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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.
You will be modded to -1, as you should be, because you did not provide evidence for your claims.
Climate change is pseudoscienceâ, because their predictions have been wrong repeatedly
A beautiful fallacy! Medical science is pseudoscience, too, because physicians are often wrong?
Ezekiel 23:20
I am curious where climate models are showing a four sigma error. It must be nice to make a claim without backing it up with some hard data. I'm open to the idea that models can be in error, but without showing where the errors are so dramatic, it's hard to credit you with anything insightful. Models aren't perfect, and we have an imperfect understanding of the interactions and feedbacks in the earth system. That doesn't make the underlying science invalid. At worst, it is incomplete and we need more study. Instead, people are too busy sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting, 'fake science' you can do better than that. Right?
"The bass, the rock, the mic, the treble. I like my coffee black, just like my metal" - Mindless Self Indulgence
A beautiful fallacy! Medical science is pseudoscience, too, because physicians are often wrong?
No, it is pseudoscience because it lacks proper repeatability and has only the barest elements of falsifiability.
In case there is any question, I am in fact referring to both Medical "sciences" and Climate "science".
That having been said, I would still think that it would be the best course of action to err on the side of caution and assume the "scientists" are correct given the extreme ramifications if they are... The venn diagram is pretty convincing:
option 1: They are wrong and we do nothing: No harm no foul.
option 2: They are wrong and we do everything in our power to stop something that wasnt going to happen anyways: Some short term economic losses, maybe.
option 3: They are right and we do everything in our power to stop it: We saved the planet.
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
Only one of those options is really bad. the rest are not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. Anybody that isn't a gambling junky knows where to put their bet on that one.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
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.
Those nano scale black holes decay faster than you can get scared of them. Same goes for the huge black holes in the universe. They decay due to hawking radiation. It just takes them longer than the micro black holes you cited. A lot longer...
Is this really so surprising? I know quite a few physicists (and some armchair physicists) who have long believed the standard model to be incomplete. The measurement problem will always have us making theories that are very, very hard to prove correct.
Additionally (granted, non-scientifically) the standard model 'feels' wrong. The model may explain the behaviors that we see but it seems overly complex for nature. Much like relativity there may be more than meets the eye going on here.
It has seemed like we were in a bit of a stagnation lately and I'm glad there are some new experimental results making us look at the standard model critically. It's not only good science it's exciting science.
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
And that's bad in the greater scheme of things because .....? Extinction may very well be a natural step along the evolutionary path to an eventual superior species. We need to be removed from the ecosystem to make room.
Imagine if cyanobacteria were sentient and they got together several billion years ago. "Guys, we are producing far too much oxygen pollution. At some point, we will irreversibly alter the ecosystem of this planet. And if we don't go completely extinct, we will drive ourselves into a tiny corner of the environment." Today, this planet would still be populated by pond scum.
Have gnu, will travel.
The straw man parade continues.
Like physicists, climatologists demand solid evidence. If you want to disagree with theirs, present yours.
This. It's easy to criticize science. It's a lot harder to do your own.
(Disclosure: IAAP)
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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
I agree with where you're going, but in all fairness, the sigma-level that matters depends on the field.
Not all fields can gather very large amounts of data the way particle physics can. For example, psychological and drug-trial studies must live with small sample sizes for moral and practical reasons. Even astronomy sometimes has to cope with large error-bars in results, yet the conclusions they draw can be significant. I think climate science lies somewhere in the middle in this regard.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
We're not dinosaurs.
This is insanely wrong. Censorship is not only censorship if a government does it. Otherwise, the Chilling Effect and self-censorship can't possibly exist.
- The ESRB isn't a government entity. It's a trade group.
- When Nintendo refused to allow any games with blood or religious symbols, which government were they working for?
- When someone refuses to criticize Islam because of fear of professional backlash, as well as death threats, what "government" censored that person?
would be as far as the moon in about a half sec.
Why is the summary talking about particle decay when the real news is that they have produced faster than light travel?
Burning books isn't censorship unless the government is doing it. You're welcome to have a bonfire anytime. As JK Rowling would say, by the time you're burning books, the author already got your money.
Not long ago, JK suggested to one angry critic that she he should also burn her DVDs - and generously inhale the fumes
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
option 4: They are right and we do nothing: Extinction.
And that's bad in the greater scheme of things because
Only philosophers and college students care about whether humanity is holding back some other superior species. The rest of us just want to go on living. If you think humanity is meant to shuffle off this mudball post haste, you know what to do.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Or we could just stop using fossil fuels which cause us harm directly with their emissions. Society pays heavily for their use by the pollution produced when they are burnt. We would save on hospital costs, people would have better lives without or improved asthma and other lung diseases, it would be easier to breath in cities, we wouldn't have to clean up after any further pollution damage. There is a lot of environmental damage using fossil fuels from the extraction, transportation, and burning. The taxpayer has ended up with bill for much more than we were supposed to. In Western Canada there are thousands of old wells that need to be retired that taxpayers got stuck for. What happens when coal ash gets free of its containment and into rivers?
None of this has anything to do with climate change but if we stopped burning fossil fuels because of climate change we would stop having this problems (or at least they would stop being added to). But if it helps you can think of it as we solve all of those problems and get climate change thrown in for free.
We shouldn't accept things as true simply because gathering accurate data is hard. Quite the opposite.
Of course not. But that's not what I was talking about. We may have varying degrees of certainty about something based on the data we have. That doesn't change the utility and importance of trying to infer something from what data we do have.
Particle physics, however, by it's very nature is very statistical these days. You don't observe anything directly, you observe things 3-4 steps removed from the interesting event, with a statistical model of what the decay products can be at each step. There's nothing but statistical inference typing actual measurements back to theory. Given that level of indirection, caution is called for.
Let me share a story I heard once about indirect evidence.
Do you know for certain that electrons exist? How? Have you ever seen one? All of the evidence for their existence is indirect.
Compare this with...
Do you know for certain that the Pope exists? How? Have you ever met him? All of the evidence for his existence is indirect.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
If I understood this correctly they're so tiny one of these micro black holes could plow through a proton and manage to miss the quarks inside.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Is this really so surprising? I know quite a few physicists (and some armchair physicists) who have long believed the standard model to be incomplete.
We know for certain that the Standard Model is incomplete because it cannot explain gravity. It it also missing Dark Matter and a large enough asymmetry between matter and anti-matter to explain the universe being full of matter. However, none of these explains why this result is not surprising.
The reason that this result is not surprising is because of the number of Standard Model measurements which experiments like LHCb, Babar and Belle make. There are literally thousands of ways in which these experiments have tested the Standard Model and when you make 1000 measurements finding one that over 3 sigma from expectations is not at all unsurprising - in fact you would expect 3.
Now 4 sigma is better because only about 1 in 15,000 measurements will, on average, be this far apart if the Standard Model applies. However, here they have combined multiple experiments but without the respective collaborations being involved. This means it is highly possible that they have failed to combined systematic errors correctly because they are restricted to using only published data. Most combined results come from working groups involving all the collaborations involved e.g. ATLAS+CMS combined results at the LHC, D0+CDF combined results from the Tevatron etc. which can redo parts of the analysis to combine errors properly.
So while it is possible they may be on to something it is far from certain and this is hardly a major result that will elicit much excitement. This is probably why it was published in Nature! While I know this is an important journal for many fields, for particle physics it is largely irrelevant. All the important results in the field are published in journals like Phys Lett B, PRL, Phys Rev D, JHEP etc.
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.
This is exactly the kind of pseudoscientific blabber that we could do without. Evolution has no goal and it has zero incentive to produce a "superior" species.
It doesn't matter what you think about the purpose of our existence on this planet and the "evolutionary path", because at least my aim is to survive. Giving up and killing myself through climate change certainly doesn't help with that. You also have to remember that it took about half a billion years for land-dwelling life to produce a sentient species, and that the Sun will, in around 600 million years, be too hot to support the carbonate-silicate cycle that fuels the C3 form of photosynthesis. It might or might not be possible to produce another sentient species in that time, if there is enough resources left after us for the planet to recover.
It is also important to realize that many of the factors that contributed to the rise of culture were caused by easy and abundant availability of resources (fossil fuels, unexhausted sources of rare earths) that will be permanently gone after we have drawn our last breath. Therefore, I would claim that it is not at all outlandish to claim that we are the absolutely only chance for this planet to successfully produce a species that could reach out to the stars. Based on presently available information, ours might also be the only world in this galaxy, which has even produced a candidate for that (considering that were it possible to construct a interplanetary culture and somebody would have reached the prerequisites, we'd likely see massive amounts of evidence for it).
All in all, the stakes are much higher than you claim. Of course you can just be an edgelord and claim that none of this matters, but it does matter, greatly, to anyone else who has the capacity to feel sympathy for their fellow humans and those who are yet unborn. In other words, grow up and start working on surviving instead of being such a nihilist little shit.
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.