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CERN Confirms Hints of Hypothetical Particle Have Disappeared (arstechnica.com)
John Timmer, writing for Ars Technica: Toward the end of last year, the people behind the Large Hadron Collider announced that they might have found signs of a new particle. Their evidence came from an analysis of the first high-energy data obtained after the LHC's two general-purpose detectors underwent an extensive upgrade. While the possible new particle didn't produce a signal that reached statistical significance, it did show up in both detectors, raising the hope that the LHC was finally on to some new physics. This week, those hopes have officially been dashed. Physicists used a conference to release their analysis of the flood of data that came out of this year's run. According to their data, the area of the apparent signal is filled by nothing but statistical noise. The search for new particles in data from the LHC starts with a calculation of the sorts of things we should expect to see at a given energy. The Standard Model, which describes particles and forces, can be used to make predictions of the frequency at which specific particles will pop out of collisions, as well as what those particles will decay into. So, for example, the Standard Model might indicate that two electrons should appear in five percent of the collisions that occur at a specific energy. Looking for new particles involves looking for deviations from those predictions.
You're right. And conveniently nobody has ever seen your brain before, so that can only mean one thing.
I'm not trolling - my question is sincere. If CERN never discovers new particles, does it still add value scientifically? For example, pinning down what we do know with greater precision? Or is the only value in discovering something entirely new?
Better known as 318230.
No, but seriously. Dark matter, dark energy (with the "dark" meaning that we somehow know it has to be there but we simply cannot find a way to detect it)... it could well mean that we're simply looking in the wrong direction.
I mean, think of Vulcan. The planet. No, not Star Trek. The hypothetical planet that we thought has to be inside the orbit of Mercury because something influenced Mercury's orbit. Something had to be there that caused Mercury to not orbit the sun the way it should. Today we know that relativity caused the error, but a hundred years ago, we didn't know this and the only logical thing we could think of was of course what we observed in the past: Errors in the orbits of planets led before to the discovery of other planets that influenced it, that way we found Neptune (and afaik Uranus was also found mostly because we noticed that Saturn isn't quite moving as it "should"). So the logical conclusion was that of course there had to be another planet inside the orbit of Mercury and the only reason we couldn't see it is of course that the sun is too close that we could detect it.
Turned out that we were wrong.
And, well, we've been looking really hard for that dark matter/energy now and ... well, nothing. Not even a hint that there might and could be something. Maybe we should at least start looking in other directions?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Considering what money is wasted on pointless things like the iraq war ($1.1 trillion), this is just peanuts (the LHC had a budget of $9bn). Or take the rio olympics, with a budget of $9.7 billion.
What scientific fields do deserve funding more than physics in your eyes?
Prior to the Mercury controversy, Uranus was found to be moving in ways not described by Newton's theory of gravity. Again, there are two solutions: our description of gravity is wrong, or there is an unseen ("dark") mass pulling on Uranus. In this case, it was dark matter, namely the undiscovered Neptune.
Both modified gravity and dark matter have been solutions to past conflicts between theory and measurement. There's no need to assume there's some conspiracy suppressing this or that idea.
Also, sometimes it takes a long time between a theoretical proposal to explain a mystery and direct detection. The neutrino was hypothesized in 1930 in order to conserve energy and momentum in beta nuclear decays. It wasn't directly detected until 12 years later in 1942. It took 49 years between the first papers proposing the existence of the Higgs boson and its discovery at the LHC. All we can do is search everywhere and be patient.
How can any dashslot reader still post retarded nonsense like this?
I tried not to respond to recent "duh dark matter obviously isn't a thing" posts, but Christmas Jesus humping a granite yarmulke, this idiocy has to stop.
Meta moderators take note, this ignorance will be troll or overrated. And this is why: Fundamental misunderstanding, or intentional ignorance deserves no consideration. Argue about what it is, what it means.. but don't argue that it doesn't exist, unless you have a NObel quality replacement. Until then, do your arguing in peer reviewed journals.
Well just think about it: Gravity alone doesn't explain why galaxies, stars, and planets form. Gravity is a very weak force, and it's just too weak of a force for that to happen. A nebula would just forever remain a nebula if all it had was gravity. There's more going on here, we're just not sure what.
The religious take on it is a straight up answer of "Because god did it." The scientific take on it is "If we take existing mathematical models of physics, it looks like the missing variable could be explained by a form of matter different from the normal matter that we can observe. We don't know what it is though so we'll just call it dark matter."
Right now, CERN is the only working elevator in a nearly half-century old building that was built on shaky ground by architects who freely acknowledge the many failures of their design. Some of the current tenants think building a skywalk to connect the building to the even older, more dilapidated building next door will somehow fix both failing structures. Unfortunately for CERN, many tenants in the building are not reupping their lease at this point, and are looking for new digs elsewhere, though many acknowledge how much fun the elevator was. At some point the remaining tenants are going to realize that no matter how many stops this elevator makes, it will never leave the building, and it will never reveal anything other than empty corridors and closed doors.