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Strange pattern found inside world’s largest atom smasher has physicists excited

StarCruiser said:
I'm not sure what they've found, and they may not be either but:

https://www.livescience.com/LHCb-hints-new-physics.html

Basically, they were expecting electrons and muons to be produced in roughly even numbers in the experiment and...nope. Heavily favored electrons. Standard model may be in real trouble now.
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The trouble with these discoveries is that they often go away before the five-sigma confidence level is reached. This is currently only three-sigma.

Machine finds tantalising hints of new physics - BBC News

The beauty quark has usually been called the bottom quark since 1975 (just as the truth quark is usually called the top quark). The names isospin (up or down), top, bottom, strangeness, and charm are arbitrary labels for the quantum numbers or flavours that describe quarks.

Flavour (particle physics) - Wikipedia
 
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Hints of new physics at the three-sigma level that never reaches five-sigma always reminds me of the Mandela effect for some reason. It makes me think we sometimes glimpse or perhaps even slip into alternate realities where history plays out slightly differently and the laws of the Universe are tweaked. Work on Wolfram's branchial theory seems to hint that there might be quite a bit of elbow room for underlying automata rules to vary. However, my wacky hypothesis isn't falsifiable so it's not science.
 
Asbo Zaprudder said:
Hints of new physics at the three-sigma level that never reaches five-sigma always reminds me of the Mandela effect for some reason. It makes me think we sometimes glimpse or perhaps even slip into alternate realities where history plays out slightly differently and the laws of the Universe are tweaked. Work on Wolfram's branchial theory seems to hint that there might be quite a bit of elbow room for underlying automata rules to vary. However, my wacky hypothesis isn't falsifiable so it's not science.
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Thanks Asbo, hadn't seen the Wolfram branchial theory before. I was wondering if this was the reason a couple of years ago some science magazines published stories about if science found the "mathematical secrets to the universe", we may have a predictive model for everything, but it may be totally wrong?
 
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Most current theories are deeply flawed in some fundamental way. This has made me suspect that all we are ever doing is correlating mathematically generated patterns with what we observe. To assume they are ever identically one and the same is a mistake. Whether such calculations can ever achieve total correspondence I don't know but I doubt it.
 
Numbers don't lie - people lie with numbers...

Not saying that scientists are lying but, they are often overdependent on math rather than actually experimenting and observing. There's something to be said for tinkering.
 
The anomalous muon gyromagnetic ratio (aka magnetic moment) value a=(g-2)/2 measurement from Fermilab looks set to reach 5 sigma. It's currently at 4.2 sigma. The value appears to deviate significantly from the predicted value and hints at some hitherto undiscovered force or particle. It's much harder to detect the signal for the electron as interaction strength scales with mass squared. The muon is 200 times more massive than the electron so the interaction signal for it is 40,000 times greater.

Muons: 'Strong' evidence found for a new force of nature - BBC News
Fermilab | Muon g-2 (fnal.gov)
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It's definitely getting more likely...

This will definitely mean a deep search for just WHY it's so off from predictions. Are the predictions themselves just off or is there something else out there we haven't picked up yet causing the error, error, faulty....must sterilize...
 
StarCruiser said:
It's definitely getting more likely...

This will definitely mean a deep search for just WHY it's so off from predictions. Are the predictions themselves just off or is there something else out there we haven't picked up yet causing the error, error, faulty....must sterilize...
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Some research papers will be published soon showing they missed x,y & z interactions of the muon with other particles which makes up the difference....or there truly are new particles hiding in spacetime.

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The muon is just a heavy version of the electron so the interaction terms that need to be summed to predict g are well understood as far as the Standard Model goes. The difference between g for the muon and the electron is due to their difference in mass. The electron might well have the same QED, weak, and hadron interactions but these contribute less to its g value as its mass is 1/207th that of the muon. Contributions to the muon's g value from weak and hadron interactions are important unlike for the electron. The muon's g value might also be sensitive to contributions from new physics beyond the Standard Model, such as supersymmetry, new particles, or new force carrying bosons.

The tau is even more massive at 3,477 times the mass of an electron but its mean lifetime is extremely short 2.9x10^-13s. Relativistic time dilation would help extend this but you'd have to accelerate it up much more - nearly to the speed of light - to keep it around long enough. The mean lifetime of a muon is 2x10^-6s and its mass 16.8 times less than a tau so accelerating it to prolong its apparent life is more feasible.
 
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Proof of new physics from the muon’s magnetic moment? Maybe not, according to a new theoretical calculation

One group from Fermilab tackled the experimental side and on April 7, 2021, released results confirming the original measurement. But my colleagues and I took a different approach.
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I am a theoretical physicist and the spokesperson and one of two coordinators of the Budapest-Marseille-Wuppertal collaboration. This is a large–scale collaboration of physicists who have been trying to see if the older theoretical prediction was incorrect. We used a new method to calculate how muons interact with magnetic fields.

My team’s theoretical prediction is different from the original theory and matches both the old experimental evidence and the new Fermilab data. If our calculation is correct, it resolves the discrepancy between theory and experiment and would suggest that there is not an undiscovered force of nature.

Our result was published in the journal Nature on April 7, 2021, the same day as the new experimental results.
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One mystery remains though: the gap between the original prediction and our new theoretical result. My team and I believe that ours is correct, but our result is the very first of its sort. As always in science, other calculations need to be done to confirm or refute it.
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It seems the earlier methods used to calculate the magnetic moment of a muon was flawed and this new theoretical improvement corrects for that, I gather.
 
Well, this is exactly how science is supposed to proceed. It sounds like the discrepancy might come about from the calculation of the annihilation cross-section of a virtual electron-positron pair into virtual hadrons (presumably pions, which are responsible for about 70% of the hadronic vacuum polarisation contribution to muon g) via virtual photons. Such terms occur in the series that is summed when calculating the expected value of g - terms visualised as Feynman diagrams in popular descriptions. So the observed discrepancy might well be due to a systematic error in the predicted value of g rather than in the measured value or requiring a new particle or force. We might at least learn more about QCD if the former.
 
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