New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by cwillu » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 4:42 PM UTC

yiyus wrote: post #24

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…

> The paper also is riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes, and while that doesn't have anything to do with the science, it does say something about the sloppiness of the researcher, I think. I have reviewed many papers that were originally quite badly written, but were not bad papers at all. Many non-native speakers are bad at English, so they rely on some external editing service, and they do not want to pay th…

How many of those papers were making exceptional claims?

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

#72

Post by keithnoizu » Sat, Dec 21, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

cwillu wrote: post #71

yiyus wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The paper also is riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes, and while that doesn't have anything to do with the science, it does say something about the sloppiness of the researcher, I think. I have reviewed many papers that were originally quite badly written, but were not bad papers at all. Many non-native speakers are bad at English, so they rely on some external editing service, and they do not want to pay th…

How many of those papers were making exceptional claims?

only researchers fluent in English can come across exceptional findings?

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

#73

Post by thefringthing » Mon, Dec 23, 2019, 2:56 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #22

bilekas wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am skeptic also, but at the same time, I remember the skepticism of the higgs. I am more than welcome to be proven wrong though! This news is a little crazy and I don't think people 'not being sold on it' should stop people trying.

No, the Higgs was considered the most probable thing the LHC could find, including the null result of "nothing". People are always going to be skeptical of particular measurements because this stuff is so tricky and the incentives are huge for discoveries, but the prior of experts was that the Higgs would exist.

I studied the philosophy of science a bit in university and one of my professors did some work on reactions in the scientific community to the Higgs boson discovery. I remember her remarking about how "this is a huge discovery" and "we knew we would see this; it's not a big deal" narratives were popular simultaneously.

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

#74

Post by jessriedel » Tue, Dec 24, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

thefringthing wrote: post #73

jessriedel wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the Higgs was considered the most probable thing the LHC could find, including the null result of "nothing". People are always going to be skeptical of particular measurements because this stuff is so tricky and the incentives are huge for discoveries, but the prior of experts was that the Higgs would exist.

I studied the philosophy of science a bit in university and one of my professors did some work on reactions in the scientific community to the Higgs boson discovery. I remember her remarking about how "this is a huge discovery" and "we knew we would see this; it's not a big deal" narratives were popular simultaneously.

I don't actually think those narratives are in strong tension, especially if each were stated precisely. In short, "surprisal" is not the sole measure of importance for a scientific discovery.