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Physicists Discover A Possible Break In the Standard Model of Physics (futurism.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the everything-you-know-is-wrong dept.

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.

6 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Just to keep it straight on my scorecard by bloodstar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  2. Re: Just to keep it straight on my scorecard by geoskd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  3. Is this really so surprising? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Is this really so surprising? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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!

  4. Re: Not worth studying this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

  5. Re: Just to keep it straight on my scorecard by Warma · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.