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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 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.
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.
> Why do physicists insist on treating gravity as a force?
Because everything else works that way.
> Since Einstein, we know gravity is the curvature of space-time
No, since Einstein we know that Einstein's model is that gravity is the curvature of space-time.
Before Einstein, we thought it was a force between objects, or objects and a space-filling field.
There's no reason to suggest one model is inherently "more correct" than the other. Personally, I *like* the geometric model more, which almost certainly means it's wrong.
I certainly hate this post.
Headline ending with a question mark? Check.
Big image that insists on occupying the whole screen! Check.
Self-promoting claim of being the first, when there was evidence of something not being quite right with the Standard Model as early as the 90s? (I'm no physicist, but I read it on Slashdot)
And finally, there is no new data. They are setting up an experiment, which will not bear fruit for years.
No good deed goes unpunished...
Gravity is not outside the 'standard model'. The 'standard model' is mostly how we interpret the world with quantization and speed of light limit. The speed of light limit says that we can't observe ANYTHING---we can only measure fields. And quantization says that those fields are granularized into quanta (since if they weren't, energy could go infinite). That's pretty much all for the standard model.
From there, we can make precise measurements of field properties and see how those properties evolve (kind of like the game-of-life!). Persistent structures in that game-of-life we call ``particles'', the not-so-persistent structures (game of life often creates a LOT of completely random shapes), we call unstable particles, etc. And yes, some physicists went overboard with calling such noise `particles'---leading to hundreds of pointless classifications.
Gravity fits right in there... Except until recently, we were clueless as to how the gravity field functions (e.g. is it a ``particle'', or something more obscure...).
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
Exactly the same, it's just the file is C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
No colour or religion ever stopped the bullet from a gun
Gravity can be formulated as a gauge theory, like the other forces in Standard Model. It's just a different mathematical representation of General Relativity, and it also captures the gravity-as-curvature idea quite neatly. You don't see it that often because the math gets a little tricky, unless you use something like Geometric Algebra, which made it easy enough for Master's courses.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
But explosions are not uniform. If anything, they are chunky. They are not instantionus. The wavefront takes time to initiate, form and travel. Therefore not uniform.
It is confusing isn't it? Again and again someone demonstrates gravity with a sheet and a ball, and again and again there is someone looking for or talking about the 'graviton'.
Another one: The presenter starts off with an illustration of space and time being -the same thing: "space-time". But then goes on to explain space only, or time only, or both but each in their own silo.
My approach to understanding this has been to watch every documentary I can, distill the common, repeated 'truths' and extrapolate a mental image from that. I think space and time are -literally- the same thing (the perpetual expansion of space -is- the passage of time), gravity is -not- a force, there was no big bang, nor was there inflation.
Ok, the last bit is somewhat radical so I'll explain a bit. The universe (space) is always expanding, slower when there is nearby matter with mass, faster when there is not. When galaxies are so far away from each other space expands so rapidly there is a "breach", covering a huge astronomical area, in which energy/matter rushes in uniformly, slowing down the expansion.
I have no math skills and might be completely wrong, but it feels right and I'll probably hold on to this mental model until/unless there is some clear irrefutable proof otherwise. Really, I don't see that happening because (lol) no one is every going to investigate the scenario I just described.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
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.
loopback is slow. you want to have it resolve to 0.0.0.0. I'm sure APK will come along and educate you soon lol
The Win hosts file path +4 informative? This is informative! :) Block ads and other nasty stuff via hosts file on Win/Mac/Linux.