Something interesting may be happening at Fermilab.
Evidence is mounting that a tiny subatomic particle seems to be disobeying the known laws of physics, scientists announced on Wednesday, a finding that would open a vast and tantalizing hole in our understanding of the universe.
The result, physicists say, suggests that there are forms of matter and energy vital to the nature and evolution of the cosmos that are not yet known to science.
“This is our Mars rover landing moment,” said Chris Polly, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill., who has been working toward this finding for most of his career.
The particle célèbre is the muon, which is akin to an electron but far heavier, and is an integral element of the cosmos. Dr. Polly and his colleagues — an international team of 200 physicists from seven countries — found that muons did not behave as predicted when shot through an intense magnetic field at Fermilab.
The aberrant behavior poses a firm challenge to the Standard Model, the suite of equations that enumerates the fundamental particles in the universe (17, at last count) and how they interact.
The article is well worth a read and a nice distraction from politicized EVERYTHING
For decades, physicists have relied on and have been bound by the Standard Model, which successfully explains the results of high-energy particle experiments in places like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. But the model leaves many deep questions about the universe unanswered.
Most physicists believe that a rich trove of new physics waits to be found, if only they could see deeper and further. The additional data from the Fermilab experiment could provide a major boost to scientists eager to build the next generation of expensive particle accelerators.
It might also lead in time to explanations for the kinds of cosmic mysteries that have long preoccupied our lonely species. What exactly is dark matter, the unseen stuff that astronomers say makes up one-quarter of the universe by mass? Indeed, why is there matter in the universe at all?
Perhaps it’s time to junk the Standard Model. Perhaps not.
The full article is an interesting read.
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If you have 17 “fundamental” particles, they are not fundamental.
If you have to postulate hidden variables to explain your experimental data (e.g. colour and flavour for your quarks), then you have a model like the “Just So” stories of Kipling. They appear to provide satisfactory, even entertaining, explanations for the state of things but actually explain nothing because there is no way to confirm (or falsify) these postulates.
If you need millions of data points and then have to massage that data with a lot of very tricky statistical techniques, but still end up with a barely perceptible signal of supposedly the most important particle in the Standard Model Zoo (the Higgs boson), then you should perhaps consider tossing the lot out and starting again.
The Standard Model is in deep trouble – and has been for a long time – but too many people have too much invested in it to let go.
All we really know is that we don’t know. Things like “string theory” are pursued in the hope of making sense of it all but they also fail.Meanwhile billions of dollars of taxpayer money are spent to crash things together at ever higher energies in the belief that some kind of understanding can be found in the random debris.
Alternatively we might be able to junk the inelegant (linear thinking) hypothesis of Dark Matter. We presume to know too much and arrive at the fanciful when looking for ‘whys’ in astronomy. Space-time may be a factor that confounds shallowly thought out Euclidean/Newtonian reasoning on the need for excess mass.
There is no “hypothesis of dark matter” that’s just a phrase used to discuss a set of observations* whose source is acknowledged as being unknown.
*Mostly regarding the rotational speed of galaxies.
The riddle is solved.
The theoretical calculations were erroneous.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03418-1
there is no new physics.