Science!

[Dannyalcatraz]

 

[Umbran]

I hate headlines like this. "...Shook Particle Physics to its Core!!1!!one!!!"

Folks, this is what physicists live for. Doing experiments that always end up verifying the current best model is ultimately kind of boring. We WANT there to be new stuff. Nobody is "shaken" by this. This is what we are partly hoping to find with every experiment - something new!

What, you thought physicists would spend millions and millions of dollars, and half a decade of work, and hope that nothing interesting happened? Come on! The headline fundamentally fails to understand the process of science, which is pretty crummy in science-reporting.

That said...

There's also a new result out of Kamiokande in Japan, also suggests that there's some unknown physical processes going on involving muons. Together, these are very interesting.

A couple of notes:
1) The wobbling in question here has little to do with the nature of time. At least, so far as we know.

2) Neither this, nor the Kamiokande result have any particular idea of what is happening. What they've noted is that there's a physical process that hasn't been fully explained by the current model, but they don't propose new models. Maybe it is new physics, maybe there's some higher-order effect in the old physics that isn't being handled properly. We shall see...

 

[Tonguez]

I hate headlines like this. "...Shook Particle Physics to its Core!!1!!one!!!"

Folks, this is what physicists live for. Doing experiments that always end up verifying the current best model is ultimately kind of boring. We WANT there to be new stuff. Nobody is "shaken" by this. This is what we are partly hoping to find with every experiment - something new!

What, you thought physicists would spend millions and millions of dollars, and half a decade of work, and hope that nothing interesting happened? Come on! The headline fundamentally fails to understand the process of science, which is pretty crummy in science-reporting.

That said...

There's also a new result out of Kamiokande in Japan, also suggests that there's some unknown physical processes going on involving muons. Together, these are very interesting.

A couple of notes:
1) The wobbling in question here has little to do with the nature of time. At least, so far as we know.

2) Neither this, nor the Kamiokande result have any particular idea of what is happening. What they've noted is that there's a physical process that hasn't been fully explained by the current model, but they don't propose new models. Maybe it is new physics, maybe there's some higher-order effect in the old physics that isn't being handled properly. We shall see...

The article I read (I think BBC?) suggested there might be a fifth fundamental force - I thought everyone was trying to unify them rather that find more

Its also amusing as in one Supers game I posited that Magic was a fifth Fundamental force whose purpose was to maintain stability between dimensions - magic was manipulation of the ‘Dimensional Field’ : ) Which also leads to the old chestnut of Magic is just Science we cant explain yet and if the standard model is wrong then at what point do Physicist decide that the current explanations for stuff are also wrong?

 

[Ryujin]

I hate headlines like this. "...Shook Particle Physics to its Core!!1!!one!!!"

Folks, this is what physicists live for. Doing experiments that always end up verifying the current best model is ultimately kind of boring. We WANT there to be new stuff. Nobody is "shaken" by this. This is what we are partly hoping to find with every experiment - something new!

What, you thought physicists would spend millions and millions of dollars, and half a decade of work, and hope that nothing interesting happened? Come on! The headline fundamentally fails to understand the process of science, which is pretty crummy in science-reporting.

That said...

There's also a new result out of Kamiokande in Japan, also suggests that there's some unknown physical processes going on involving muons. Together, these are very interesting.

A couple of notes:
1) The wobbling in question here has little to do with the nature of time. At least, so far as we know.

2) Neither this, nor the Kamiokande result have any particular idea of what is happening. What they've noted is that there's a physical process that hasn't been fully explained by the current model, but they don't propose new models. Maybe it is new physics, maybe there's some higher-order effect in the old physics that isn't being handled properly. We shall see...

It's sad that media continuously goes for the click-baity title, to draw people in, instead of presenting the facts that are already impressive enough, if you get a few sentences into an article. One thing that DC Comics got right, that Marvel got wrong (too many J. Jonah Jamesons and not enough Perry Whites in this world).

For example when the first quantum teleportation of photons was accomplished, all of the news articles seemed to be captioned using pictures from Star Trek. Back in 2015 they were crowing about the same thing when some German scientists "invented" a process to deconstruct and object, in one location, and then 3D print it in another. Ummmm, no. Not even close.

 

[francisbaud]

"If the results are true, the discovery represents a breakthrough in particle physics of a kind that hasn't been seen for 50 years, when the dominant theory to explain subatomic particles was first developed. The teeny-tiny wobble of the muon — created by the interaction of its intrinsic magnetic field, or magnetic moment, with an external magnetic field — could shake the very foundations of science.
[...]
However, a rival calculation made by a separate group and published Wednesday (April 7) in the journal Nature could rob the wobble of its significance. According to this team's calculations, which give a much larger value to the most uncertain term in the equation that predicts the muon's rocking motion, the experimental results are totally in line with predictions. Twenty years of particle chasing could have all been for nothing."

Yea, considering the conclusion of the article, the title may be a bit to sensational!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Only timey wimey will tell...

 

[Morrus]

The headline fundamentally fails to understand the process of science, which is pretty crummy in science-reporting.
.

Its worse than that. It doesn’t fail to understand anything. It chooses to ignore something. Because clicks.

It’s not inability. It’s deliberate.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

You blinded me!

 

[Ryujin]

You blinded me!

With SCIENCE!

 

[Umbran]

The article I read (I think BBC?) suggested there might be a fifth fundamental force - I thought everyone was trying to unify them rather that find more

You cannot unify them all if you don't know what they all are, now can you?

Its also amusing as in one Supers game I posited that Magic was a fifth Fundamental force whose purpose was to maintain stability between dimensions - magic was manipulation of the ‘Dimensional Field’ : ) Which also leads to the old chestnut of Magic is just Science we cant explain yet and if the standard model is wrong then at what point do Physicist decide that the current explanations for stuff are also wrong?

It isn't like, hey, there's this new thing, so EVERYTHING IS WRONG!!!1one!