Fermi Lab May Have Discovered New Particle or Force 226
schleprock63 writes "Physicists at Fermi Lab have found a 'suspicious bump' in their data that could indicate they've found a new elementary particle or even a new force of nature. The discovery could 'be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.' Physicists have ruled out that the particle could be the standard model Higgs boson, but theorize that it could be some new and unexpected version of the Higgs. This discovery comes as the Tevatron is slated to go offline sometime in September."
Desertron (Score:3, Interesting)
Still kinda miss the Superconducting Super Collider [wikipedia.org]. Wonder if it could have produced results sooner.
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Re:Hardly a Result (Score:4, Interesting)
It has now been named.... (Score:5, Funny)
It shall henceforth be known as the pleaseExtendOurFunding-ion.
OK, I jest. On a more serious (but related) note, back in 2000, when the LEP at CERN was shutting down, there were possible "hints" of the Higgs' Boson and pleas to extend the running time (which were ultimately denied so that the LHC would not be delayed).
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And we never will know what might have come out it...
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No it's far too late for something that petty, that day has already passed [fnal.gov]. The Tevatron collider run will not be extended:
Fiscal ye
Re:It has now been named.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Do they account for hypothesis-mining? (Score:5, Informative)
When I read things like "In about 250 times more cases than expected, the total energy of the jets clustered around a value of about 144 billion electron volts" I get nervous.
This is like saying that in a series of 1M coin tosses the sequence HTTHHTTTTHHTTHHH came up 100x more often than would be expected by chance. Does that mean that any particular sequence of 8 tosses should come up 1/65536th of the time, and this one came up 1/655th of the time, or does it mean that some random sequence of results should come up 100% of the time in a random series of 16 coin tosses, and we happened to pick the random series that came up the most often in that particular set of data?
If I mine a big set of data against 100 random hypothesis I'll be able to find about 5 that I can show to be true with 95% confidence, despite the fact that there is nothing really going on.
The real test is to come up with the hypothesis first, then collect the data.
Now, these guys are probably smart, and hopefully control for this. If you want to test for 100 hypotheses and REALLY have 95% confidence, then you need to target a confidence of 1-0.05^100 for each test - at least that is how I see it (being a complete novice at statistics).
Re:Do they account for hypothesis-mining? (Score:5, Interesting)
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10,000 collisions
expected number of weird collisions ~ 1
probability of seeing 250 or more weird collisions ~ 1E-1140
That should be enough to take care of most multiple testing issues.
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Re:Do they account for hypothesis-mining? (Score:5, Informative)
The real test is to come up with the hypothesis first, then collect the data.
That's not the way the vast majority of science is done. Popper was a philosopher speaking in ignorance (but I repeat myself).
The challenge for these guys is not in the hypothesis testing, but in the cuts. You have to come up with some set of criteria for selecting "good" events in complex detectors of this kind. There is always a degree of arbitrariness in how you do that, and there have been cases in the past (the so-called 'GSI particle') where people tweaked and tuned multi-dimensional cuts to maximize peaks in the data.
In the present case it is clear their cuts are physics-based--they are described in the paper--and that the peak structure is consistent with the resolution one would expect (the GSI particle required some very weird physics to make the narrow peak widths plausible.)
However, the peak is also precisely in the region where their background spectra are varying most rapidly, and this is a huge red flag. It makes them sensitive to any number of minor mis-calibrations. It does NOT mean the phenomenon is not real, but if I had to make a bet on it being physics beyond the standard model or an instrumental artefact, my money would not be on new physics.
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Popper was a philosopher speaking in ignorance (but I repeat myself).
That is a nice ad hominem logical fallacy.
You may be shocked to learn that the modern scientific method was entirely the invention of philosophers. Many self-proclaimed scientists disagree with this, but that is because they have not also studied history.
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The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new ...' Isaac Asimov
discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny
This event seems to fit that bill well.
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Mis-calibrate everything FTW! (Score:2)
This information has been most helpful. I will be a huge contributor to the scientific community. To sum up, if the equipment is mis-calibrated, new discoveries will be made! In my lab, I will now randomly calibrate equipment on a daily basis. I expect to publish several hundred papers just this year on new physics discoveries. I could randomly select from a pool of experiments what I might be able to reveal this year, but that would just be irresponsible science!
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I probably deserve a "Whoosh!" for this but I'll bite anyway.
Such a scheme would fail at the reproducibility part of the review process. You have to describe your process in the paper such that someone else can reproduce your results, if they build a correct machine that isn't mis-calibrated and then get a different result, it will then call your paper into question. Pull these shenanigans enough and people will stop publishing you and take a long, hard look at whatever university gave you your degree. Univ
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"I probably deserve a "Whoosh!" for this but I'll bite anyway."
The entire post was sarcasm, sorry you had to bite into it. I would like someone to prove my theory correct and they can risk their scientific credentials in the process. OTOH, I don't have any credentials so I'm hardly the one to know how to mis-calibrate expensive scientific equipment.
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Yeah, I figured it was probably sarcasm, but it actually isn't that far off from the anti-science or just plain science-ignorant positions that some very vocal people tend to take. (oh sci.physics.relativity, I mourne for you.). So I figured on the off chance that I can make at least one anti-science individual reconsider their views, it was worth replying too.
Trust me, I am much happier that you were posting than sarcastically than if you were a kook who actually believed it and wanted to argue. :)
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I don't agree with your analogy. Given 16 coin tosses and any length 8 sequence, you'd expect the sequence to appear 8/2^8 = 1/32 of the time. (Simulate it if you don't believe me; proving it is boring statistics.) In general a length k subsequence of a length n sequence of coin tosses appears (n-k)/2^k times. Replace 2 with s if the coin has s sides.
Anywho, I interpret the bit you quoted as saying "our theory's predicted probability distributions have an expected value for 'energy jet clustering about 144
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The may is really the operative word there, it may be a new force or a new particle or it could just be something that happened. The problem though is that there's very few facilities which are capable of running those sorts of experiments. If they don't get funding it's going to be really tough to test these sorts of things to actually verify them.
The article unfortunately confounds hypothesis with theory and what the title refers to is a theory that somebody posted to a sight, not one which has been subje
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Oblig XKCD: http://xkcd.com/882/ [xkcd.com]
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The real test is to come up with the hypothesis first, then collect the data.
The hypothesis came first. The hypothesis is, "A cluster of jet events with close energies indicates the presence of a particle with a certain mass" -- this method has been used time and again to detect new particles and is nothing new. This is just another instance of the same. If you take issue with the idea, you're pretty much going against reality because this is how new particles are, and have been, identified.
You can quibbl
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in order to have a hypothesis, you need to have an observation. This is that observation.
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"If I mine a big set of data against 100 random hypothesis I'll be able to find about 5 that I can show to be true with 95% confidence, despite the fact that there is nothing really going on."
they call that psychiatry.
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> The real test is to come up with the hypothesis first, then collect the data.
That is exactly what they were doing. Testing the hypothesis that the standard model accurately describes nature. They found it didn't, hence the need to explore it and come up with new hypothesis's to test.
1) You start out observing something the current theory can't explain.
2) Come up with a new theory that accurately predicts all experimental results so far, the newly observed effect, and that also predicts something new th
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1) You start out observing something the current theory can't explain.
2) Come up with a new theory that accurately predicts all experimental results so far, the newly observed effect, and that also predicts something new that has not been tested yet.
3) Test the new thing that the new theory predicted. If you do observe the new effect, it lends credence to the theory.
Except, of course, it's a hypothesis until 3 has been repeated a few times by different people; in particular by critics looking to disprove it. After it stand up to this scrutiny and organized efforts to disprove it actually fail, in the process proving it, it becomes a theory. Theory means only theologists will argue against it. But in vernacular use, theory = hypothesis.
What to call it? (Score:3)
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A useful link (Score:5, Informative)
...to the paper [arxiv.org], as opposed to the commentary by PopSci on the article written by NYT by someone who really didn't know what the hell they were talking about.
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And a link to the lecture set to go live in an hour on it:
http://vms-db-srv.fnal.gov/fmi/xsl/VMS_Site_2/000Return/video/r_livelogicindex.xsl?&-recid=573&-find=
(posted AC, you dirty karma whore)
Re:A useful link (Score:4, Informative)
Nobody views under a 2 any more, so if you want a link to be seen you have to post non-AC. No choice. Too b. noisy with trash talk otherwise. I'd not have seen your link at all if I didn't have a habit of expanding hidden replies on the offchance they're important.
(And because very few people mod ACs - why bother, it won't alter their karma - important AC posts often vanish into the ether.)
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very few people mod ACs - why bother, it won't alter their karma
Uhhh, stroking another Slashdotter's karma isn't the point of moderation.
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I could say something smark-alec about gravity wave detectors (which are the same experiment, only bigger and more expensive), but I'll limit myself to saying something smart-alec about how you can't get much more dissapeared than that.
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which are the same experiment, only bigger and more expensive
No, they're not.
And no, they're not.
Well, maybe bigger. Maybe. But not a patch on more expensive.
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Now that is very true. It has become way too cluttered with stuff that really adds no value and/or subtracts from it. It's top-heavy. Which means, incidentally, that it's going to become increasingly hard to maintain.
The really, really, really sad part -- there still isn't a single discussion/forum/BBS system out there that comes even close to the quality of Slashcode. I use a lot of different systems and Slashcode has them beat hands-down for quality of features and degree of flexibility.
When a ten tonne l
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I've been around from before the time of UIDs on Slashdot, but my memory of the early days is just not good enough to be able to comment on the case or offer any kind of opinion on what happened.
What I can say, though, unfortunately, is that no board - indeed no organization involving one person or more - is going to be free of politics, controversy or undeserved consequences. That is extremely unfortunate, doubly as most "social" venues (Slashdot included) have no form of appeal and even in those places wh
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*starts a sing-along*
And the postgrads of the thesis of the paper of the article of the blog of the boys who put the scintilating stitches in the britches of the witches who put the powders on the noses of the ladies of the harem of the court of King Caractacus were just passing by...
Dark Matter... (Score:2)
No No No... I'll call it a superfluid... yeah that's sounds cool! Puff Puff Puff!
Ya new funding, time to go get some Cheetos!
Measurement Error (Score:2)
Could it be? I mean, just maybe?
I know it's asking a lot, but science is about repeatable results. Sadly the article does not tell us whether this happened in various different tests or a single test where they simply threw that amount of protons/antiprotons against each other. If the latter, a minimal contamination could explain it all without being the scientific breakthrough of the afternoon.
Heim Theory says its mass is 0.51617049 MeV/c (Score:3)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heim_theory [wikipedia.org] is an alternate model of particle physics that does a pretty good job of predicting the mass of fundamental particles mathematically.
What's the predicted mass of the neutral electron particle? It's 0.51617049 MeV/c.
I hope (Score:2)
I hope they have found proof of a possible levity field, that counter balances the gravity filed and will make physics so much more fun and interesting for particle theory.
More Discoveries are waiting to be made (Score:2)
Even without the Trevatron, there are mountains of data to be dug through to find bumps and hills and scratches and wrinkles in the data. They are still finding new things in the data from LEP and from the moon material they brought back from that moon thing. So why bother if it is still online. The LHC will produce even more data and that means we have enough data in the future to play with it to the end of the world. And if not we can always built a larger thing. The device in Swiss/France is an internati
what id like to see (Score:2)
I have seen 2 explanations in physics plogs (Score:2)
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They are not really the same/related, nor are they likely to be correct.
The Z' proposal is by Dan Hooper, who neglects the fact that CDF has already excluded the possibility of a Z' with a mass below 800 GeV [http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0602045]. He is also the same guy who, while not being a member of the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope collaboration, used their data to "discover" dark matter not once but twice! I've become extremely skeptical of his work, as he seems excitable and prone to early and il
Re:Death is the end of time. Consciousness is time (Score:4, Insightful)
Lunchtime doubly so.
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I can't, it's not part of my predestined thoughts :/
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You belong in a church somewhere.
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First off, nobody cares about your philosophy major or your drug trip or whatever it is that lead you to such sophomoric philosophical conundrums.
Secondly, philosophy is mostly useless, solipsism and fatalism doubly so. What's the point? How does effort into either one of these topics benefit anyone?
Third, your logic fails. And it fails HARD. I have to prove something or accept that the alternative is true? Huh?
No, it's more like "prove all this is reality or accept that it CA
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Philosophy,as a study, is dead. It's just riding the coat tails of it's own history.
The Greeks had philosophers. There where teachers, mathematicians artists, doctors,. Great Men. Presumable with Great Women.
As time marched on, each category got it's own specialty.
Now science can either answer many of the great questions. The remaining ones have either been shown t be invalid, or by their nature and can not be proven true.
Nothing but wankery these days. These days being the past 50 or so years.
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It's hard to get funding for philosophical wankery these days so most of the wankery occurs in Climatology now.
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Re:Death is the end of time. Blah blah (Score:3)
A meaningless statement. In order for something to be considered an illusion you must consider the possibility that something can be deceived. And in order for that something to be deceived, it must be conscious.
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A meaningless statement. In order for something to be considered an illusion you must consider the possibility that something can be deceived. And in order for that something to be deceived, it must be conscious.
by Tyler Durden (136036) Alter Relationship on Wednesday April 06, @03:47PM (#35737136) Homepage
My mind just asploded.
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I said salvia not alcohol. Drinking wont allow you to experience and appreciate death.
Spoken like a man who's never drunk himself to death.
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You know what allows you to experience death by smoking it? Carbon monoxide, for example!
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You know what allows you to experience death by smoking it? Carbon monoxide, for example!
Carbon monoxide ain't flammable.
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WOO WOO!
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You know what else twists facts and perspectives? Hallucinogens. Even weak ass hallucinogens like Salvia Divinorum.
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Salvia isn't by any means a weak hallucinogen, but that doesn't mean that it's worth taking. It's in the dissociative class of hallucinogen (with DXM and fly agarics), as opposed to the psychedelic hallucinogens, like LSD, psylocybes and DMT.
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I bet you trust physicists don't you?
Just like you trust priests?
And doctors?
But why? Why trust them? They could manipulate or twist the facts to promote any kind of perspective they wish.
When a doctor says I'm fine, I don't believe him. When a priest tells me I'm not catholic, I believe him. When a physicist tells me not to cross the streams, I don't know what to believe. Which one is lying and why?
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Dude, how can you trust yourself? Don't you know that you can lie too, even to yourself? Haven't you made a lie a reality once by saying "I did X" over and over until eventually you made yourself believe it?
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Sure, but that lie can be tested simply by asking Ms. Alba.
Re:If it's not the God particle, it's Salvia. (Score:5, Funny)
A person who smoked salvia said that a black hole in reality opened up and their soul was sucked into it. Meanwhile physicists claim that black holes suck in matter and light and it can never escape.
Maybe if more physicists smoked Salvia [erowid.org] they'd have a better natural understanding of the universe. They would understand that salvia [erowid.org] is an alien lifeform, a plant brought to the earth by the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greys [slashdot.org] to consume our souls. They would understand that our reality is an illusion and that this force they just discovered is the salvia [erowid.org] force, the ultimate proof of alien life. The universe and existence is fake, accept it. You don't have consciousness, you are just a biological machine, please accept it.
Oddly enough, your post is as worth reading as the 40+ posts that came after it. You may have proved a point. God know what it is (maybe on some quantum scale you are proving that insanity is sanity at the same time) but, well done old chap.
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Re:If it's not the God particle, it's Salvia. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Try DMT, cowboy. Makes Salvia look like a Children's Chewable Tylenol. Also, people with schizophrenia should never do hallucinogens. Most people can do them, and still know the difference between hallucination and reality. Schizophrenics, not so much.
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Duh. Thus, the definition of schizophrenia.
Oh, it should be obvious to most people, especially schizophrenics, but it isn't. They do things like Salvia and think they are talking to gray aliens.
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Schizophrenics are the last people who would be able to figure that out, just like chronically depressed people would be the last to figure out that chronically depressed people shouldn't consume lots of a substance which acts as a depressant (alcohol).
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Although you are mostly correct, I feel just pedantic enough to point out that central nervous system depression is nothing at all like psychological depression, you may as well be comparing psychological depression to a tropical depression. Depressed people are generally cognitively capable of figuring out that using alcohol to treat their depression is a loosing battle. Schizophrenics are not generally capable of figuring out that hallucinogens make them crazier than they already are.
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Well, sure. Depressed people may be depressed but they're not crazy.
Speaking of pedantry, your post had a loosing/losing mismatch.
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Although you are mostly correct, I feel just pedantic enough to point out that central nervous system depression is nothing at all like psychological depression, you may as well be comparing psychological depression to a tropical depression.
And chronically depressed people should avoid hurricanes! See, it fits.
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Oh my. I'm ashamed, I never confuse loosing and losing!
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On one level, there's no way to tell, and therefore, it doesn't matter whether it is or not. On another level, of course it isn't a hallucination, "hallucination" is pretty much defined as "not reality" so you kind of have to redefine either "hallucination" or "reality" to make them the same thing, and then the terms become meaningless.
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LSD isn't nearly strong enough.
Ha. It's plenty strong, you just need to eat more.
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Obviously you weren't around in the late 60's and early 70's when getting the real-deal LSD was pretty easy.
Re:If it's not the God particle, it's Salvia. (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot has just opened up to a new demographic I think.
Who, crazy people? No, they've been here for years.
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We should test all physicists for drugs when they start talking about new forces or new theories of reality.
I don't think it's drugs so much as a looming expiration date for a project's funding. It's always nice to be able to point to something and say "look at this interesting new particle/force!" right before the plug gets pulled. That could get you another year or two.
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How do we know they aren't using performance enhancing drugs? We should test all physicists for drugs when they start talking about new forces or new theories of reality.
What would be performance enhancing drugs for a physicist, Provigil [wikipedia.org] and perhaps Adderall [wikipedia.org] or maybe Welbutrin [wikipedia.org]?
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You are deeply confused by semantics. "It's all an illusion" is an illusion, because "it" is not "that." No separation. You are not a little homonculus in your head, looking out of your eyes and listening through your ears. The present moment is real, not an illusion. Consciousness is real, not an illusion, but there is no one that has consciousness. It exists, because it is created by circumstance, but consciousness does not adhere to an individual.
There is life to sense and measure heat. Life is real. It
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gb2/b/
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"Physicists at Fermi Lab have found a 'suspicious bump' in there data that could indicate they've found a new elementary particle or even a new force of nature."
Where data?
Re:I know it's petty... (Score:5, Funny)
Fixed
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Arr, that there data be bumpy.
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"Physicists at Fermi Lab have found a 'suspicious bump' in THAT there data OVER YONDER that could indicate they've found a new elementary particle or even a new force of nature. Yeeeeeeeha!"
Better?
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The bus you don't see will still run your ass over.
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Ah, but does your brain exist? If not, then maybe the universe was never there to begin with.
Re:Sad to lose the Tevatron (Score:5, Informative)
FWIW, earlier drafts of the paper were much more sensationalistic than the final draft that the collaboration approved. A large contingent of the collaboration, myself included, would have removed our names from the paper if it had done something as insane as claim discovery of a new particle. So, we specifically pushed to make the paper more scientifically honest and less effective as a "ploy to keep the funds flowing." That said, the NYT article and all the other mainstream news reports on the issue are far, far more sensationalistic than anything the analyzers ever even considered producing...
Some interesting things to note:
So, long story short, there is certainly something here to be interested in. Both the theorists who write the Monte Carlo generators and the experimentalists analyzing data from the LHC experiments are paying close attention to this result, as it affects their work. We will know more after further study and work, both to improve the Monte Carlos and to look for similar effects in the ATLAS and CMS data.
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This sentence FTFA makes me rather dubious: "A new analysis of 10,000 proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron showed a weird result a couple hundred times".
Two problems here: a "new" analysis? Does it mean it needs massaging the results? And two hundred times out of ten thousand does not necessarily mean it's statistically significant, that's 2%, to know if it's significant or not one needs more information than those two numbers alone.
An intriguing result is in this paragraph: "Last fall, Fermilab phy
Re:Sad to lose the Tevatron (Score:5, Insightful)
I would strongly advise reading the actual paper (can be found on the arxiv) instead of the NYT article, which, as I mentioned, is sensational and largely content-free. There is plenty of information in the paper about how they determined the significance of the result and how the analysis (event selection etc) was done. It should answer your questions in this regard. As far as being "new", the data from these experiments is analyzed in scientifically and statistically rigorous ways all the time. It in no way involves "massaging" the data, which you can see if you read the hundreds of papers that have come out of high energy physics experiments.
I really can't comment professionally on the sterile neutrino re dark matter. I've heard of the MiniBOONE result, and think it is very interesting, but the viability of a sterile neutrino as dark matter is pretty far afield for me. Perhaps a passing cosmologist can comment?
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All I want to know is, can you light one of them on fire?
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It is like Voyager (Score:2)
We present the new strange particle of the week, which made $SOMETHING_INCREDIBLE and transformed $OBJECT_A into $OBJECT_B which allows us to $DO_SOMETHING_EVEN_MORE_INCREDIBLE which we will use to (go home|blow up our enemies|have a warm bath).