Fermilab discovers new particle/force

[Ought Six]

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/us-atom-sma...73624-567.html

[CanadaSue]

Woah!

[Samen]

A particle accelerator in the US has shown compelling hints of a never-before-seen particle, researchers say.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13000253

Fermilab press release and experiment

[Kassy]

Thanks for the links Samen. Funnily enough the press release has the most information. The second, less glamerous possibility is also intriguing.

We're probing where we haven't probed before and who knows what'll turn up next now that the LHC is also running again.

[DReynolds]

Originally Posted by Kassy

We're probing where we haven't probed before and who knows what'll turn up next now that the LHC is also running again.

Does it make you feel good, that everytime we turn up the energy, we discover new, poorly-understood particles? Or does it make you feel like modern physics is a high-tech version of Homer Simpson's observation that "it's fun to smash things"?

Maybe it's time to dial back on the $billions going into accelerators, and instead devote time and effort to---thinking.

[Twoolf]

Many years ago I worked with a team from the American Museum of Natural History in NY. We were covering some fairly new ground in Ornithology and one of our motto's that kept us going was "What is discovered only shows how little is known about what is YET to know. Discovery for the sake of discovery fuels practical application. If the guy that played with LED's for your first calculator had not done so, you would still be waching a TV that weighed 80 pounds or so and your monitor would take up half your desk.

[DReynolds]

Indeed. Now apply your statement to Physics: "what is discovered only shows how little is known" about Particle Physics and see what happens.

Or let me summarize the situation for you thusly: if you went to every tenured professor of Physics in the Ivy League+MIT/Caltech/Chicago/Berkeley/Stanford, and asked them publicly if they believed there was a chance that the standard model is not correct, at least 95% would say "no chance". This is a profession that says it's seeking answers, but which is completely certain their textbooks are correct.

[DReynolds]

It's a kind of mass insanity. Not much different than a religion. The Physics community says "of course our textbooks are correct." Meanwhile, never before in the history of mankind has any model of the physical world been literally "correct". Newtonian physics gave way to relativistic physics. And so it develops. The idea that "this time we really do have all the details right" is narcisistic and idiotic.

So we spend $billions of government money on particle accelerators, which permit us to smash particles into each other like high-tech cavemen. These collisions have led us to observe new and poorly-understood particles, since the 1970's. 4 freakin decades now. We find a particle one day, we wish we could understand why we can't find another particle (higgs' boson) another day. All the while, insisting we're progressing.

I got a better idea -- take those $billions, and pay 1,000 of the smartest people you can find $1million/year to think hard about the puzzles Physics already has.

[Kassy]

But the $$$ for the machinery are well spent because they give us data to work on and we can look into areas we could not probe before. The data will prove things to be wrong or right. The obvious hunt is for the Higgs Boson but now we stumbled over this.

It might still be a data anomaly or it might be a new force of nature or our background theory that tells where we find our forces is wrong.

95% adhering to the known paradigm isn't a bad score. For one part it's what they've been taught and the complementary part is that they can't see past it.

I always liked the philosophy of science and there are these abstracted models based on the achievements of physics because it's one of the sciences that really gave us stuff (rockets etc).

Theories of Kuhn or Lacatos are hopelessly idealistic (but they all cater for the 95%).

A much better version is Paul Feyerabends Against Method. The history of science as a random walk of unimaginativeness and bright ideas.

Our new machines show us details of reality we couldn't see before and thousands of physicists are working on the new data.

I don't see why we'd need to subsidize old 'smartest people' since it would be throwing money to many 95%ers.

[DReynolds]

Originally Posted by Kassy

But the $$$ for the machinery are well spent because they give us data to work on and we can look into areas we could not probe before.

My contention is that we already have a bevy of puzzles to work with. There are a dozen theoretical puzzles and a dozen empirical puzzles that are known now, and have been known for decades.

Are we going to gain a deeper understanding of the top 20 puzzles in Physics by creating more puzzling data? Or is it more effective to try to understand the existing top 20 puzzles, by thinking hard about them and trying to solve them with a new model of the universe?

[Malcolm]

Beam me up Scotty....................

[DReynolds]

Originally Posted by Kassy

95% adhering to the known paradigm isn't a bad score.

What you need is 95% of the profession to say "the known paradigm is the best model we have now. But no model is literally ciorrect, so the standard model will probably not be our model in 100 years".

You can't have 95% saying "this time we got it right." Because those people do not accept papers or ideas that contradict the textbooks. This means infinitely-long lived inertia. The textbooks never get amended (and they haven't significantly for 4 decades now, whereas they used to).

[Kassy]

I don't think new data can hurt. You always need to test your theories and that's what these machines do. It would be interesting if the outcome would be 'go back to the drawingboard' and we just might need to do that.

Most people thinking in the old style will do just that no matter how clever they are. We need to see where our theories break down & then we need someone to come up with a better theory.

[DReynolds]

Originally Posted by Kassy

I don't think new data can hurt. You always need to test your theories and that's what these machines do. It would be interesting if the outcome would be 'go back to the drawingboard' and we just might need to do that.

I am 100% convinced they won't find the Higgs Boson (that none such exists). I've been saying so for a very long time. Perhaps the failure to find it with the LHC will spur a go back to the drawingboard. That's what I've been hoping for, since there's now enough evidence already to seriously look beyond Quantum Field Theory (the standard model) to whatever's next.

[Kassy]

Just out of curiosity: could you give a short explanation why it wouldn't exist?

[DReynolds]

Originally Posted by Kassy

Just out of curiosity: could you give a short explanation why it wouldn't exist?

OK.

Higgs suggested his Boson as the solution to a problem.

The problem: the standard model (hereby, meant Quantum Field Theory as presented for example in Weinberg) does not explain which particles will have mass or why they attain mass. Equivalently, you can have massless particles. We don't understand where the property of "mass" comes from.

Higgs' solution (50 years ago): invent a new particle-interaction (you can think of this as a 'force') that gives rise to mass in some things that otherwise wouldn't have mass. Basically, the proton has mass because it gets hit by a Boson.

Critique: Higg's solution is ad hoc. It's made-up. It's the first thing you'd think of, as a silly theoretical solution. The idea of spending $billions to look for it, makes me weep.

My solution: dispense with the idea of a vacuum. There's no such thing. All particles are realizations of states on a space-time manifold that has local properties. So a massive particle is like a wave, that happens to be very, very high and breaks a qualitatively different way than small waves break. Small waves are massless particles.

[Kassy]

That makes sense although i still think that all the data from our colliders will only help. We see more details from a landscape that was unseen and not thought of before. Our new theory will have to take that into account and we'll need to check if prior assuptions work but you need data for that.