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There May Be A Fifth Force of Nature, Study Suggests (space.com)
According to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, physicists at the University of California, Irvine, may have discovered a previously unknown subatomic particle that's evidence of a fifth fundamental force of nature. Space.com reports: "[Professor of physics and astronomy Jonathan Feng] and his colleagues analyzed data gathered recently by experimental nuclear physicists at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, who were trying to find 'dark photons' -- hypothetical indicators of mysterious dark matter. Dark matter is thought to make up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe, but it neither absorbs nor emits light, so it's impossible to detect directly. 'The experimentalists weren't able to claim that it was a new force,' Feng said. 'They simply saw an excess of events that indicated a new particle, but it was not clear to them whether it was a matter particle or a force-carrying particle.' The new work by Feng and his team suggests that the Hungarians found not a 'dark photon' but rather a 'protophobic X boson' -- a strange particle whose existence could indicate a fifth force of nature. The known electromagnetic force acts on protons and electrons, but this newfound particle apparently interacts only with protons and neutrons, and then only at very short distances, researchers said. The potential fifth force may be linked to the electromagnetic and strong and weak nuclear forces, as 'manifestations of one grander, more fundamental force,' Feng said. It's also possible that the universe of 'normal' matter and forces has a parallel 'dark' sector, with its own matter and forces, Feng added. 'It's possible that these two sectors talk to each other and interact with one another through somewhat veiled but fundamental interactions,' Feng said. 'This dark-sector force may manifest itself as this protophobic force we're seeing as a result of the Hungarian experiment. In a broader sense, it fits in with our original research to understand the nature of dark matter.'"
Locke2005 writes: I've always speculated that there might be forces of nature that we never observed because they were on a much larger or smaller scale than we could detect easily. But now Jonathan Feng, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, is suggesting there may actually be a fifth force. Of course, this might vanish just like the Higgs Boson evidence did. Can anybody explain better what it was they detected, and why it is being interpreted as evidence of a previously unknown force?
Locke2005 writes: I've always speculated that there might be forces of nature that we never observed because they were on a much larger or smaller scale than we could detect easily. But now Jonathan Feng, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, is suggesting there may actually be a fifth force. Of course, this might vanish just like the Higgs Boson evidence did. Can anybody explain better what it was they detected, and why it is being interpreted as evidence of a previously unknown force?
Perhaps you're thinking of the 750 GeV "bump" that turned out to be a statistical deviation?
The summary and the PHYS.org article link to Arxiv, not a peer-reviewed Phys Rev Letters article. The Arvix article is also way too long to be published in PRL. So what gives? Where is the peer-reviewed article?
Attempting to up the hype a bit
Please don't. The paper contains a wildly speculative idea which, while technically possible, is based on a single, unconfirmed experimental result. Hundreds of these are published every year even in PRL and the overwhelming majority do not pan out. This is just the very early stage in the scientific brain storming process looking for new ideas which might be right and at this stage almost none of them are. The time to start getting interested is when another experiment appears to have data confirming one of the predictions of this new theory - and even then it does not always work out!
Dark Matter could contain anything... but conveniently the secular Left has determined what kinds of things it definitely doesn't contain.
That helps with the physics... right?
All bow before the Gap God!
Further, we know what the "fifth force" is: we call it Dark Energy.
Once upon a time Feynman gave a lecture explaining how we knew there wasn't a fifth force, because a very precise experiment had been done to measure the attraction between two objects, and it was exactly what we expected from gravity. No mystery left to explain.
Well, two ways that can be wrong, and it looks like he might have been wrong in both ways: a force which was simply to weak to measure by any earthbound experiment, or a force which simply doesn't affects the objects measured (wooden spheres IIRC). The former is dark energy - it's so weak at human scale, or even at the scale of our galaxy, that you'd never see it. As for the latter: we still don't really know how dark matter works, and maybe it has its own forces (some oddball ones have been proposed).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.