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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?
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?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
The evidence for the Higgs Boson didn't disappear, it was possible evidence for a heavier particle than Higgs that has been shown to be a statistical fluke.
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
So there is a Force of the Dark Side? This would make a great story..!
The fifth force is... LOVE!? Who's been screwing with this thing?
Attempting to up the hype a bit... Physical Review Letters is the well respected publication where Einstein his paper 1936 “Do gravitational waves exist?”, in which he concludes they do not, which turned out to be wrong. A couple of takeaways here: 1) Physical Review Letters is a forum for heavyweight players in the physics world; 2) that doesn't mean it's always right; 3) Einstein predicted gravity waves in 1916. Later he changed his mind and thought that he was wrong, but he was wrong about that.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
If you google "what are the forces of nature" the first result says there are 5.
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?
..it's called Cowboy Neal!
Let's just wrap it all up in a Dark Universe and call it a day.
Pony science is all this is. Basing another religion on unfounded behaviour is NOT science, it is unicorns and faeries.
It seems kind of bewildering to me that signs weren't seen of its existence decades ago. oO
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
Hard to see, the dark side is. but Once you start down the dark research path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.
It's Leeloo, duh.
I suggest we call it "The Force"
Is called Stupidity.
It's a retarding force.
Earth; Water; Fire; Wind; Void (ether)
Don't thank me, it's been known for thousands of years.
Man stupidity. But is not the fifth, is the first !
So far the evidence is limited to one experiment. There will be more of them within a year or two from different teams, then we can have more confidence. So far, there are interesting, internally consistent possible explanations from two teams for this anomaly, but they are not so easy to fit in the current model as to accept them immediately. For all we know, this may go the same way as the FTL neutrinos, etc.
That has been known for a very long time already. The force centres around this element: http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/...
New chemical Element Discovered
by William DeBuvitz
The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered by investigators at a major U.S. research university. The element, tentatively named administratium, has no protons or electrons and thus has an atomic number of 0. However, it does have one neutron, 125 assistant neutrons, 75 vice neutrons and 111 assistant vice neutrons, which gives it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by a force that involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles called morons.
Since it has no electrons, administratium is inert. However, it can be detected chemically as it impedes every reaction it comes in contact with. According to the discoverers, a minute amount of administratium causes one reaction to take over four days to complete when it would have normally occurred in less than a second.
Administratium has a normal half-life of approximately three years, at which time it does not decay, but instead undergoes a reorganization in which assistant neutrons, vice neutrons and assistant vice neutrons exchange places. Some studies have shown that the atomic mass actually increases after each reorganization.
Research at other laboratories indicates that administratium occurs naturally in the atmosphere. It tends to concentrate at certain points such as government agencies, large corporations, and universities. It can usually be found in the newest, best appointed, and best maintained buildings.
Scientists point out that administratium is known to be toxic at any level of concentration and can easily destroy any productive reaction where it is allowed to accumulate. Attempts are being made to determine how administratium can be controlled to prevent irreversible damage, but results to date are not promising.
I am just waiting for the torrent of New Age clickbait on my facebook feed saying that physics has finally found evidence of the mystical magical quantum life force energy that their super-dooper-quantum-yoga tradition has known for centuries.
John_Chalisque
. . . we're all forgetting what is perhaps the most powerful force there is:
Stupidity.
Hell, look at our candidates this year: a Habitual Liar in a bad Pantsuit, a Shaved Chimpanzee with a bad wig, and, of course, the Magic Johnson. If they aren't proof of the power and pervasiveness of stupidity, then what is ??
Science has already well established Chuck Norris as the 5th
Back in the 1980's there was a reanalysis of some old gravity measurements made by Roland von Eotvos which suggested that gravity might have a short-range, composition-dependent component, a "fifth force". This inspired a number of experiments, with some positives and some negative results. Eventually, the positive results were all explained and the fifth force went away.
Coincidentally, in regard to this recent research, one of the hard to explain positive results also came out of UC Irvine.
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 is thought to make up about 85 percent of all matter in the universe
No solicitors. I am not interested in buying any of your alleged "dark matter" today, thank you. Please put me on your Do Not Call list. Go ahead and keep all of my tax money you've already spent on this, but please, don't spend any more of it. Earmark my contributions for something else. No means no. I do not consent.
Reasons to be skeptical about these authors and their methodology: they publishing the same claim over with changes in data but no explanation for why their numbers are changing. This article explains the physics as well as the reservations about the claim: https://www.quantamagazine.org...
This blog entry by a senior scientist at Fermi Lab has interesting comments on previous experimental results from the Hungarian group the UCI theoretical work is based on:
http://www.livescience.com/552...
What about the Hungarian group? I know none of them personally, but the article was published in Physical Review Letters — a chalk mark in the win column. However, the group has also published two previous papers in which comparable anomalies were observed, including a possible particle with a mass of 12 million electron volts and a second publication claiming the discovery of a particle with a mass of about 14 million electron volts. Both of these claims were subsequently falsified by other experiments.
Further, the Hungarian group has never satisfactorily disclosed what error was made that resulted in these erroneous claims. Another possible red flag is that the group rarely publishes data that doesn't claim anomalies. That is improbable. In my own research career, most publications were confirmation of existing theories. Anomalies that persist are very, very, rare.
My teacher said gravity isn't a force, it's "just" geometry. Electromagnetic and weak is the after certain energy levels. On the other hand we used to count magnetic and electric forces as related but separate.
Red Leader Standing By!
The notion of a fifth force was seriously proposed already during the early 80s. It fizzled. I would be surprised, and disappointed, if it does not fizzle this time as well. Quite frankly, modern theoretical physics looks more and more like an epicycles science. Sure, strings are very simple - but so are the circles.
Well, Physics has been a muddle since the 1930s (QM), and the 1940s (QED), and the 1950s (QFT).
None of the models work very well, the mathematics is rather flawed ( infinities being subracted subjectively ), and there
are no 'Maxwells Equations' for any of the other forces. Hell, even gravity has morphed into cosmology.
And the Standard Model os a mish-mash.
Nuclear? nope - still competing models, none of which predict data from 70 years ago, much less today, and still having arguments about
whether protons decay...
Weak? nope. Still no resolution of Majorana paradox.
Electromagnetic - sort-of done, but still not completely satisfactory in terms of QED ( they predict one number really well.... what other numbers are waiting to be calculated?)
I read this and figured they've just been watching Stranger Things too much....
"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"
Government grants.
No, really... it's people. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094721/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Higgs Boson Truther ITT. Never thought I'd see the day.
I admit I like this idea: "It's also possible that the universe of 'normal' matter and forces has a parallel 'dark' sector, with its own matter and forces." I feel like every comic I've read and every sci-fi show I've watched is about to be come true.
Event Horizon could be our future folks!
Chuck Norris is the fifth force of nature.
The fifth force of nature tends to be mistakes computing the other forces of nature.
Remember the Ulysses navigation errors. They turned out to be acceleration from an unexpected distribution of Bolzmann radiation from the spacecraft. Took a bunch of years before they figured that one out.
I've always considered time to be a force.
By the time the guys who cautiously announced the "bump" had checked it out and reported nothing going on here, they said about 500* speculative papers had already been published on the matter. Could this be one of them?
*I'd speculate this number is misreporting and you could probably trim a zero off it.
Posting anonymously because I know some people here know about physics stuff and they might be rude to me.
(My observation is that accurate reporting of anything is generally an anomaly.)
It penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
Peter Gabriel just called from Scotland. He says it's the Fifth of Force.
Will the force be with them?
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine
But it's most likely Aliens.
What about charm, persuasion, uncertainty and bloody-mindedness?
Not much is known about the nature of the strong force. Perhaps this is some more "color" on the nature of the strong force (which is suspected to bind protons and neutrons, but in it's "color-ed" form is suspected to bind quarks together).
Extraordinary claims requite extraordinary evidence.
what the fuck is wrong with this idiot? higgs boson evidence did not vanish
We just need to add another 14 dimensions..
Ok - how about doing some real world experiments ..
Too much BS already this week...
I don't consider myself special. Our paper (I had two co-authors) was even mentioned in Science News, but nobody gave me a key to the Ivory Tower. Just another scientist, TCB, but it looks good on the resume.
Just gaze.. gaze into our wild vast summaries. Do not stare at the finger, pointing at the lawyers. Or you will miss the bullshit and all the spy glory.
The fifth force of nature is the one where people get tired of spies lying to them and just crush their fucking heads like grapes.
Semper Fi
YOUR MOM!
Wait, that's gravity. Never mind.
Cowboy Neal. :-)
sorry, couldn't resist!
Then please explain what the fuck 'protophobic' means.