Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted • Hacker News Board

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#281

Post by mikelevins » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 12:00 PM UTC

astrange wrote: post #225

gct wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to read the Cartoon Guide to... books as a kid: https://www.amazon.com/Cartoon-Guide-Physics/dp/0062731009 . They were great.

Cartoon History of the Universe is probably the best "nonfiction" comic ever made. (it's not inaccurate but it's kind of psychedelic and retells more than one religious founding text as if it actually happened)

I’m a huge fan of the Cartoon History, but I think I’d have to give the prize to Maus for best nonfiction comics. Second runner up would probably be Understanding Comics.

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#282

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 12:49 PM UTC

shrimpx wrote: post #223

lolthishuman wrote: post #215

It’s simple. The universe is electromagnetic. The Bose-Einstein condensate is the aether in most dense form. Everything evaporates into lower densities by means of rotation via the torus and vortices. Everything is pressure finding equilibrium spread throughout densities in fluid. Easy to reason about. The sun is hollow and incompressible aether inside, which is why it’s cold. The surface is electromagnetic activated…

Is there legitimate support for this hollow sun theory, or is this a fringe theory like flat earth and so on?

The EM universe hypothesis is not much better than the flat Earth one. Similar levels of agreement with observed behavior.

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#283

Post by SyzygistSix » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 1:07 PM UTC

jhoutromundo wrote: post #198

nyc640 wrote: post #38

There was a nice explanation of the finding in comic format from APS & PhD Comics: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v14/47

Let me say that this is the best thing that I ever saw in science: people using art to explain extremely complex findings that might change the future in a bit. I laughed a bit on 'I don't know you anymore'. When I was younger, I remember to read cyberpunk comics quite a lot. They explain a vision of the future that is improbable, but in many ways it get stuff right. Imagine aligning this with real word science. Imag…

Economix, a comic book explanation of basic economics, is the only book on economics I have ever read.

It seemed biased but still covered the basics well, I thought, not that I'm a good judge.

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#284

Post by lgrebe » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 1:17 PM UTC

fsloth wrote: post #279

lgrebe wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sound like the hypothesized „subtle-matter“ as proposed by Dr. Klaus Volkamer [1]? - still looking for a better link than the Book… I’ll update this later [1] https://amzn.to/3mvvsWW

"Weightable soul". Sounds like a con-man, who wants only the most foolish of marks to make his job as easy as possible, and hence begins his script "I am about to hoax you...but I have something very important to tell you" - and those that remain after that are proven suckers and can be taken to any sort of ride.

I totally agree. Id be great to have a peer review of his papers[1][2] and either confirm something interesting or just shut him up.

Seems like all he was initially doing in the 80’s was dig into the 2 out of 10 experiments from Landolt that failed to confirm a conservation of mass

[1] http://klaus-volkamer.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/1994-Vol...

[2] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1....

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#285

Post by evanb » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

maxnoe wrote: post #267

evanb wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a lattice QCD practitioner. What I'll say is that the BMW collaboration isn't named that by coincidence---they're a resource-rich, extremely knowledgeable, cutting-edge group that is the envy of many others. They're also cut-throat competitive, which is very divisive. Grad students and postdocs are forced to sign NDAs to work on the hot stuff. That's insane. What's worse, from my point of view (as an actual LQCD…

> OK, so they don't want to share their source code; that's fine. No, it is not. It is the exact reason why rheir results are not trust worthy. Publish the code, let it be checked by the peers. Closed source code has no place in science and most journals now rightly demand open code for the publications.

I appreciate the absolutist position. However, everybody agrees on what code _must do_. If you need to solve a (massive) system of linear equations (as happens often in LQCD) you can then take your alleged solution and plug it in and check. A variety of those sorts of things prevent you from doing anything too wrong. If you screw up gauge invariance, for example, you will get 0. There are agreed-upon small examples. Plus other benchmarks---they computed the hadronic spectrum. They computed the splitting between the proton's mass and the neutron's mass.

If you spend hundreds or thousands of man hours optimizing, for example, assembler for a communications-intensive highly-parallel linear solve, it's fair to be reluctant to give it away. If you do others will get the glory (publications / funding). Some people do [ eg. this solver library for the BlueGenes https://www2.ph.ed.ac.uk/~paboyle/bagel/Bagel.html ]. Most people are happy to let others do the hard work of building low-level libraries. But they COULD decide to write custom software that'd go faster. If their custom software reproduce results that community-standard libraries produce that's not nothing.

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#286

Post by evanb » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

dguest wrote: post #276

evanb wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a lattice QCD practitioner. What I'll say is that the BMW collaboration isn't named that by coincidence---they're a resource-rich, extremely knowledgeable, cutting-edge group that is the envy of many others. They're also cut-throat competitive, which is very divisive. Grad students and postdocs are forced to sign NDAs to work on the hot stuff. That's insane. What's worse, from my point of view (as an actual LQCD…

Saying they treat their code as secret sauce is a pretty damming accusation for scientists. I've seen a few other cases where relatively closed groups of otherwise top-notch scientists claim an interesting discovery [1,2], and then turn out to be wrong. It rarely ends anyone's career and the fiasco tends to fade in a few years, but it leads to a bit of a media circus, for better or worse, and is mostly distracting fo…

I really want to stress: it's excellent science, and that's why they hold their code tightly. You can say 'no, a true scientist publishes everything' but---says you.

As someone in the field let me assure you: everything, of course, is more complicated than you make it out to be. I understand the absolutist position. But in a world of finite and ever-shrinking resources (grants, positions, etc.) it's fair to try to push your advantage. If funding were plentiful, adopting standards of publish-every-line-or-it-doesn't-count would be fair. People would have plenty of time and resources to get that done. As it stands there are basically no incentives to behave that way and being strapped for human resources puts the issue at the bottom of the list compared to actually getting results.

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#287

Post by peter303 » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

The muon was the first non-standard matter particle and 2nd transient particle discovered in 1937. It lead to new physics then and continues to suggest there is new physics.

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#288

Post by lolthishuman » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #282

shrimpx wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there legitimate support for this hollow sun theory, or is this a fringe theory like flat earth and so on?

The EM universe hypothesis is not much better than the flat Earth one. Similar levels of agreement with observed behavior.

Not much is published that makes sense unfortunately. The EM universe hypothesis has its flaws because it’s not United on first principles connecting the aether and primitive constructs like the torus and hyperboloid. It’s dangerous for many easy to reason about considerations. Most people’s lives are reputation based and confined to incentives of pay that prevent such topics being published or discussed. Hard problem.

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#289

Post by dguest » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

evanb wrote: post #286

dguest wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying they treat their code as secret sauce is a pretty damming accusation for scientists. I've seen a few other cases where relatively closed groups of otherwise top-notch scientists claim an interesting discovery [1,2], and then turn out to be wrong. It rarely ends anyone's career and the fiasco tends to fade in a few years, but it leads to a bit of a media circus, for better or worse, and is mostly distracting fo…

I really want to stress: it's excellent science, and that's why they hold their code tightly. You can say 'no, a true scientist publishes everything' but---says you. As someone in the field let me assure you: everything, of course, is more complicated than you make it out to be. I understand the absolutist position. But in a world of finite and ever-shrinking resources (grants, positions, etc.) it's fair to try to pu…

I'm not an absolutist, and don't want to come off as one. I'm just not in lattice QCD :)

What degree of data sharing is considered normal there? Across experimental physics it varies a lot: astronomers are often required by the funding agencies to make the data public, whereas particle physics experiments have traditionally shared very little (although pressure from funding agencies has started to change this too).

Given the ways you described this collaboration, my questions are:

- As an experimental physicist, when will I be able to believe them? Do we wait around for someone else to cook up a batch of similar secret sauce to confirm the result? Will they release their gauge configurations after some embargo period? Or should we believe them just because they are top-notch? I've seen top-notch groups like this fall before, so it seems quite reasonable if experiments aren't citing them now.

- Should funding agencies be attaching more importance to openness in science? From what you describe (and sorry if I'm misinterpreting you) there is very little incentive to share things that would make their results far more useful. Of course nothing is simple, but I've seen collaborations reverse their stance on open data overnight in response to a bit of pressure from the people writing the pay checks.

Re: Particle mystery: physicists confirm the muon is more magnetic than predicted

#290

Post by dguest » Thu, Apr 08, 2021, 6:40 PM UTC

evanb wrote: post #285

maxnoe wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OK, so they don't want to share their source code; that's fine. No, it is not. It is the exact reason why rheir results are not trust worthy. Publish the code, let it be checked by the peers. Closed source code has no place in science and most journals now rightly demand open code for the publications.

I appreciate the absolutist position. However, everybody agrees on what code _must do_. If you need to solve a (massive) system of linear equations (as happens often in LQCD) you can then take your alleged solution and plug it in and check. A variety of those sorts of things prevent you from doing anything too wrong. If you screw up gauge invariance, for example, you will get 0. There are agreed-upon small examples.…

I think this clarifies a misunderstanding I had from your original comment.

It sounds like the "secret sauce" for this collaboration includes a set of numerical libraries. They would get relatively little funding, few publications ("glory", as you say), and at best be reduced to a citation (if people remember to cite their libraries) if all they did was improve the backbone of lattice QCD with better software.

So instead they keep it internal. It's a bit sad that there's so little glory in writing better numerical libraries, but it's a common problem across the sciences (and in the open source community in general) so I can believe they'd be reluctant to share.