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Physicists finally nail the proton’s size, eliminating an anomaly

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Physicists finally nail the proton’s size, eliminating an anomaly

#11

Post by conistonwater »

> If the discrepancy was real, meaning protons really shrink in the presence of muons, this would imply unknown physical interactions between protons and muons — a fundamental discovery. Hundreds of papers speculating about the possibility have been written in the near-decade since.

This reminds me of a joke. An experimental physicist walks into a theoretical physicist's office with a really cool experimental result, shows the printed out graph to the theoretician. He thinks for a while and says, "this is perfectly in line with theory, let me explain how". The experimentalist looks at the graph, scratches his head, says "uh, this is upside down", and rotates the paper 180 degrees. The theoretician thinks a while more and says, "well this can also be explained".

Re: Physicists finally nail the proton’s size, eliminating an anomaly

#12

Post by willis936 »

certifiedloud wrote: post #9
mfoy_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's hard to say, because we don't know what we don't know. The famous example is Newtonian physics which seemed to perfectly explain everything.... until new tools and methods came out that were capable of showing it break down under extreme circumstances. That's how we ended up with Einsteinian physics, where it accounted for the old model and the new observed discrepancies. So... how do we know that we wil…

Einstein's theory hasn't yet been reconciled with quantum theory. That's a good place to watch for progress.

I wonder if there is a Future Circular Collider that could help expand the standard model into this regime.

Re: Physicists finally nail the proton’s size, eliminating an anomaly

#13

Post by sousavdouglas »

willis936 wrote: post #12
certifiedloud wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Einstein's theory hasn't yet been reconciled with quantum theory. That's a good place to watch for progress.

I wonder if there is a Future Circular Collider that could help expand the standard model into this regime.

No

Re: Physicists finally nail the proton’s size, eliminating an anomaly

#14

Post by analog31 »

Bostonian wrote: post #4

I think in some areas of physics, such as high-energy physics, there is not much left to discover. The Standard Model works. What branches of physics are likely to see progress?

There's still physics in every successive new digit of the physical constants. The gravitational constant is only known to roughly 5 digits. Get to work!

Re: Physicists finally nail the proton’s size, eliminating an anomaly

#15

Post by adrianN »

Bostonian wrote: post #4

I think in some areas of physics, such as high-energy physics, there is not much left to discover. The Standard Model works. What branches of physics are likely to see progress?

It would be neat if we had a better model for superconduction.

Re: Physicists finally nail the proton’s size, eliminating an anomaly

#17

Post by pletnes »

Bostonian wrote: post #4

I think in some areas of physics, such as high-energy physics, there is not much left to discover. The Standard Model works. What branches of physics are likely to see progress?

Complex systems and emergent behavior in these.

Re: Physicists finally nail the proton’s size, eliminating an anomaly

#18

Post by RandomTisk »

vectorEQ wrote: post #3

so, a failure in measurement sparked a mystery which went on for decades. i wonder how often that happens in science ;P

Worse are the "best explanations" that get adopted as if they were real observations with militant fervor, something we're seeing with Dark Matter and Energy today. It's gotta be difficult to make progress sometimes when most of your field insists that their best theory must be the correct one.

Re: Physicists finally nail the proton’s size, eliminating an anomaly

#19

Post by Symmetry »

certifiedloud wrote: post #9
mfoy_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's hard to say, because we don't know what we don't know. The famous example is Newtonian physics which seemed to perfectly explain everything.... until new tools and methods came out that were capable of showing it break down under extreme circumstances. That's how we ended up with Einsteinian physics, where it accounted for the old model and the new observed discrepancies. So... how do we know that we wil…

Einstein's theory hasn't yet been reconciled with quantum theory. That's a good place to watch for progress.

That may require waiting to become a Kardashev III[1] civilization so we can do experiments where we know General Relativity and the Standard Model give different results. The energies required for the disagreements to show up are really insane.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale

Re: Physicists finally nail the proton’s size, eliminating an anomaly

#20

Post by Sharlin »

certifiedloud wrote: post #9
mfoy_ wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it's hard to say, because we don't know what we don't know. The famous example is Newtonian physics which seemed to perfectly explain everything.... until new tools and methods came out that were capable of showing it break down under extreme circumstances. That's how we ended up with Einsteinian physics, where it accounted for the old model and the new observed discrepancies. So... how do we know that we wil…

Einstein's theory hasn't yet been reconciled with quantum theory. That's a good place to watch for progress.

Not really sure about that. Physicists are getting really frustrated by the fact that the LHC has found exactly the missing piece that the SM predicted (the Higgs) and zero evidence of any physics beyond that, anything that would get us closer to quantum gravity. No strings, no supersymmetry, not even any hints as to the nature of dark matter. All it has done is give new lower bounds to the energy scales at which something interesting might start to happen. For all we know, we might need a solar system size collider to attain the required energies.
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