“Oh, Really?”, a possible fifth Force in the universe...

[Tonguez]

Get Real dude!

 

[Rob Kuntz]

Your thread title is overstated and misleading.



That is... weird.

I say that because that mass is pretty low. At that mass, particle accelerators should have been creating these things by the dozens, for years. To only see two is very strange.



Or, it could be a very tiny elephant named Bingbong. I am unimpressed by such statements to the media. This sounds flashy, but this result has far too little verification to support such speculation.



Neither. This is one team (who, by the way, seem to have announced new particle finds in the past, and then retracted those announcements without explanation), with only a couple of detections. That's not a new force, or new science, yet. It seems that no other teams have replicated the results. We'll want far more detections to happen to nail down that the thing is real, and not some anomaly in their mechanisms, or other form of error, before we start really considering this to be solid new science.

Of course today's scientists are suggesting things that they formerly burned mystics at the stake for saying in the 15-18th centuries.

 

[shawnhcorey]

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
- Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

Most physicists think the Standard Model is incomplete. Although it's too soon to claim a fifth force, it cannot be dismissed by an over-hyped title. That's bad science.

 

[Umbran]

Most physicists think the Standard Model is incomplete.

The guy who wants to argue about bad science needs to back up generalized claims like that, doesn't he?

(By the way - I'm a physicist, just so you know. I recognize the Standard Model is incomplete... for certain definitions of "incomplete". Those are the same definitions that recognize that no model ever created by humans to date is "complete", so it is a bit of a reductive argument.)

Although it's too soon to claim a fifth force, it cannot be dismissed by an over-hyped title. That's bad science.

We can dismiss THIS CLAIM as over-hyped, at least for now.

And, I didn't dismiss it based on the title. I gave some very clear reasons why this particular claim should be viewed with high skepticism. I made exactly zero statements rejecting a fifth force, in general. So... bit of a strawman, there.

 

[Rob Kuntz]

In short, the scientific method cannot validate universal claims (Popper, 1959); so scientific stories should never be regarded as candidates (or competitors) for ‘Truth’. And they are true only insofar as one is satisfied with the provisional, i.e., with a story that summarizes all observations made up to the present. – Paul Grobstein, Revisiting Science in Culture: Science as Story Telling and Story Revising

 

[shawnhcorey]

And, I didn't dismiss it based on the title. I gave some very clear reasons why this particular claim should be viewed with high skepticism. I made exactly zero statements rejecting a fifth force, in general. So... bit of a strawman, there.

Why do you think I was talking about you personally? I made a comment on the overall tone for the postings.

 

[freyar]

Yeah, I'm a little surprised at how much press this got.

To add one point to what Umbran said, the way this low mass particle could have escaped detection until now is that it would have to be pretty weakly coupled. On the other hand, there are experiments that look for specifically this sort of thing (not the LHC which produces relatively few high-energy collisions, but other experiments that produce very many lower-energy ones), and they haven't found it. It seems like not all the parameter space is entirely closed, possibly, though.

But there are quite a few specific reasons to think that the experiment is not right. Anomalies like this just show up from time to time. And some real experts on this required type of statistical analysis think what's being done is naive. Anyway, it would be exciting if true, but it still seems less likely to be true than other recent anomalies that turned out to be incorrect in the end.

Here are some articles:
By a theorist, just giving a general take.
By an experimentalist with some specific criticism.
Mainstream media explanation by a credible science writer.

 

[shawnhcorey]

On the other hand, there are experiments that look for specifically this sort of thing (not the LHC which produces relatively few high-energy collisions, but other experiments that produce very many lower-energy ones), and they haven't found it.

Such a low-energy quantum could lie within the acceptable error of the experiments. The true test is when someone besides the original experimenters try to reproduce the same results.

 

[freyar]

Such a low-energy quantum could lie within the acceptable error of the experiments. The true test is when someone besides the original experimenters try to reproduce the same results.

It's not error of the other experiments as much as they just haven't necessarily accessed the right parameter range yet necessarily. But, yes, the test is reproducing the results, both in similar experiments by other groups and different types of experiments that should be able to detect a new particle of the proposed type in a distinct way.

Some disclosure: I am a theoretical physicist; while I'm not working on this type of stuff right now, I have worked on related issues in the past (until about 5 years ago), and I still follow the field though not incredibly closely. Not too many people got very excited when this group posted their first experimental results, but they probably will get some more attention now.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Fifth force? I mean, we have air, earth, fire, water, and spirit already -- shouldn't it be sixth?