Honestly feel sorry for particle physicists... Their entire gig is spending billions on fancy equipment, and hoping that observe something unexpected. If they see exactly what they expected to see, all that effort was basically wasted. Also, a lot of "discoveries" turn out to be equipment miscalibration - remember those particles which supposedly moved faster than light a few years back? Always struck me as an odd way to do science.
Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted
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Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted
#42What is everyones favorite book on quantum mechanics (I would love understand more of the 3 generations of matter)?
This one is just what you need:
Sudbery, A. (1986): Quantum Mechanics and the Particles of Nature: An Outline for Mathematicians.
Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure they can fit any experimental result that way, they can probably fit any 19 experimental results that way, but in general if you would freely adjust a constant to fit one experiment then it would stop fitting other experiments.
Do we need TDD for particle physics so CI could run tests on what experiments break when merging a theory
Are you volunteering to write the YAML for it? =)
Should be pretty much trivial! Exercise left to the reader.
Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted
#44The Quanta write up is a bit more neutral on this announcement. There is a computational result that was not included in the theoretical value used to bench the test against. Once reviewed, this difference may yet go back to oblivion. https://www.quantamagazine.org/muon-g-2-experiment-at-fermil...
In the Scientific American article also currently linked on the front page a scientist & professor* at an Italian university is quoted as saying something along the lines of “this is probably an error in the theoretical calculation”. Would this be what the professor was referring to?
Edit: I’m not entirely sure whether they’re a professor, but here’s the exact quote
> “My feeling is that there’s nothing new under the sun,” says Tommaso Dorigo, an experimental physicist at the University of Padua in Italy, who was also not involved with the new study. “I think that this is still more likely to be a theoretical miscalculation.... But it is certainly the most important thing that we have to look into presently.”
Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted
#45Honestly feel sorry for particle physicists... Their entire gig is spending billions on fancy equipment, and hoping that observe something unexpected. If they see exactly what they expected to see, all that effort was basically wasted. Also, a lot of "discoveries" turn out to be equipment miscalibration - remember those particles which supposedly moved faster than light a few years back? Always struck me as an odd wa…
From a physicists standpoint, not seeing something unexpected is not a waste at all.
Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted
#46The Quanta write up is a bit more neutral on this announcement. There is a computational result that was not included in the theoretical value used to bench the test against. Once reviewed, this difference may yet go back to oblivion. https://www.quantamagazine.org/muon-g-2-experiment-at-fermil...
To clarify, for those not familiar with this topic, this experiment is making measurements at such exquisite precision that even the calculations for the theoretical prediction are extremely non-trivial and require careful estimation of many many pieces which are then combined. Which is to say that debugging the theoretical prediction is (almost) as hard as debugging the experiment. So I would expect the particle phy…
it's not good to cherry-pick paragraphs from the whole artile.
> But as the Brookhaven team accrued 10 times more data, their measurement of the muon’s g-factor stayed the same while the error bars around the measurement shrank. The discrepancy with theory grew back to three sigma by the time of the experiment’s final report in 2006.
Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted
#47Honestly feel sorry for particle physicists... Their entire gig is spending billions on fancy equipment, and hoping that observe something unexpected. If they see exactly what they expected to see, all that effort was basically wasted. Also, a lot of "discoveries" turn out to be equipment miscalibration - remember those particles which supposedly moved faster than light a few years back? Always struck me as an odd wa…
From a physicists standpoint, not seeing something unexpected is not a waste at all.
Can you expand on that? I was under the impression that many thought of it as a waste (Sabine Hossenfelder comes to mind, for example).
Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted
#48Honestly feel sorry for particle physicists... Their entire gig is spending billions on fancy equipment, and hoping that observe something unexpected. If they see exactly what they expected to see, all that effort was basically wasted. Also, a lot of "discoveries" turn out to be equipment miscalibration - remember those particles which supposedly moved faster than light a few years back? Always struck me as an odd wa…
> If they see exactly what they expected to see
Why? Validating a hypothesis is quite valuable.
Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a physicists standpoint, not seeing something unexpected is not a waste at all.
Can you expand on that? I was under the impression that many thought of it as a waste (Sabine Hossenfelder comes to mind, for example).
I assume it helps trim off the branches of research that become unviable with the new evidence.
Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted
#50Physics noob question: is there any physical framework that does away with the concept of "force"? I know a bit about how it is reconceptualized as space-time deformation in the context of general relativity, but that's about it. It just seems like one of those inherently anthropocentric concepts that (potentially) holds us back from exploring something different?
Somewhat tangential, but Newton has been made fun of because he suggested the apparently "magical" idea that forces could act at a distance...