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."
Re:Death is the end of time. Consciousness is time (Score:4, Insightful)
Lunchtime doubly so.
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.
Re:If it's not the God particle, it's Salvia. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Do they account for hypothesis-mining? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:It has now been named.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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?