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Fermi Lab May Have Discovered New Particle or Force
schleprock63 writes "Physicists at Fermi Lab have found a 'suspicious bump' in their data that could indicate they've found a new elementary particle or even a new force of nature. The discovery could 'be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.' Physicists have ruled out that the particle could be the standard model Higgs boson, but theorize that it could be some new and unexpected version of the Higgs. This discovery comes as the Tevatron is slated to go offline sometime in September."
Still kinda miss the Superconducting Super Collider . Wonder if it could have produced results sooner.
what
but dammit! Proper grammar is a godsend!
Use it!
It's early to be drinking.
Consciousness is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Then shut up.
WOO WOO!
It's a ploy to keep the funds flowing.
I feel sorry for people that don't drink, because when they get up in the morning, that's as good as they're gonna feel
"a 'suspicious bump' in there data"
Sigh.
or possibly a huge bison
- "If one man can create that much hate, you can only imagine how much love we as a togetherness can create."
Either it's "Newly discovered", or it's really something that never existed before and is therefore "New". I think it unlikely that this is "New!".
Geekism is your _only_ God!
Dude, this isnt your 1980's dodge van with the tinted/teardrop windows and shag carpet. And you dont have a puppy or free candy. Therefore not legit.
GP is confusing Salvia with LSD
So when all those other people die that means what Mr. Spammer? Which universe ends then? Take your anti-materialist nonsense to some place that cares.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I said salvia not alcohol. Drinking wont allow you to experience and appreciate death.
Spoken like a man who's never drunk himself to death.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
It shall henceforth be known as the pleaseExtendOurFunding-ion.
OK, I jest. On a more serious (but related) note, back in 2000, when the LEP at CERN was shutting down, there were possible "hints" of the Higgs' Boson and pleas to extend the running time (which were ultimately denied so that the LHC would not be delayed).
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
You know what allows you to experience death by smoking it? Carbon monoxide, for example!
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
I can't, it's not part of my predestined thoughts :/
Slashdot has just opened up to a new demographic I think.
Ah, but does your brain exist? If not, then maybe the universe was never there to begin with.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
When I read things like "In about 250 times more cases than expected, the total energy of the jets clustered around a value of about 144 billion electron volts" I get nervous.
This is like saying that in a series of 1M coin tosses the sequence HTTHHTTTTHHTTHHH came up 100x more often than would be expected by chance. Does that mean that any particular sequence of 8 tosses should come up 1/65536th of the time, and this one came up 1/655th of the time, or does it mean that some random sequence of results should come up 100% of the time in a random series of 16 coin tosses, and we happened to pick the random series that came up the most often in that particular set of data?
If I mine a big set of data against 100 random hypothesis I'll be able to find about 5 that I can show to be true with 95% confidence, despite the fact that there is nothing really going on.
The real test is to come up with the hypothesis first, then collect the data.
Now, these guys are probably smart, and hopefully control for this. If you want to test for 100 hypotheses and REALLY have 95% confidence, then you need to target a confidence of 1-0.05^100 for each test - at least that is how I see it (being a complete novice at statistics).
Reminds me of that joke "Oh, I always wanted to meet another solipsist!"
The cookie told me to.
A person who smoked salvia said that a black hole in reality opened up and their soul was sucked into it. Meanwhile physicists claim that black holes suck in matter and light and it can never escape.
Maybe if more physicists smoked Salvia they'd have a better natural understanding of the universe. They would understand that salvia is an alien lifeform, a plant brought to the earth by the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys to consume our souls. They would understand that our reality is an illusion and that this force they just discovered is the salvia force, the ultimate proof of alien life. The universe and existence is fake, accept it. You don't have consciousness, you are just a biological machine, please accept it.
Oddly enough, your post is as worth reading as the 40+ posts that came after it. You may have proved a point. God know what it is (maybe on some quantum scale you are proving that insanity is sanity at the same time) but, well done old chap.
I went to battle M.C. Escher, but drew a blank.
Did we finally find the Unstoppable Force?
Slashdot has just opened up to a new demographic I think.
Who, crazy people? No, they've been here for years.
...to the paper, as opposed to the commentary by PopSci on the article written by NYT by someone who really didn't know what the hell they were talking about.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You sir, need to find a more competitive source for LSD.
A meaningless statement. In order for something to be considered an illusion you must consider the possibility that something can be deceived. And in order for that something to be deceived, it must be conscious.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Try DMT, cowboy. Makes Salvia look like a Children's Chewable Tylenol. Also, people with schizophrenia should never do hallucinogens. Most people can do them, and still know the difference between hallucination and reality. Schizophrenics, not so much.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The bus you don't see will still run your ass over.
LSD isn't nearly strong enough.
Ha. It's plenty strong, you just need to eat more.
You know what else twists facts and perspectives? Hallucinogens. Even weak ass hallucinogens like Salvia Divinorum.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
FWIW, earlier drafts of the paper were much more sensationalistic than the final draft that the collaboration approved. A large contingent of the collaboration, myself included, would have removed our names from the paper if it had done something as insane as claim discovery of a new particle. So, we specifically pushed to make the paper more scientifically honest and less effective as a "ploy to keep the funds flowing." That said, the NYT article and all the other mainstream news reports on the issue are far, far more sensationalistic than anything the analyzers ever even considered producing...
Some interesting things to note:
So, long story short, there is certainly something here to be interested in. Both the theorists who write the Monte Carlo generators and the experimentalists analyzing data from the LHC experiments are paying close attention to this result, as it affects their work. We will know more after further study and work, both to improve the Monte Carlos and to look for similar effects in the ATLAS and CMS data.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
I bet you trust physicists don't you?
Just like you trust priests?
And doctors?
But why? Why trust them? They could manipulate or twist the facts to promote any kind of perspective they wish.
When a doctor says I'm fine, I don't believe him. When a priest tells me I'm not catholic, I believe him. When a physicist tells me not to cross the streams, I don't know what to believe. Which one is lying and why?
Wonder if it could have produced results sooner.
Finding a "suspicious bump" in the middle of a steeply falling distribution of events is hardly an exciting result unless it is confirmed. Bump hunting on exactly this sort of distribution is extremely hard to do. They barely have a 3 sigma deviation and, given the number of measurements made by the tevatron a 3 sigma deviation in one is not, perhaps, unexpected. If the other Tevatron experiment, D0, confirms the result then things will be more interesting...until then I remain highly unconvinced.
We should test all physicists for drugs when they start talking about new forces or new theories of reality.
I don't think it's drugs so much as a looming expiration date for a project's funding. It's always nice to be able to point to something and say "look at this interesting new particle/force!" right before the plug gets pulled. That could get you another year or two.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Hot
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
All I want to know is, can you light one of them on fire?
No No No... I'll call it a superfluid... yeah that's sounds cool! Puff Puff Puff!
Ya new funding, time to go get some Cheetos!
Dude, how can you trust yourself? Don't you know that you can lie too, even to yourself? Haven't you made a lie a reality once by saying "I did X" over and over until eventually you made yourself believe it?
Duh. Thus, the definition of schizophrenia.
Oh, it should be obvious to most people, especially schizophrenics, but it isn't. They do things like Salvia and think they are talking to gray aliens.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You are deeply confused by semantics. "It's all an illusion" is an illusion, because "it" is not "that." No separation. You are not a little homonculus in your head, looking out of your eyes and listening through your ears. The present moment is real, not an illusion. Consciousness is real, not an illusion, but there is no one that has consciousness. It exists, because it is created by circumstance, but consciousness does not adhere to an individual.
There is life to sense and measure heat. Life is real. It just isn't what you think it is, and rather than accept what it is, you have decided it is all an illusion. It is easier for some people to believe "It is all meaningless" than to take responsibility for creating meaning.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
gb2/b/
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
It also mentioned that discovery was made by a highschooler or something...
A meaningless statement. In order for something to be considered an illusion you must consider the possibility that something can be deceived. And in order for that something to be deceived, it must be conscious.
by Tyler Durden (136036) Alter Relationship on Wednesday April 06, @03:47PM (#35737136) Homepage
My mind just asploded.
Schizophrenics are the last people who would be able to figure that out, just like chronically depressed people would be the last to figure out that chronically depressed people shouldn't consume lots of a substance which acts as a depressant (alcohol).
GP is confusing Salvia with LHC
FTFY
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
... can be found here: http://motls.blogspot.com/2011/04/fermilab-cdf-new-force-press-conference.html
Could it be? I mean, just maybe?
I know it's asking a lot, but science is about repeatable results. Sadly the article does not tell us whether this happened in various different tests or a single test where they simply threw that amount of protons/antiprotons against each other. If the latter, a minimal contamination could explain it all without being the scientific breakthrough of the afternoon.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Reality is a hallucination.
Although you are mostly correct, I feel just pedantic enough to point out that central nervous system depression is nothing at all like psychological depression, you may as well be comparing psychological depression to a tropical depression. Depressed people are generally cognitively capable of figuring out that using alcohol to treat their depression is a loosing battle. Schizophrenics are not generally capable of figuring out that hallucinogens make them crazier than they already are.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
On one level, there's no way to tell, and therefore, it doesn't matter whether it is or not. On another level, of course it isn't a hallucination, "hallucination" is pretty much defined as "not reality" so you kind of have to redefine either "hallucination" or "reality" to make them the same thing, and then the terms become meaningless.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Consciousness is an illusion is a completely different statement from free will does not exist, though. And you seem to be particularily sensitive to Salvia. All I got out of it was a deeply relaxed Zen state.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_theory is an alternate model of particle physics that does a pretty good job of predicting the mass of fundamental particles mathematically.
What's the predicted mass of the neutral electron particle? It's 0.51617049 MeV/c.
I hope they have found proof of a possible levity field, that counter balances the gravity filed and will make physics so much more fun and interesting for particle theory.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Well, sure. Depressed people may be depressed but they're not crazy.
Speaking of pedantry, your post had a loosing/losing mismatch.
Oh my. I'm ashamed, I never confuse loosing and losing!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Although you are mostly correct, I feel just pedantic enough to point out that central nervous system depression is nothing at all like psychological depression, you may as well be comparing psychological depression to a tropical depression.
And chronically depressed people should avoid hurricanes! See, it fits.
The enemies of Democracy are
This sentence FTFA makes me rather dubious: "A new analysis of 10,000 proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron showed a weird result a couple hundred times".
Two problems here: a "new" analysis? Does it mean it needs massaging the results? And two hundred times out of ten thousand does not necessarily mean it's statistically significant, that's 2%, to know if it's significant or not one needs more information than those two numbers alone.
An intriguing result is in this paragraph: "Last fall, Fermilab physicists said they detected evidence for a new class of neutrino, a 'sterile' particle that only interacts through gravity. Those results came out of the MiniBooNE detector; this is is the result of a different experiment, Tevatron's CDF experiment."
If this is true, could that be the "dark mass" particle that cosmologists need?
Prove that they don't, genius.
You belong in a church somewhere.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I would strongly advise reading the actual paper (can be found on the arxiv) instead of the NYT article, which, as I mentioned, is sensational and largely content-free. There is plenty of information in the paper about how they determined the significance of the result and how the analysis (event selection etc) was done. It should answer your questions in this regard. As far as being "new", the data from these experiments is analyzed in scientifically and statistically rigorous ways all the time. It in no way involves "massaging" the data, which you can see if you read the hundreds of papers that have come out of high energy physics experiments.
I really can't comment professionally on the sterile neutrino re dark matter. I've heard of the MiniBOONE result, and think it is very interesting, but the viability of a sterile neutrino as dark matter is pretty far afield for me. Perhaps a passing cosmologist can comment?
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
My word, you're serious.
First off, nobody cares about your philosophy major or your drug trip or whatever it is that lead you to such sophomoric philosophical conundrums.
Secondly, philosophy is mostly useless, solipsism and fatalism doubly so. What's the point? How does effort into either one of these topics benefit anyone?
Third, your logic fails. And it fails HARD. I have to prove something or accept that the alternative is true? Huh?
No, it's more like "prove all this is reality or accept that it CAN BE an illusion. You know, like, it's possible. Man.
As far as that goes, sure, all this really could be a fantastic simulation. So? Does that change a god-damned thing?
And uh, do you get that even if it is a simulated reality, free-will is still possible. Indeed, I'd say that would probably be the point of it all. Cause that's what I'd study if I had god's own reality simulator.
This information has been most helpful. I will be a huge contributor to the scientific community. To sum up, if the equipment is mis-calibrated, new discoveries will be made! In my lab, I will now randomly calibrate equipment on a daily basis. I expect to publish several hundred papers just this year on new physics discoveries. I could randomly select from a pool of experiments what I might be able to reveal this year, but that would just be irresponsible science!
Philosophy,as a study, is dead. It's just riding the coat tails of it's own history.
The Greeks had philosophers. There where teachers, mathematicians artists, doctors,. Great Men. Presumable with Great Women.
As time marched on, each category got it's own specialty.
Now science can either answer many of the great questions. The remaining ones have either been shown t be invalid, or by their nature and can not be proven true.
Nothing but wankery these days. These days being the past 50 or so years.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Even without the Trevatron, there are mountains of data to be dug through to find bumps and hills and scratches and wrinkles in the data. They are still finding new things in the data from LEP and from the moon material they brought back from that moon thing. So why bother if it is still online. The LHC will produce even more data and that means we have enough data in the future to play with it to the end of the world. And if not we can always built a larger thing. The device in Swiss/France is an international device with scientists from many different countries.
Next time we built one in ... well Japan is out of the question they have an energy problem right now. And the US does not have a stable grid. The Europeans are not really sure if they should go to renewable energy or if they should blow up ehm built new nuclear plants on the edge of tectonic plates. May be Libya would be a good place. A lot of sunshine which can be used for energy at day time and the inhabitants are our friends now. At least of half of them. ;-)
No silly, this is real life, not some movie. They'd call it a bion.
We present the new strange particle of the week, which made $SOMETHING_INCREDIBLE and transformed $OBJECT_A into $OBJECT_B which allows us to $DO_SOMETHING_EVEN_MORE_INCREDIBLE which we will use to (go home|blow up our enemies|have a warm bath).
Exactly! It's plenty strong! You just need to take eat more, then chase it with ayahuasca, and smoke some diviner's sage when the trip is peaking... mixed with wet.
May the Force be with you!
Sure, but that lie can be tested simply by asking Ms. Alba.
Salvia isn't by any means a weak hallucinogen, but that doesn't mean that it's worth taking. It's in the dissociative class of hallucinogen (with DXM and fly agarics), as opposed to the psychedelic hallucinogens, like LSD, psylocybes and DMT.
You know what allows you to experience death by smoking it? Carbon monoxide, for example!
Carbon monoxide ain't flammable.
Obviously you weren't around in the late 60's and early 70's when getting the real-deal LSD was pretty easy.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
How do we know they aren't using performance enhancing drugs? We should test all physicists for drugs when they start talking about new forces or new theories of reality.
What would be performance enhancing drugs for a physicist, Provigil and perhaps Adderall or maybe Welbutrin?
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
It's hard to get funding for philosophical wankery these days so most of the wankery occurs in Climatology now.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
This must be the inverse to Clay Shirky's rule that as soon as an organization is set up (or in this case: about to be destroyed), the goal for which the organization began shifts to second priority, and the new primary goal is the preservation/perpetuation of the organization.
From here(s):
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_on_institutions_versus_collaboration.html
http://www.amazon.com/Here-Comes-Everybody-Organizing-Organizations/dp/1594201536
i wish there was a way to directly convert electricity into momentum.
One is Z' boson, another is technicolor model.Can some physicist explain, are they the same/related or not?
I think he's referring to things like this:
An informal statement of the argument for explosion is this: Consider two inconsistent statements, “Lemons are yellow” and "Lemons are not yellow", and suppose for the sake of argument that both are true. We can then prove anything, for instance that Santa Claus exists: Since the statement that "Lemons are yellow and lemons are not yellow" is true, we can infer that lemons are yellow. And from this we can infer that the statement “Either lemons are yellow or Santa Claus exists” is true (one or the other has to be true for this statement to be true, and we just showed that it is true that lemons are yellow, so this expanded statement is true). And since either lemons are yellow or Santa Claus exists, and since lemons are not yellow, (this was our first premise), it must be true that Santa Claus exists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_entailment#Paradox_of_entailment
I'm not really familiar with the field so maybe that example is outdated or something. In that case, can you give an example of an important, ongoing philosophical argument (e.g. related to consciousness)?
I've had rather severe Dissociative episodes with DMT, DXM and mescaline. So severe I put them into the same class as Salvia: "potentially fscking terrifying, use rarely and sparingly". But then again LSD and psylocybes got extremely boring by the time I hit my mid-20s.
Salvia isn't as strong as good acid pure mescaline used to be. It is intense, but very short lived, but less intense than proper DMT either. My first, and last, experience with high doses of DXM put salvia to shame too.
And then I got older, realized that pumping chemicals into my brain merely alters perception, and not necessarily improves it and moved on to a proper education and listening to people older and wiser than me. I'll take a well brewed Trapist, or good bourbon over hallucinogens, any day now. Not that I'm judging people who enjoy it, I just am a bit suspicious of people claiming that it enables them to see some deep ontic truth. Just like I'm a bit suspicious of anyone who claims the ascendancy of something that is invisible, unobservable, and intangible.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Well to be fair, in the last few years as they've been getting close to pulling the plug on the Tevatron, they've been cranking up the amount of energy they pump into it. They're pushing it close to its limits, presumably because it won't matter if they break it when it's going to be taken off-line anyways. Under those circumstances of applying higher energy levels than before, there are good reasons why they might be making new findings instead of just the cynical one of "the grant is running out".
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
As carbon monoxide is CO, wouldn't it make sense if it was able to somehow get hold of another O and turn into CO2?
...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide
A proud member of the Onion-in-Hand alliance
Very deep, you should send that in to the Reader's Digest. They've got a page for people like you...
I believe in solipsism, you insensitive clod!
Why am I talking to myself again?!
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
At what point should we have stopped Philosophical "wankery"?
Hmmm. Probably after that whole scientific method got going. The empirical beats the snot out of philosophical wankery.
Study into the field of ethics is usually either boring and obvious, eg "murder is bad", or or really really scary, eg "murder isn't that bad".
Wouldn't the study of high level logic just be mathematics?
And its philosophical wankery that can actually give ideas in which direction to test consciousness. Which frankly...is still a pretty big mystery.
Well that's true, but I think it's far more probable to get insight into that mystery with neuroscience, chemistry, and brain surgery. They have that whole "empirical" thing going for them.
And if you think, even for a moment, that there's some sort of mind-body dualism and studying the brain is a waste of time or is off-target, then kindly GTFO.
If this force or particle exists, it's likely to have always been there. The word new seems inappropriate.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Um, empiricism is great. But it only helps when you have a sense of what possible hypotheses there are for a given problem, what tests you should make for each hypothesis, where to look for answers when none of them pan out, etc. This is all classic scientific method of course, but in order to do it properly requires some depth of thought. The kind of thing that philosophy covers.
Happy people make bad consumers.