Scientists are worried about the W Boson: 'Something is amiss'
1–10 of 62 posts
Re: Scientists are worried about the W Boson: 'Something is amiss'
#2A very good piece of journalism explaining the problem for non physicists.
For me personally, the discussion by the researchers about their guiding principles for conducting scientific research was a great reminder for all researchers..
As that section concluded :
"Science is organized in skepticism."
Re: Scientists are worried about the W Boson: 'Something is amiss'
#3we'd have to change our understanding of how all the particles in the universe work.
Well, remember the new paper? We're pretty much entering that worst case scenario.
I believe you mean "best case"! There was much hue and cry after the Higgs discovery because the result, at least from the outside, seemed like "welp, we predicted a thing and found it and we don't have any new physics to disagree with; what a letdown!"
worst case here would be something like "oh, we thought it was 7 sigma, but actually we can completely account for the discrepancy because the instrument deformed slowly under its own weight for the last decade and now we're 4 angstroms off and we still don't have any new physics to disagree with!"
Re: Scientists are worried about the W Boson: 'Something is amiss'
#4This article states that the most recent measurement agrees with others over the last decade. That is simply not true.
https://non-trivial-solution.blogspot.com/2022/04/do-we-have...
Re: Scientists are worried about the W Boson: 'Something is amiss'
#5The theorists working on their own grand explanations take heart
Re: Scientists are worried about the W Boson: 'Something is amiss'
#6we'd have to change our understanding of how all the particles in the universe work. Well, remember the new paper? We're pretty much entering that worst case scenario. I believe you mean "best case"! There was much hue and cry after the Higgs discovery because the result, at least from the outside, seemed like "welp, we predicted a thing and found it and we don't have any new physics to disagree with; what a letdown!…
> the instrument deformed slowly under its own weight for the last decade and now we're 4 angstroms off
This was hilarious and plausible at the same time. Nice work!
Re: Scientists are worried about the W Boson: 'Something is amiss'
#7we'd have to change our understanding of how all the particles in the universe work. Well, remember the new paper? We're pretty much entering that worst case scenario. I believe you mean "best case"! There was much hue and cry after the Higgs discovery because the result, at least from the outside, seemed like "welp, we predicted a thing and found it and we don't have any new physics to disagree with; what a letdown!…
> the instrument deformed slowly under its own weight for the last decade and now we're 4 angstroms off This was hilarious and plausible at the same time. Nice work!
Totally plausible indeed! One of the recent (past decade or so) major mistaken discoveries in particle physics was a cabling issue.
And from a different field, but closer to the quip: semiconductor lithography lenses' own weight causes stresses that cause birefringence in the optics that has to be explicitly corrected for. And that was true 20 years ago already.
(Recovering particle physicist here and thinking about this even much later gives me mild trauma. ;) )
Re: Scientists are worried about the W Boson: 'Something is amiss'
#8This article states that the most recent measurement agrees with others over the last decade. That is simply not true. https://non-trivial-solution.blogspot.com/2022/04/do-we-have...
> this finally the sign of new physics, which we all have been hoping for?
I don't understand this mindset? Why (aside from creating jobs) is it good to discover that the universe is more complicated than we knew, or that we were wrong?
To me, what we want in "new physics" is explanations for unexplained phenomena, or resolutions to know problems/inconsistencies (like quantum vs gravity), or emergent effects that less to interesting applications.
Re: Scientists are worried about the W Boson: 'Something is amiss'
#9The fun thing about measurement physics is that you never know if your cool tool is measuring something in the universe, or if you are using something in the Universe to test and find bugs in your tool.
Re: Scientists are worried about the W Boson: 'Something is amiss'
#10This article states that the most recent measurement agrees with others over the last decade. That is simply not true. https://non-trivial-solution.blogspot.com/2022/04/do-we-have...
> this finally the sign of new physics, which we all have been hoping for? I don't understand this mindset? Why (aside from creating jobs) is it good to discover that the universe is more complicated than we knew, or that we were wrong? To me, what we want in "new physics" is explanations for unexplained phenomena, or resolutions to know problems/inconsistencies (like quantum vs gravity), or emergent effects that les…
> Why (aside from creating jobs) is it good to discover that the universe is more complicated than we knew, or that we were wrong?
Because this would give us hints to new degrees of freedom in the current models that seem to contradict each other but otherwise work extremely well in their respective their domains. Finding a crack in those hermetically closed models would be wonderful.