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The First Particle Physics Evidence of Physics Beyond the Standard Model?
StartsWithABang writes It's the holy grail of modern particle physics: discovering the first smoking-gun, direct evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model. Sure, there are unanswered questions and unsolved puzzles, ranging from dark matter to the hierarchy problem to the strong-CP problem, but there's no experimental result clubbing us over the head that can't be explained with standard particle physics. That is, the physics of the Standard Model in the framework of quantum field theory. Or is there? Take a look at the evidence from the muon's magnetic moment, and see what might be the future of physics.
I hate it when I open a page, it just starts with a huge image, and you have to scroll down to the actual stuff.
I always figured the Standard Model was narrated by John Cleese, and the weird stuff was narrated by Ricky Gervais
I'm a bit biased, but consider finding non-zero neutrino mass (via neutrino oscillations) as the first "beyond the standard model" evidence. Slashdot carried that story in its infancy, way back in 1998.
Also worth pointing out that TFA is talking about an experiment in construction that hopes to push the g-2 result past 5 sigma. It's not there yet, although 4.something sigma is still pretty darn good. Just 14 years late to the party.
I admit not having read the clickbait (this is /. after all), but I presume that the real story behind it is that an experiment to measure the muon magnetic moment has recently moved from Brookhaven to Fermilab to get access to more energetic muons. They're hoping to start measuring data in 2.5 years.
I'm not a physicist, but I do find this kind of stuff interesting enough to know that the headline is a big deal, but now I see that firstly, its another Starts With A Bang advertisement and secondly, the headline end with a question mark, so without reading the article, the answer is going to be no, there's no evidence.. *sigh*
I am a particle physicist, and I have worked directly on this problem. The uncertainty in the hadronic contributions to the vacuum polarization and light-by-light scattering are large enough that the supposed BSM signal is not significant.
That is, you can do nice high-order paper-and-pencil calculations of Feynman diagrams when the particles involved are electrons and muons, but there are important cases where the particles contributing to this effect are composite: hadrons (which are made of quarks). Since you cannot do calculations on hadrons without considering how the hadron is composed of quarks, you can't avoid getting into strongly coupled quantum chromodynamics (QCD). See here for further discussion: Hadronic Light-by-Light.
That means you can't do your calculation on paper, you have to use a supercomputer and something called lattice QCD. Unfortunately, it's easier to crank out a thousand crappy model calculations of BSM that is supposedly showing up than to properly fund studies of the theory uncertainties. As a result, the precision of the theory values are not good enough to establish whether the muon magnetic moment is consistent with the Standard Model or not.
That said, it's still an interesting place to look, and somebody will work out all the uncertainties eventually. In a few years, there might be something to talk about seriously.
Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
You mean, like, gravity? Just do the typical: "Hey, we'll add a new, ad hoc particle!"
Why do physicists insist on treating gravity as a force? Since Einstein, we know gravity is the curvature of space-time. It may be represented as a force in calculations but in reality there is no force.
If gravity is not a force then do we really have a hierarchy problem? For eg. shouldn't Newton's constant, G, be some kind of average curvature of space-time between two bodies and be calculable from this curvature?
Obviously, if this is the case, G has nothing to do with Fermi's constant and we should not compare the two.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Honestly, I really love the Starts With a Bang blog, and have been reading it for years.
But I do have to wonder why every single post is announced on /. these days.
We already have RSS, we subscribe, we know about it. By the time /. has caught up I've already read it, usually 24 hours ago.
Is /. getting a paid for these posts? Inquiring minds want to know.
It is very hard to get excited about this stuff without some real world application.
If going beyond the standard model can help us build a hover board then please keep funding these scientist people.
I believe the hover board will be the first step to build a true (wingless) flying car which we will need to enable transport between the beer volcanoes and stripper factories.
It's the holy grail of modern pseudo-scientists: getting an angreement with a former major geek site, allowed to directly post articles. Sure, there are unanswered questions in it, ranging from dark matter to the hierarchy problem to the strong-CP problem, but still they swallow the clickbait until they find another method to squeeze the last remaining bit of income from this community. Or is there? Take a look at the evidence from user StartsWithABang, and see what might be the future of Slashdot.
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
When people use the biggest of things to see the smallest of things.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
While you're at it, let's have a look at the "inflation" madness. Our universe behaves nothing like an "explosion", being almost perfectly uniform instead. And we have that pesky idea that everything had to get into place very fast. So we invent "inflation"...and it sticks, for some reason. There is zero point zero behind the notion. But it continues to pass muster and get repeated by anyone who is anyone. Inflation makes no sense. But it keeps religion^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h the Big Bang alive.
Physics: Boldly going where no muon has gone before.
Physics: a momentous time for muons.
Physics: do muons follow Standards?
etc
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Could we flag this kind of articles with a warning, please? I'm getting tired of glossy gossip that's more suited for a write-up about soap-stars and Big Brother. Give us a hex-dump or a wall of equations to look at, not chatty nonsense trying to invoke a sense of "Woooh, mysterious!!!!"
Since Einstein, we know gravity is the curvature of space-time. It may be represented as a force in calculations but in reality there is no force.
How about I turn that around and say that Einstein showed gravity can be modelled by the curvature of space-time but in reality it is a force? The fact of the matter is that, at a fundamental level, we have no clue what gravity is. However you can represent it very well by a spin-2, mass-less particle which couples to a particle's 4-momentum (the caveat being that you cannot make this theory work without an energy cut-off at some scale for which there is no justification). Until we solve quantum gravity we simply do not know what gravity really is but, if I were to bet, I suspect the latter is closer to the truth but needs some correction for the quantum structure of space-time which is something we have no clue about.
If gravity is not a force then do we really have a hierarchy problem?
Yes, and if anything it would be worse. The current problem comes about because we cannot scale the Higgs corrections up to the Planck-scale where we know there is new physics. If we remove that scale then we have a theory which has no upper scale limit and so should generate infinitely large corrections to the Higgs mass i.e. we go from an incredibly unlikely 1 in ~10^34 chance of the corrections giving such a light Higgs to a zero percent chance of the theory giving a light Higgs, or any Higgs with a non-infinite mass.
Obviously, if this is the case, G has nothing to do with Fermi's constant and we should not compare the two.
You are getting your 'g's and 'G's confused. In the muon g-2 experiment the 'g' is the muon's anomalous magnetic dipole moment. This is a precision test of Quantum Electrodynamics. The high order corrections to this will involve Fermi's constant (G_F) due to W and Z loops but these contributions will be incredibly small and were this any other experiment I would have said negligible but perhaps not in this case given the incredibly high precision involved. Neither of these constants have anything to do with the gravitational constant (G) nor the local acceleration due to gravity (g). So we are not comparing the two.
Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell's equations explain just about everything we observe, except for a "few loose ends" like radiation and finite black-body radiation, etc.
Right up until the ad people start using your block list to fingerprint you.
I don't play semantic BINGO. Start without me.
Because everyone was looking in the Koran?