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Physicists Discover A Possible Break In the Standard Model of Physics (futurism.com)
Slashdot reader freddienumber13 write:
A series of experiments has shown that tau particles have decayed faster than predicted by the standard model. This has been observed at both CERN and SLAC. This suggests that the standard model for particle physics is incomplete and further research is required to understand this new area of physics.
Nature adds: One of the key assumptions of the standard model of particle physics is that the interactions of the charged leptons, namely electrons, muons and taus, differ only because of their different masses... recent studies of B-meson decays involving the higher-mass tau lepton have resulted in observations that challenge lepton universality at the level of four standard deviations. A confirmation of these results would point to new particles or interactions, and could have profound implications for our understanding of particle physics.
Nature adds: One of the key assumptions of the standard model of particle physics is that the interactions of the charged leptons, namely electrons, muons and taus, differ only because of their different masses... recent studies of B-meson decays involving the higher-mass tau lepton have resulted in observations that challenge lepton universality at the level of four standard deviations. A confirmation of these results would point to new particles or interactions, and could have profound implications for our understanding of particle physics.
Physics: 4 sigma error, question the model
Climate: 4 sigma error, jail those who dare to disagree
Not quite.
Everything: 4 sigma error, question the model
Everything: shame those who think a 6 sigma error is the truth
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Not to mention any black holes created will be traveling several orders of magnitude greater than escape velocity so even if Hawking radiation doesn't exist or they didn't have an incredibly small gravitional capture cross section to be with things would be as far as the moon in about a half sec.
We don't merely think the SM is incomplete, we know for a fact that it is, because it doesn't describe gravity. Just as we know for a fact that GR is incomplete, because it's not a quantum theory at all.
There's other breaks in the Standard Model which appear to occur at energy levels we might conceivably actually be able to reach (Like this tau decay anomaly, and time-reversal invariance breaking in... D or B meson), and the long known problem of unitarity violation in the electroweak force above about 2TeV (Above this energy, known electroweak interactions have a probability exceeding 1, so something we don't know about has to be "fixing" this). And the classic hierarchy problem: The correction terms we know should give the Top an enormous mass if the coefficient on those term is near to 1, so something must be cancelling these (if one doesn't believe that the coefficient on the corrections is absurdly, vanishingly small).
There is also the grand unified theory scale around 1e19 GeV, where the strong and electroweak forces will merge into one and nobody knows how that'll work, but the energy level is so high it will never be examined directly.
So it's not surprising. It's cool!
We're not dinosaurs.
Seriously, NO. Radioisotope dating relies on known measured values of isotope half life, models of "how" are completely irrelevant to their accuracy. Not that unexpected Tau particle decay rates would have anything to do with nuclei decay anyway. Tau particles are unstable exotic heavy electrons basically, they play no role in nuclei decay mechanisms.
Extinction is a decent possibility, really... We've barely survived genetic bottlenecks before. But you're right for the most part- Humanity is likely to survive, though at a drastically reduced level of civilization.
Science wrongly condemns other paths to knowledge about nature, and in so doing reveals its fundamentally human nature.
These "other paths to knowledge" have not given you fridges, penicillin, transistors, radios, space travel, gps, mobile phones, computers, DNS sequencing, planes, solar panels, cd players, the Internet, magnetic resonance imaging, satellites,airbags, quartz clocks, and all those other things stupid uneducated idiots like you take for granted in their daily life.
That page does a nice job of explaining in simple terms why we don't have perfect models, but it does not make any claims about the amount of error in any given model. It does not support the argument that you're trying to make.