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New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

arstechnica.com

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Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#51

Post by tspiteri »

yiyus wrote: post #45
tspiteri wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between bad grammar/spelling and ambiguity; ambiguity is the worse issue. Some journals have fields in their review report where reviewers can say if the text is unambiguous, but no field about grammar or spelling in general.

It is not unusual (at least on some fields) seeing specific questions about grammar. It must be checked and maybe fixed, and in some extreme cases it can even imply rejection independently of content, but in most cases a revision is enough.

Oh, by field I meant it as a field in a record, not an area of study. For example in some reports I had to check a box for unambiguous text but I had no check box for grammar or spelling. That's some ambiguous text from my part! :)

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#52

Post by chrisseaton »

yiyus wrote: post #44
blondin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why should the reviewers be obligated to give you the benefit of the doubt? because that's what they are supposed to be doing? and beside, i wonder if those reviews are actually free...

You do not get paid to review papers.

Yes you do. If you’re a professional researcher than reviewing papers is part of your paid job.

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#53

Post by 7532yahoogmail »

particleguy wrote: post #17

This result isn't even peer-reviewed yet. All of this hype about the X17 particle is coming from a pre-print on the arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.10459 They claim a 7.2 sigma result, but the distribution of the null-hypothesis (called PDF(exp) in the paper) was determined from simulations of one atomic transition and "external pair creation on the target backing", and the only source of systematic error they took…

Agree. This new boson business has been declared and punted on since 2015/2016. Still I hope something new breaks lose... We could use a shot in the arm.

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#55

Post by dpark »

chrisseaton wrote: post #52
yiyus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do not get paid to review papers.

Yes you do. If you’re a professional researcher than reviewing papers is part of your paid job.

No it is not. Research institutions do not explicitly pay people to do peer reviews and it is not generally (ever?) in the job description.

It is essentially an etiquette concern. Peer review is important so generally you should do peer review if you every publish papers.

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#56

Post by [deleted] »

ephimetheus wrote: post #41
ssivark wrote: post #3

Surprisingly confident tone in the title for an experimental result that is far from confirmed! Experimental research is damn hard and it is very easy to make tiny oversights resulting in signals like this (in an absolute sense — with all respect to the Hungarian lab which has made this claim). While the possibility is exciting, public facing communication should be very careful to not jump the gun. > ”...breaks Stan…

One of the people on the paper works at cern actually.

[deleted]

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#57

Post by mrandish »

If I'm reading this correctly it seems like it's pretty interesting even if it's not validated. They either discover a new particle or they discover a new way to arrive at anomalous results.

I'm thinking back to the team that had the result that appeared as if it was faster than light communication (IIRC). Even they didn't fully buy into their result but they published because they checked it every way they could think of and couldn't explain it. As I recall, the underlying error was pretty interesting on its own and in some sense contributed something new to our understanding of "how not to be wrong".

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#58

Post by dang »

dudydidudy wrote: post #26

That seems more like not speaking English than not being a native English speaker. If you can't be bothered to pay for something until it's published why should the reviewers be obligated to give you the benefit of the doubt?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847340 and marked it off-topic.

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#59

Post by chrisseaton »

dpark wrote: post #55
chrisseaton wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you do. If you’re a professional researcher than reviewing papers is part of your paid job.

No it is not. Research institutions do not explicitly pay people to do peer reviews and it is not generally (ever?) in the job description. It is essentially an etiquette concern. Peer review is important so generally you should do peer review if you every publish papers.

> it is not generally (ever?) in the job description.

You're wrong! Just one counter-example I could find in seconds - 'participation on program committees, advisory panels, and editorial boards'. And that's not even an academic position - it's industry.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/careers/

In fact I'm literally reviewing a paper myself... right now... while being paid.

Re: New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed

#60

Post by danellis »

"Essentially, the scientists took some lithium and shot protons at it."

How does this actually work? Presumably it's a very small amount of lithium. What is it held in? How are the protons so accurately steered towards it? The accelerator ring is comparatively very wide, right?

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