are still relevant. Once the LHC starts producing science data there will be impossible to justify funding for the Tevatron. The whole of Fermi Lab. (which uses about half the science money given by the D.O.E.) will be in danger of being closed, so they are fighting for survival. During the Bush administration they had to get private funding to avoid lay-offs. http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/good-news-or-less-bad-news-for-american-science/