Given how difficult it is going to be for Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, a fifth seems very unlikely, and even the breathless article admits we are talking about not much more than a lightweight.
The “McMullin particle”? It is only observable in the state of Utah.
From the article, “this newfound boson interacts only with electrons and neutrons – and at an extremely limited range”
I suspect that should read only interacts with “electrons and neutrinos.” An uncharged interacting particle that couples to neutrons and not protons would be revolutionary indeed.
[Edit: On looking over the article, I see I am wrong about this. The hypothetical particle is “protophobic” – doesn’t interact with photons.]
photon -> proton
Is this the same new particle that just got a “sorry, nothing there, our bad?”
You really have to have been an experimentalist to truly appreciate the variety of explanations theorists can come up with for every 2-sigma blip.
No, that was a different false alarm (750 GeV diphoton peak at the LHC that went away with more data; the experimenters didn’t claim it was a discovery.)
Understand that this is likely to be nothing as well. There’s a great deal of skepticism about the group that is claiming this.
Physics is entering an interesting period, the so-called “Nightmare Scenario”, where they are running out of experimental evidence for anything new. The LHC failed to find anything except the Higgs, despite hopes (wishes?) that all sorts of new particles would show up. So they are desperate for hints of new things, even if those hints are mirages. Otherwise, funding for high energy physics is likely to go down.
Time to finally complete the Superconducting Turtle Collider.
Turtles? I thought it was elephants — I need to better keep up with developments in Cosmology affecting High-Energy Physics.
You’re thinking of the high energy version of those chicken guns they use to test airplane windshields. The JIR(*) had an paper on chicken colliders some years back, where physicists were trying to materialize virtual chickens (“eggs”) out of the vacuum, thereby answering that age old philosophical question.
A variant of the scheme would collide ducks instead of chickens, in an attempt to produce free quacks.
(*) Journal of Irreproducible Results
Paul D. writes:
A variant of the scheme would collide ducks instead of chickens, in an attempt to produce free quacks.
Ouch. You just made by head hurt.
+10 (I’m a masochist…)
I don’t know who’s worse for this sort of thing: Paul, or Josh Hopkins.
Paul, I believe you’re right. I saw a physics department begin to come undone from reduced funding. Astronomy might be next. The telescopes needed for the recognized “big projects” are so big they are just barely affordable. The JWST and 30-m class ground-based telescopes may be the equivalents of the SSC and LHC, the last big things that can be afforded.
Nightmare Scenario –> Settled Science –> $0.00
It’s not that the science is “settled,” as in well understood. The nightmare scenario is that there’s no more you can do to solve the big problems (at least no more you can *afford* to do). In physics, the nightmare scenario is running out of attainable observational phase space and leaving the whole string theory mess up in the air, having no theory of quantum gravity, no dark matter candidates, no better understanding (or proof) of dark energy than we curently have, etc. Clever theorists would run unconstrained by reality (the way they like it!) and fundamental physics research would be moribund.
There’s lots of application-related work to do, but those billion-dollar projects would be just memories.
How much of the funding problem is because the money is going to supercomputer centers that model the effects of global warming on hypothetical amphibians?
If you can’t do the experiment I’d say what has been confirmed by experiment is settled, the rest is just speculation, or unproven hypothesis if you prefer. Whatever it is if it’s not falsifiable it’s not Science.
If we keep on building bigger and bigger colliders and better and better detectors, using more and more number-crunching and spend more and more money, that still won’t solve the basic problem with Physics.
That problem is two theories which each work very well in their own domains but don’t play nice with each other when those domains meet. There are certain places, such as the event horizon of a black hole, where both theories come into play and all hell breaks loose with causality and division-by-zero errors.
What is needed isn’t an undetectable dark matter making up most of the universe, or undetectable dark energy causing the universe to expand, or undetectable m-branes or superstrings.
What is needed instead is a new paradigm for which both relativity and quantum mechanics are emergent properties of something more fundamental.
I think space is quantized at the Planck scale. Not spacetime mind you, but volume: spheres 1 Planck length in diameter. I’ve only just started laying down the theory on my blog and have not fully worked it out yet, but I can make a testable prediction. On the largest scales, the universe resembles bubble bath: gigantic voids surrounded by a thin layer of galaxies. Where three voids meet, there is a thin string of galaxies, but where four voids meet there is a supercluster. The prediction is that in those thin strings where three voids meet, the velocities of those galaxies relative to each other will be much higher than the Hubble constant.
I think time
quantized
No I mean
time
I think quantized
Quantize
Time is
No time
Quanta is
wait…
Coffee, brain, thoughts… moving faster now, time dilating…
There… I think time is quantized.
If the force exists and does act between electrons and neutrons, it may be an explanation for some of the observed LENR results.
… May the force be with us, now available in 5ths…
For some strange reason I have a feeling that Physics is on the cusp of discovering something really unusual by 20th Century standards. Not that this is it… But if I could tell you want that is, I’d be publishing in a journal aiming for that Nobel Prize, not writing snide side blog comments… <:-P
No offense Rand…. 😉
There was another big story with potential implications for the Standard Model this past week:
Interesting. Wonder if they’ve given thought to a twin accelerators operating 180° out of phase? You would have one for the atomic hydrogen/deuterium and another for the electrons/muons. Then let them combine along a long track for measurement. Since both are traveling very fast, but not relative to each other, they might be able to combine with long intervals for observation from stationary equipment that could do all sorts of manipulations along the track.
Close the patent office. Everything’s been invented. Movie plots were the first to go.
Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich are unavailable for comment.
Given how difficult it is going to be for Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, a fifth seems very unlikely, and even the breathless article admits we are talking about not much more than a lightweight.
The “McMullin particle”? It is only observable in the state of Utah.
Could be interesting if true. There are also rumours that someone found an exoplanet in Proxima Centauri. If true it could (finally) provide the drive to make an interstellar mission.
http://www.seeker.com/new-nearby-earth-like-planet-discovered-1970197349.html
From the article, “this newfound boson interacts only with electrons and neutrons – and at an extremely limited range”
I suspect that should read only interacts with “electrons and neutrinos.” An uncharged interacting particle that couples to neutrons and not protons would be revolutionary indeed.
[Edit: On looking over the article, I see I am wrong about this. The hypothetical particle is “protophobic” – doesn’t interact with photons.]
photon -> proton
Is this the same new particle that just got a “sorry, nothing there, our bad?”
http://www.news.com.au/world/breaking-news/no-new-particle-scientists/news-story/38e99c2df6ffe2fe00ea65b184b19398
You really have to have been an experimentalist to truly appreciate the variety of explanations theorists can come up with for every 2-sigma blip.
No, that was a different false alarm (750 GeV diphoton peak at the LHC that went away with more data; the experimenters didn’t claim it was a discovery.)
Understand that this is likely to be nothing as well. There’s a great deal of skepticism about the group that is claiming this.
Physics is entering an interesting period, the so-called “Nightmare Scenario”, where they are running out of experimental evidence for anything new. The LHC failed to find anything except the Higgs, despite hopes (wishes?) that all sorts of new particles would show up. So they are desperate for hints of new things, even if those hints are mirages. Otherwise, funding for high energy physics is likely to go down.
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8686
No grant funding for you! Next!
Time to finally complete the Superconducting Turtle Collider.
Turtles? I thought it was elephants — I need to better keep up with developments in Cosmology affecting High-Energy Physics.
You’re thinking of the high energy version of those chicken guns they use to test airplane windshields. The JIR(*) had an paper on chicken colliders some years back, where physicists were trying to materialize virtual chickens (“eggs”) out of the vacuum, thereby answering that age old philosophical question.
A variant of the scheme would collide ducks instead of chickens, in an attempt to produce free quacks.
(*) Journal of Irreproducible Results
Paul D. writes:
A variant of the scheme would collide ducks instead of chickens, in an attempt to produce free quacks.
Ouch. You just made by head hurt.
+10 (I’m a masochist…)
I don’t know who’s worse for this sort of thing: Paul, or Josh Hopkins.
Paul, I believe you’re right. I saw a physics department begin to come undone from reduced funding. Astronomy might be next. The telescopes needed for the recognized “big projects” are so big they are just barely affordable. The JWST and 30-m class ground-based telescopes may be the equivalents of the SSC and LHC, the last big things that can be afforded.
Nightmare Scenario –> Settled Science –> $0.00
It’s not that the science is “settled,” as in well understood. The nightmare scenario is that there’s no more you can do to solve the big problems (at least no more you can *afford* to do). In physics, the nightmare scenario is running out of attainable observational phase space and leaving the whole string theory mess up in the air, having no theory of quantum gravity, no dark matter candidates, no better understanding (or proof) of dark energy than we curently have, etc. Clever theorists would run unconstrained by reality (the way they like it!) and fundamental physics research would be moribund.
There’s lots of application-related work to do, but those billion-dollar projects would be just memories.
How much of the funding problem is because the money is going to supercomputer centers that model the effects of global warming on hypothetical amphibians?
If you can’t do the experiment I’d say what has been confirmed by experiment is settled, the rest is just speculation, or unproven hypothesis if you prefer. Whatever it is if it’s not falsifiable it’s not Science.
If we keep on building bigger and bigger colliders and better and better detectors, using more and more number-crunching and spend more and more money, that still won’t solve the basic problem with Physics.
That problem is two theories which each work very well in their own domains but don’t play nice with each other when those domains meet. There are certain places, such as the event horizon of a black hole, where both theories come into play and all hell breaks loose with causality and division-by-zero errors.
What is needed isn’t an undetectable dark matter making up most of the universe, or undetectable dark energy causing the universe to expand, or undetectable m-branes or superstrings.
What is needed instead is a new paradigm for which both relativity and quantum mechanics are emergent properties of something more fundamental.
I think space is quantized at the Planck scale. Not spacetime mind you, but volume: spheres 1 Planck length in diameter. I’ve only just started laying down the theory on my blog and have not fully worked it out yet, but I can make a testable prediction. On the largest scales, the universe resembles bubble bath: gigantic voids surrounded by a thin layer of galaxies. Where three voids meet, there is a thin string of galaxies, but where four voids meet there is a supercluster. The prediction is that in those thin strings where three voids meet, the velocities of those galaxies relative to each other will be much higher than the Hubble constant.
I think time
quantized
No I mean
time
I think quantized
Quantize
Time is
No time
Quanta is
wait…
Coffee, brain, thoughts… moving faster now, time dilating…
There… I think time is quantized.
If the force exists and does act between electrons and neutrons, it may be an explanation for some of the observed LENR results.
… May the force be with us, now available in 5ths…
For some strange reason I have a feeling that Physics is on the cusp of discovering something really unusual by 20th Century standards. Not that this is it… But if I could tell you want that is, I’d be publishing in a journal aiming for that Nobel Prize, not writing snide side blog comments… <:-P
No offense Rand…. 😉
There was another big story with potential implications for the Standard Model this past week:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/08/researchers-orbit-a-muon-around-an-atom-confirm-physics-is-broken/
Interesting. Wonder if they’ve given thought to a twin accelerators operating 180° out of phase? You would have one for the atomic hydrogen/deuterium and another for the electrons/muons. Then let them combine along a long track for measurement. Since both are traveling very fast, but not relative to each other, they might be able to combine with long intervals for observation from stationary equipment that could do all sorts of manipulations along the track.
Close the patent office. Everything’s been invented. Movie plots were the first to go.
Bruce Willis and Milla Jovovich are unavailable for comment.