Slashdot Mirror
Lepton Universality In Question, a Standard Model Assumption
Charliemopps writes: "Over the past few years, more and more experiments have started to question one of the core assumptions of the standard model: Lepton Universality. Simply put, the weak nuclear force is assumed to work equally on all Leptons (electron, muon and tau). Two years ago The Babar experimental collaboration reported that measurements indicated this may not have been the case. But the measurements were not accurate enough to be definitive.
Now, a report from The LHC shows that they have analyzed their entire dataset of proton-proton collisions and found a rather large discrepancy. These measurements are still not all that accurate. These decays happen so rarely that even with this huge data set there is still about a 1% change they are incorrect. One explanation for such measurements is an as-yet-undiscovered, charged Higgs particle. It would have to be extremely heavy: greater than 109GeV possibly even as high as 150GeV. This is predicted by some models outside of the Standard Model, like Supersymmetry."
Now, a report from The LHC shows that they have analyzed their entire dataset of proton-proton collisions and found a rather large discrepancy. These measurements are still not all that accurate. These decays happen so rarely that even with this huge data set there is still about a 1% change they are incorrect. One explanation for such measurements is an as-yet-undiscovered, charged Higgs particle. It would have to be extremely heavy: greater than 109GeV possibly even as high as 150GeV. This is predicted by some models outside of the Standard Model, like Supersymmetry."
To "fix" it, just add one or more of the following to the model:
* More turtles
* More nested epicycles
* More dimensions
* Invent dark [something] to plug it
* Say God did it
Profit!
Table-ized A.I.
Except that that LHC's ongoing failure to find any SUSY particles is making it increasingly unlikely Supersymmetry is right either:
http://scienceblogs.com/starts...
Change you can believe in!
"chance", you idiots!!!
Gosh science is so expensive. Let's shut it down so we can remain ignorant fucktards forever!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
With regards to Supersymmetry I have the feeling the LHC is going to end up being this century's version of Michelson-Morley.
However, given what happened after Michelson-Morley, we may be in for some very exciting new physics in the years to come if we can disprove Supersymmetry.
(At least I hope we are... :-))
Consider how long it took to gather enough of the right events to be reasonably certain about the Higgs, the various false alarms that vanished as more data was collected, etc. Another version just a bit rarer could easily be lost in the noise. Or the two could be similar enough that their signals aren't distinguishable from each other yet.
Wan't the confirmation just slightly different from what they expected.
The deviation might actually be traces of this unknown 2nd Higgs particle.
---- Sig. gone.
Um, what? Insane pseudoscience at its finest.
The standard model is an extremely comprehensive collection of theories that makes incredibly accurate predictions. It's a crappy computational tool. It's so computationally intractable that it requires supercomputers to simulate even simple multi-particle systems.
And that's the problem with applying pop logic to a fuzzy understanding of a vastly simplified description.
Modern quantum theory suggests not only that two examples of the same type of particle are not only completely identical except for certain features like position, but that even talking about particles as if they had individual existence doesn't really make sense.
When I grow up I'm going to Lepton University!
No wait...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
the Standard Model is completely useless for describing the forces that shape and evolve the cosmos: gravitation, dark energy, dark matter. It does not explain neutrino oscillation (neutrino mass). Doesn't give reason for the observed dominance of matter over antimatter. It has a huge number of arbitrary constants not related to each other and no way to predict or give reason for there values.
In short, it's obviously half-assed, a "cooking the books" production
Sounds like the simulation we are living in uses some de-duplication in the file system.to save space.
So, the idea that contrary leptons can be symmetric is absurd.
Not at all. Because, while your considerations are valid in a sense, you fail to take into account the fact that a 'particle' is an abstract entity - a theoretical construct that attempts to sum up a set of measurable characteristics in the data. Whenever we construct a theory, we are looking for things that are looking symmetrical and harmonic in some sense, so the elements in our theory will almost unavoidably be objects with this sort of universal properties.
Of course, being a only model means that any theory must fail at some point, when our observations become sophisticated enough, and that is probably what all true scientists are hoping for. The frustrating problem we have had for a long time is that we have observations that are not covered by our theory, but none of the predictions we have been able to produce with the help of our models turn out to be false. IOW, we know that our understanding of the universe is fundamentally flawed, but we can't see how or where. Things like the apparent problem with lepton universality may show us a way forward, so it is in fact very good news.
Two hydrogen atoms are completely unique to one another...
That statement is false. Quantum mechanics deals explicitly with "identical particles", which are particles that are literally indistinguishable from each other, but are not the same particle. This is an empirically demonstrable violation of the principle of "identity of indiscernibles", which states that if two things are indiscernible any means whatsoever, even in principle, they are the same thing. Even though we have known this principle to be false for almost a century, philosophers still take it seriously for some reason.
There is a relatively simple proof that atoms of the same kind are indiscernible. The heat capacity of solids is a measure of how much the temperature goes up as you add energy to a block of material. The temperature is just the average energy per vibrational mode of the crystal lattice. The number of vibrational modes is intimately linked to the number of distinguisable particles in the crystal. N distinguishable particles have a different number of modes than N indistinguishable particles, so crystals will have a different heat capacity depending on which situation actually obtains.
This can be seen by considering a pair of distinguishable coiins vs a pair of indistinguishable coins. If we have two coins that are distinguished by the labels A and B, we have four ways of arranging them by which face is showing (H for heads, T for tails): AH/BH, AT/BH, AH/BH, AT/BT. If they are not distinguishable we only have three states: H/H, H/T, T/T because there is no way to distinguish AT/BH from AH/BT when we remove the labels.
So by a simple macroscopic measurements like the heat capacity of crystalline solids we can prove positively and directly by experiment that atoms of the same kind are in fact indistinguishable, and that the principle of the identity of indiscernibles is false. It is not false "for quantum particles" but false, absolutely--it just happens that quantum particles are the only case we know of where different particles are genuinely indiscernible from each other. But there is no limited domain of application to this result, and philosopher's attempts to treat it as somehow restrictive to the quantum domain are simply misguided (it turns out that the identity of indiscernibles being false makes nonsense of a bunch of other things philosophers want badly to believe, not least of which is how utterly useless the human imagination is in deciding what is and is not true of the world.)
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
That's not a very good way to describe it. It's like blaming Boyle's Law for not predicting nuclear fusion. The Standard Model is anything but half-assed. It made a lot of predictions, including previously unseen quarks, mesons, and the Higgs Boson.
Nobody was trying to say that it was the final theory. They know it doesn't incorporate gravity; that's why there's string theory and alternatives (and the challenge of putting together an experiment with sufficient energy to show the discrepancies between general relativity and the Standard Model). They know it doesn't explain all of its own parameters; that's why they're looking for supersymmetry (or alternatives) and the presence of unpredicted particles to narrow it down.
It's all just physics. That's how science works. It's a process. It seems weak to run down the process for not being finished, when it's clear that the process does make progress (and when it comes to these questions, it's the only thing that makes progress).