CERN spots Higgs boson decay breaking the rules Evidence discovered at CERN of a rare form of Higgs boson decay may be just what scientists need to prove the existence of particles beyond those predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics – indirectly, at least. Speaking at the Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference last week, researchers working on a pair of CERN …
Running somebody else's code in a VirtualBox on my computer. What could possibly go wrong, right?
Douglas Adams nailed it on a larger scale:
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
That would be about par for the course. The current standard model seems to have more or less settled into its current form in the mid-70s, so it's about 50 years old. Before that, there was a period of about 70 years of experimenters delivering endless "what the fuck" moments to the theoreticians, starting with things like the photo-electric effect. About 40 years prior to that, Maxwell's electromagnetism and a recognisable formulation of classical thermodynamics were "new" in the 1860s or so. Electricity itself was taking shape in labs around the beginning of that century. Go back much before 1770 and I think we were still knocking classical mechanics into some kind of analytical shape. And of course Newton's Principia is not much further back again (1689).
So even if the Standard Model is toast by the end of this year, I'd say it has done about as well as any of its predecessors.
... after all, we still use Newtonian mechanics to fly to the moon (or launch sattelites) - for GPS to work, we need to work with relativistic effects though. The current standard model is probably useful enough to keep it around and use it where it works well enough. It will likely remain a useful approximation. Especially since they propose to extend the standard model, not to completely can it.
However, I totally agree with the overall assessment of the situation (if not the exact wording).
To be clear, we are absolutely sure we really have no idea what's going on. It's been known for decades that the Standard Model is fundamentally broken in several different ways. The entire reason for the existence of large fields of particle physics such as string theory and supersymmetry is precisely to find some way to either fix it or replace it with something better. The problem is that the parts we're pretty sure it can't handle mostly still fall outside the range of energies we're able to experiment on. Meanwhile, every time someone has a clever idea for something we can actually test, it keeps turning out to match the basic Standard Model and not point us in any useful direction for how to modify it.
This was why the search for the Higgs boson was such a big deal. The idea wasn't simply to find it, there were a whole bunch of different predictions for what mass it would have or how many different types there might be depending on which theory you used, so it was supposed to tell us where to look next. And once again it was just the unmodified Standard Model that matched best, and whole swathes of string and field theories were pretty much thrown out overnight. And that's why this news is also potentially a big deal. We might have finally found something solid that can tells us which direction we should be looking to figure out what's going on.
So there's never been any thinking we know what's going on. That's just a common myth non-scientists think scientists think. We've been modifying and trying to fix the Standard Model for longer than it's even been called that. The original version when the term was coined 50 years ago only had 4 quarks and massless neutrinos after all. But neither are we simply going to tear it up and replace it with something entirely new. Newtonian physics is correct, it's simply the low-energy limit of relativistic physics. Similarly, the Standard Model is correct under certain conditions, it's simply going to be the limit of some more widely valid theory. Modern quantum physics is the most thoroughly tested theory ever to have existed; we know it's not complete and doesn't cover every situation, but all the parts it gets right aren't suddenly going to disappear and require us to tear it all up and throw it out wholesale. It's possible we'll end up in a situation like relativity where our new theory boils down to the previous one under certain conditions. Much more likely is that whatever we come up with will still be called the Standard Model, and there will just be yet another addition or extension to the existing theory rather than an actual replacement.
Firstly, these virtual-particle probability games happen with all particle-particle interactions, not just this Higgsy stuff. But it's mainly at the top, Higgsy end of our experimental energy range that undiscovered particles might remain to be found. An unexpected decay rate, into say the Z plus a photon, is just the memory of a shadow of a particle that couldn't quite pop into existence after all. That is all you get to work with. So you drum up a magic idea and invent some magic maths (basically the same thing), plug it into the standard maths and see if its predictions are anywhere nearer the mark.
It's pretty much like monkeys at a typewriter: if enough physicists plug enough magic ideas into enough predictions, eventually one of them will win the Nobel prize. They hope.
"Is there a "non-standard Standard Model"?"
There is the standard Standard Model, things we know we know.
We also know there is a standard Non-Standard Model, that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.
But there is also non-standard Non-Standard Models - the one we don't know we don't know.
Finally there is the non-standard Standard Models - the thing that you know, that you don't know you know.
Simples.
.... my BS detector! The needle just wrapped itself around the stop!
Is the chromium boiling? Or the metal it is plated to? If it's boiling how is it still plated?
Then you have the mass loss which is actually the source of fusion energy. This is 0.7% for hydrogen fusing to helium. A 1000 times that would be 700% loss of mass!!!
I know that chromium (or the metal it is plating) will have a higher atomic mass than hydrogen, but I still fail to see how you can get 1000 time more energy without total conversion of the fuel to energy. And I thought that was only realistic if you're talking of using antimatter.
So please provide some links to your astonishing new physics ..... or stop BS trolling the comments!
There's nothing more exciting in science than "that's odd".
And that's very odd.
The trouble with most of the serious alternatives to the Standard Model has been that there's too many of them, and no experiments to determine which is "correct". Maybe CERN can now bang the rocks together hard enough to tell?
The fact that there are so many untested (and some times untestable) theories out there indicates that we throw too much money at theoreticians and too little at experimentalists. This results in a lot of pointless theories and then a lot of PhDs ("Quants") messing up our financial system.
...which may or may not itself be true... that we make subatomic discoveries when we're ready to conceive of them - which designing the experiments and building the machines implies - like reality is a dream with an internal consistency that, when imagination meets, causes new varieties to spontaneously exist. We're not discovering but inventing them, writing a play as we go; people thinking emotion causes action rather than being an effect of it, but in reverse; like the machine of the Krell.
Belief is necessarily unconscious - intuitive - and not fantastic - so 'discovery' appears plausible, though actually it's creation with a small 'c'.Like the observation collapsing the waveform is the thinking of it in sufficient detail as to be mentally reciting an incantation (code).
Mind you, there are times nicotine withdrawal is so far out I could get hooked on it.
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