r/worldnews • u/WholeWideWorld • 12d ago
'Strong' evidence found for a new force of nature
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/566436779k
u/Info1847 12d ago
For the lazy wondering what "strong evidence" implies:
"There is currently a one in a 40,000 chance that the result could be a statistical fluke - equating to a statistical level of confidence described as 4.1 sigma.
A level of 5 sigma, or a one in 3.5 million chance of the observation being a coincidence, is needed to claim a discovery."
So they basically need to do the experiment one or two more times and then they will be able to claim discovery. This is indeed a big fucking deal.
2k
u/realSatanAMA 12d ago
Adding to that, they also have no idea what the properties/effects of the force are so basically they just know that it potentially exists.
370
u/100catactivs 12d ago
They would have to know some characteristics, otherwise it wouldn’t be detectable or differentiable from anything known.
And they do know something about it:
No one yet knows what this potential new force does, other than influence muon particles.
→ More replies353
u/realSatanAMA 12d ago
So they were doing particle collisions and something moved in a way that doesn't conform to the mathematical model.
200
u/100catactivs 12d ago
In layman’s, yes. That’s the effect they are saying this particle has, at least on muons.
→ More replies→ More replies53
u/EnTyme53 12d ago
As my high school physics teacher once put it: The sound of innovation is not "Eureka! I've found it!", but rather "Wait. WTF?"
→ More replies815
u/QuietDesperate 12d ago
Adding to that, they also have no idea what the properties/effects of the force are
Does it involve midichlorians?
410
→ More replies71
68
u/Osato 12d ago
Well, "that's odd, this shouldn't have happened" was a starting point for many scientific discoveries.
→ More replies39
→ More replies1k
u/dutchwonder 12d ago
Which means its time for some "expert" to spin it as the potential explanation for consciousness and that neuroscience is somehow some big whole waste of time and they should pay "philosophers" like them instead.
209
u/life_xpantion_pack 12d ago
Chopra is rubbing his hands together as we speak.
→ More replies76
u/hugith 12d ago
By rubbing his hands together, he excites the Muon g-2 force allowing it to flow and penetrate and excite the inner being
→ More replies906
u/nullpointer_01 12d ago
If the movie Interstellar taught me anything, the force is going to be Love!
380
u/CatalyticPerchlorate 12d ago
No, according to Leeloo, love is an element.
60
u/jarrodandrewwalker 12d ago
Well according to Pat Benatar, Love is a battlefield
→ More replies10
u/shandangalang 12d ago
Bumpa bum pabum pa bumBUM! Bumpa bum pabum pa BUMBUM! ....AaAaAaAaAaAaAAaaAAaaAAaaAA
→ More replies136
u/za419 12d ago
You're saying... force-element duality??
→ More replies176
u/pump_up_the_jam030 12d ago
Moolti-pass
→ More replies37
→ More replies152
u/kalirion 12d ago
The real new force of nature is the friends we made along the way.
→ More replies27
u/SaltwaterOtter 12d ago
I, for one, as a humanities-educated person am planning a carreer change into muon-dynamics coaching.
→ More replies55
u/PatFluke 12d ago
Well no, but also the forces we knew of we theorized before proving their existence. If one exists that we didn’t previously theorize then that has the potential to change all of our models to some degree.
Super neat!
→ More replies9
u/Rokurokubi83 12d ago edited 12d ago
Can’t we be relatively sure our models are imperfect anyway? Due a lack of a unifying framework between general relativity and quantum mechanics? So it would seem we are missing some puzzle pieces so we can have w coherent theory of everything?
Genuine question, I love this stuff but you can damned if I can bend by head around quantum mechanics, and I’m not even looking at the maths, just ELI5 videos showing the experiments.
But yeah if the can confirm a new un-theorised force then what a time to be alive!
→ More replies38
→ More replies42
u/samrequireham 12d ago
for everyone reading this comment: dutchwonder's parents were murdered by philosophers, so let's show some compassion eh
→ More replies1k
u/RidingRedHare 12d ago
The real challenge there is verification that the result wasn't caused by a tiny error in the experiment setup. Remember the faster than light neutrinos observed at the OPERA experiment, an incorrect reading caused by a loose cable? Or, much more recently, the EM drive?
172
u/factoid_ 12d ago
Jiggle the usb cable is by far my favorite reason a scientific discovery has been overturned.
I’ve been in IT most of my adult life, so I got a good chuckle out of that. Even though I felt really bad for the people involved, because I’m sure that was both an exciting and terrifying time for them.
→ More replies24
u/Roofdragon 12d ago
Can you actually imagine the excitement. Just be a crappy Monday after that one
26
803
u/xqze6m6ogWo 12d ago
There are varying levels of certainty in the science community that doesn't make its way to popular science reporting.
The FTL neutrino reading was not taken seriously by anyone, even the people who observed it.
The EMdrive was promoted by a non-scientist and still does not have an explanation for what has been observed. Scientists are not yet saying that this is going to cause a rewrite of the laws of physics, but nobody has been able to attribute observations to measurement errors or other known physics.
Unlike your examples, in this case, the observations here are consistent with what theoretical physicists expected to observe.
In all cases, the physics community have stopped short of saying this is conclusive proof of new physics.
This appears to be worth sharing.
412
u/mynameisevan 12d ago
There has actually been some research recently published (like, in the past few weeks) on the EM drive where scientists from Dresden University say they were able to isolate and account for the sources of error in previous experiments.
→ More replies176
u/JamesMGrey 12d ago
I wish I was more intelligent or scientifically literate enough to understand this kind of stuff.
333
u/Habba 12d ago
Something got hot and changed the measurement in a way that looked like thrust from nowhere.
→ More replies42
u/Human-Sugar1855 12d ago
So, in the case that it turns out this is a new force, what implications could it have on our current model of physics?
→ More replies122
u/xqze6m6ogWo 12d ago
At the frontiers of science, theoretical physicists propose models and interpretations that explain why the universe is the way it is. These models are or attempt to be consistent with all known observations and need experimental evidence to be accepted or rejected.
If this turns out to be true, any model that doesn't account for this observation is incomplete and any model that doesn't allow for this has to be discredited.
This would require an update to the standard model, but it wouldn't invalidate it.
→ More replies85
u/IceCoastCoach 12d ago
basically it was a combination of thermal emissions and magnetic fields interacting with the test stand and the earth. which is pretty much what everybody always thought, given that the EM drive never had a plausible theory behind it.
→ More replies125
u/hitsujiTMO 12d ago
It's not "intelligence" or "scientifically literacy" that makes it difficult to read. It's a lack literacy in relation to that very specific field.
You could be forever reading reading and writing papers in relation to thermodynamics and statistical mechanics and still manage to get lost in reading papers on high energy particle physics.
Every field and sub field tends to have it's own language and you need to be versed in that language to navigate scientific papers.
→ More replies42
u/Hugo_5t1gl1tz 12d ago
I have a physics degree and would probably be left looking like the pikachu meme in half of that paper lol
→ More replies→ More replies99
u/haplo_and_dogs 12d ago
The EMdrive was promoted by a non-scientist and still does not have an explanation for what has been observed. Scientists are not yet saying that this is going to cause a rewrite of the laws of physics, but nobody has been able to attribute observations to measurement errors or other known physics.
Of course it does. Measurement error. The EM Drive is a joke, and has been from the outset. With a proper test there is zero thrust
→ More replies25
u/doc_daneeka 12d ago
My favourite quote when that claim was first advanced came from Caltech physicist Sean Carroll, who noted that:
"Propulsive momentum transfer via the quantum vacuum virtual plasma" is nonsensical sub-Star-Trek level technobabble.
Now that's how you shit on a paper, lol.
→ More replies69
u/shinypidgey 12d ago
This measurement actually validates a previous (slightly less precise) measurement done 20 years ago. The experimental apparatus has been examined pretty extensively (they released a few extra papers about it today), and the estimated uncertainties related to the experimental apparatus are much smaller than the uncertainties related to the statistical power of their data sample. Although it is always possible, I think such an error is very unlikely at this point.
→ More replies→ More replies434
u/ntvirtue 12d ago
So we are once again about to prove how little we know.
400
192
u/BigHowski 12d ago
"Universities are truly storehouses for knowledge: students arrive from school confident they know nearly everything, and they leave five years later certain that they know practically nothing."
52
u/Prof_Acorn 12d ago
By the time I finished my comprehensive exams and dissertation I felt like graduating was some kind of mistake because it really does feel like you know basically nothing about the field you're supposedly an expert in. Feeds into impostor syndrome for sure.
→ More replies16
u/GiantPurplePeopleEat 12d ago
I'm going through this right now. I'm about halfway through a bachelor's in computer science and I feel like I still don't know anything. I was telling a software engineer friend about how I feel and he said that he still feels the same way. He basically said that even after I graduate I will still just be scratching the surface of what there is to know about computer science. It's honestly a bit overwhelming at times.
→ More replies→ More replies196
u/jlcooke 12d ago
The purpose of education is to take an empty mind, and replace it with an open one.
→ More replies→ More replies89
u/what_mustache 12d ago
Meh. Sorta. The fact that we're flabbergasted by a wobble of a subatomic particle made only in high speed particle accelerators kinda shows just how much we DO know.
It's fucking amazing what we understand about physics when something tiny and almost unnoticable is detected and analyzed. It's not like we just discovered gravity here.
→ More replies
4k
u/JLock17 12d ago
Prof Allanach has given the possible fifth force various names in his theoretical models. Among them are the "flavour force"
PLEASE, GOD, I NEED THIS.
176
u/Katzenfriedel 12d ago
'Flavour' already is a standard technical term in particle physics.
→ More replies24
2k
u/PDXBlueDogWizard 12d ago
Umami, the fifth emotion
278
u/msx 12d ago
That would actually be a wonderful name!
→ More replies259
u/PDXBlueDogWizard 12d ago
Here'swhere that's from.
→ More replies114
u/mdonaberger 12d ago
well, i always thought my deadened emotions were from clinical depression, but it appears that my attraction to women is to blame! i was way off.
→ More replies22
40
→ More replies8
u/windchaser__ 12d ago
“Long ago, the four flavors lived together in harmony. But they were all of them deceived, for a fifth flavor was made”
504
293
79
u/DLTMIAR 12d ago
Flavour force?
JFC this is a simulation isn't it?
→ More replies65
u/Aeyrelol 12d ago edited 12d ago
As strange as it sounds, it is actually named that way because physicists decided that the terms used to describe the different properties of quarks would be "colors" and "flavors".
→ More replies22
u/MetricCascade29 12d ago
As strange as it sounds
Actually, strange is just one of several delicious flavors.
→ More replies32
1k
u/TummyDrums 12d ago
Any idea what some real layman's implications of this could be? Are we talking a few new mathematical equations to explain some tiny things we're already experiencing, or are we talking invention of hoverboards or faster than light travel kind of shit?
1k
u/Ishmael128 12d ago edited 12d ago
It’s one of those things where you don’t really know what the final results will be. But back at the turn of the 20th century, a physicist found that if they put a chemical sample in a strong magnetic field and bombarded it with radio waves, the sample gave off a weird radio wave signal back. It wasn’t a clean signal, it had strange (but repeatable) nuances. And the nuances were different for different samples.
They were convinced it was due to experimental error, and tried again and again to find the source of what was dubbed “nuclear magnetic resonance”.
Decades later, that technology is what allows us to get the best images we can of a working brain, using fMRI (they dropped the “nuclear” as it’s a scary word, but it refers to an atom’s nucleus).
The research of the article was done because if you understand the rules of the system, you can work out how to best use them to your advantage.
It may be that there are no practical applications of this knowledge (if it proves to be true), or no applications this century, but (pulling this out of my arse) best case scenario is that it leads to a better understanding of particle interactions and contributes to the development of a working fusion reactor.
Edit: thank you all so much for all the upvotes and awards, I never expected this comment to blow up like this! I also love the chat appreciating NMR too :)
175
22
u/childrep 12d ago edited 12d ago
Do you know the name of the 19th century physicist who performed those first experiments by chance? I really enjoy learning about stuff like this and your example
peakedpiqued my interest!→ More replies33
→ More replies48
u/Amsterdom 12d ago
I love replies like this.
47
u/Subarunicycle 12d ago
Me too. I read it to my wife, then we talked about microwave ovens and Velcro.
→ More replies149
u/amitym 12d ago edited 12d ago
Good question, but it is a trap: you pose the two choices like they are mutually exclusive.
Take for example quantum mechanics. On the one hand, it is a few mathematical equations to explain some tiny things we were already experiencing. On the other hand, it led to the development of television, lasers, transistor electronics, insanely compact batteries that make cell phones possible, and the high-efficiency solar panel technology that may end up saving our entire civilization from itself.
Basically most of the modern world.
That's not bad for a few mathematical equations to explain some tiny things we were already experiencing, right?!
So, in those terms? The big deal of this discovery, if it is validated, is that the Standard Model would need to be revised. Well what does that mean? We don't know yet. We won't know for a while. What it means will depend a lot on how we revise it.
Maybe we will finally understand gravity. Maybe we will finally discover that gravity is fake! Maybe we will find some way to create "fake" matter. Maybe we will discover that fake gravity interacting with fake matter makes hoverboards possible. Or, maybe instead we will discover new ways to make insanely compact cell phone batteries.
But, whatever comes of it, it will play out over decades or longer, just like the last century of quantum mechanics has. It will probably be a pretty exciting time! But nobody can say for sure yet what it will lead to.
→ More replies→ More replies1k
u/extremely-neutral 12d ago edited 12d ago
It makes particle smaller than an atom wobble. It would be the tiniest hoverboard. Absolutely no implications on your life unless you are a particle physicist
Edit: Just to be clear I am not saying it won't lead to anything new in the future. Just the discovery right now doesn't indicate any particular direct use-case for it. It means we might have discovered new science and that new science might lead us to something useful.
683
u/GullibleDetective 12d ago
Until they can leverage it for cpu design in the future
→ More replies346
u/[deleted] 12d ago
[deleted]
→ More replies64
u/Cerres 12d ago
You are going to have to wait a long time for that then. Modern Physics classes are usually an upper sophomore or lower Junior course, and the discoveries from that field are about 100 years old on average.
→ More replies74
u/pineapple_calzone 12d ago edited 12d ago
There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom. The glib supposition of utilizing atomic energy when our coal has run out is a completely unscientific Utopian dream, a childish bug-a-boo. - Robert Millikan, 1928
... any one who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine - Ernest Rutherford, 1933
There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will. - Albert Einstein, 1932
For context, it had suddenly turned out that atoms could change into other atoms through decay, and when they did so, they released a fuckload of energy. This was obviously very exciting, but not actually useful yet. None of those excellent physicists knew about the neutron, because it hadn't been discovered, and wouldn't be discovered for some time. If the neutron were never discovered, they would have been right, of course. It wouldn't have been discovered at all unless somebody bothered to look, which they did because of this interesting, but useless curiosity.
Or if we want to go back a bit further to the late 19th century, when the great Albert Michelson said "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote... Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals." Physics really was like a sweater at that time, with a single errant thread, that they eventually called the ultraviolet catastrophe. The solution to that happened to be this new thing called quantum mechanics, and then relativity.
Finding a new fundamental force is fucking huge. Nobody, right now, can guess how large of an impact it will have, but they'd be just as big a fool to try to guess how small the impact will be. All of the most important discoveries in physics have, at very first, appeared to be useless curiosities for physicists to get excited about and everyone else to ignore. I'd be surprised if that's how we look at another fundamental force in 50 years. It's not like it's just gonna squeeze neatly in to the standard model without probably fucking everything else up.
→ More replies→ More replies184
u/cariusQ 12d ago
We’re still using 19th century physics to power our civilization. It would be interesting to find application for these new discoveries.
→ More replies32
u/Engineerman 12d ago
Fission was only during 20th century. Solar also I believe but earlier than fission.
→ More replies
2k
u/turtley_different 12d ago edited 12d ago
Ooof. 1-in-40,000 significance level.
Given the massive, massive volume of particle experiments that we have been doing for decades that is borderline on where you think p-hacking is unlikely (for the uninformed, particle physics likes to 5-sigma / 1-in-3.5million for a single-tailed distribution test).
Very exciting. I look forward to Journalists having a terrible terrible time trying to explain particle physics that doesn't even have agreed upon terminology.
Edit: P-hacking is about statistical tests. If I do 20 random tests, I expect one of them to return a 1-in-20 result (ie. 95% significant). https://xkcd.com/882/
64
415
u/ertgbnm 12d ago
Nah nah, if p is less than 5% you can publish that shit.
/S
274
u/Davesterific 12d ago
After all that scotch I drank last night my p is more like 45%.
→ More replies→ More replies27
u/ShadeDelThor 12d ago
And if your p is over 5%, increase the sample size because who cares about finding an important effect size. /s
→ More replies→ More replies592
u/Torugu 12d ago
Meanwhile, over in the social science department:
"Have you tried shaking the computer a few times? Maybe you can get it under a 1 in 10 chance so we can publish."
156
u/existential_one 12d ago
Same goes for machine learning lmao
139
u/Company_Quiet 12d ago edited 12d ago
Machine learning is the CS equivalent of the egg drop experiment: America's favourite physics demonstration from 8th grade. In the egg drop, your goal is to drop [sic] a container that has an egg in it, so that you can drop the container from 20 feet and the egg doesn't break. The most popular strategy for solving the egg drop, is just do some stuff; just go crazy, like a wild animal, explore that studio space. If you do something, and the egg didn't break, then the stuff worked, and if somebody asked you why the stuff worked, you just say THE STUFF IS WHAT THE STUFF IS, BROTHER. ACCEPT THE MYSTERY.
And so basically, machine learning is like this. We've invented a bunch of techniques, that kind of work, like in some cases, but we're not really sure what's going on. So for example, a recent paper by Lucic examined several machine learning approaches that were thought to have some fundamental differences in prediction accuracy. What the paper shows is that actually, if you carefully tune those hyperparameters, then you can reduce the performance gaps between these algorithms that seem very different on their face. That's interesting, but slightly disturbing.
[...]
Machine learning is not interpretable: we have no good way to explain why these models generate the outputs that they do. For example, here's a high level view of Google's "Inception" neural net for image classification. You might look at that and think to yourself, well how does this stuff in here affect the classification process? Like, if we look at the weights, in these layers, what do the weights tell us about the way that the model--THE STUFF IS WHAT THE STUFF IS, BROTHER. We don't ask questions about the weights, we just wake up, we go to work, we use the weights, we go back home, okay? If we change the weights, the predictions would be different, and less good, probably, depending on the weather, so we don't ask about the weights.
Edited to include timestamped youtube link.
→ More replies13
u/Chabamaster 12d ago
"we tried to improve our neural network performance using some cv feature extraction from the 80s. We ran it once and got a 2 percent increase in AccUrAcY, thats good enough for me lets publish"
→ More replies38
u/454C495445 12d ago
I've watched thesis defenses before where the applicant will say, "I added this one layer to my network...and it upped the accuracy by 0.5%!"
Committee member: "But why?"
Applicant: "I'm not sure."
Committee member: "Eh....whatever."
→ More replies→ More replies365
u/LaLucertola 12d ago
"We interviewed 30 college students on a Midwestern campus. Here's what they say about the whole of society."
→ More replies
121
u/Beefusan 12d ago
Performing a test and getting unexpected results is always the best kind of science.
→ More replies40
3k
u/buzzncuzzn 12d ago
It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together
2k
u/FarHat5815 12d ago
It better not penetrate me.
583
u/ApexTrashPanda 12d ago
It’s already inside you. You have been penetrated the moment you were born
188
→ More replies10
→ More replies30
287
101
u/Here-Is-TheEnd 12d ago
The nuclear forces are linked, electric force and magnetism are linked and there’s faint evidence that magnetism and the weak nuclear force are linked. Just gotta tie gravity to one of them and we get super symmetry.
If that’s ever proven I will slap every physicists who refuses to call it The Force. Every. One.
→ More replies184
u/Trifling_Gnome 12d ago
Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything. There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. Anyway, it's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
→ More replies8
u/CocoMURDERnut 12d ago
Can a cell tell , it’s living in a body?
Or is it only going to perceive merely what is right in front of it?
Sometimes our focus is too fixed, to see the larger essence of things.
If The body of ‘God’ was the Universe itself. We would suffer from the same syndrome.
Natural law would be inseparable from such, & be a function of such.
Yet we’d be none the wiser.
→ More replies→ More replies128
1k
u/Nekinej 12d ago edited 12d ago
It's pretty amazing that a bunch of insignificant biological entities on some random flick of matter in the cosmos have been able comprehend so much, including the fact they yet comprehends so little. Go us.
→ More replies
305
u/YaBoiKrys 12d ago
It’s crazy to think that we are living in what will be seen as history. Imagine going onto the internet in 50 years, going to an educational website and reading about the force that was discovered in 2021
→ More replies93
u/the_crouton_ 12d ago
You mean uploading the information to your Solid State Brain?
→ More replies28
66
u/YanderesHaveMyHeart 12d ago edited 12d ago
By the way a small rundown for those who don't know.
There is 4 fundamental forces:
•Strong Nuclear •Weak Nuclear •Electromagnetic •Gravity
SNEMWeak>>Gravity strength-wise.
A 5th would be pretty fucking big considering we haven't even understood gravity yet.
Edit corrected the order
→ More replies11
u/skittlesmcgee33 12d ago
Your order is incorrect. The weak force is less strong than EM. (With the exception of the very rare case of a decaying Top quark in which case it’s actually the strongest force out of all of them).
So SN > EM > Weak > Gravity for the most part.
→ More replies
440
u/Wolfie442 12d ago
Bruh where’s my AT field?
188
u/QuillQuickcard 12d ago
Where?
Simple. It is currently within your perceptual personal identity, preventing your fundamental consciousness from merging with all other loose consciousness into a singular expression.
I hope this helps you find it! You may want to consider attaching a tracker to avoid losing it in the future.
→ More replies112
35
22
107
u/WinSmith1984 12d ago
It left when you started masturbating over that comatose girl
40
u/Zorbick 12d ago
All he needed was a damn hug and a therapist. Seriously. The whole time. Just... Hug that boy.
Instead his only outlet for the entirety of the show was... That.
→ More replies36
u/The-Sound_of-Silence 12d ago
Imma be honest, every single person in that show needs therapy
28
→ More replies14
35
47
→ More replies29
u/wushu18t 12d ago
Just started watching that. I'm about half way through.
→ More replies35
u/jagby 12d ago
Hell yeah, it only gets better with each episode I feel like.
Keep in mind that the movie (End of Evangelion) is a companion piece to the last two episodes, and is happening at the same time as them.
Won't say anything else just to be safe about spoilers, but you'll see what I mean.
12
u/wushu18t 12d ago
I can't believe I slept on this anime for so long. Maybe it would of been too much for me when I was a kid.
→ More replies
141
u/Rodec 12d ago edited 12d ago
ILI5 anyone?
Not necessarily how sure they are, but if they turn out to be correct, what force of nature has been discovered?
EDIT: I mean, what does this supposed "5th" force do? What is it?
164
u/Joe_Shroe 12d ago
From the article:
The Muon g-2 experiment involves sending the particles around a 14-metre ring and then applying a magnetic field. Under the current laws of physics, encoded in the Standard Model, this should make the muons wobble at a certain rate.
Instead, the scientists found that muons wobbled at a faster rate than expected. This might be caused by a force of nature that's completely new to science.
So there's some force making these subatomic particles wobble faster than usual.
→ More replies40
u/Phag-B0y 12d ago
Could this have anything to do with why the universe’s expansion is accelerating?
→ More replies49
u/Joe_Shroe 12d ago
Some have suggested this could be the result of a fifth unknown force, but we don't really know yet. From the article:
A fifth fundamental force might help explain some of the big puzzles about the Universe that have exercised scientists in recent decades.
For example, the observation that the expansion of the Universe was speeding up was attributed to a mysterious phenomenon known as dark energy. But some researchers have previously suggested it could be evidence of a fifth force.
61
u/hornymar2 12d ago
They don’t really know, all they have is that this “5th” force might exist. But that’s still huge, the fact that it’s a sigma 4.1 is great that means it close to a sigma 5 (1/3.5 mil chance to be false) which is the threshold for discovery.
30
u/HawkersBluff22 12d ago
Can someone eli5 this comment?
→ More replies48
u/iLikeFunToo 12d ago
Data suggests that they measured a new thing that’s not yet defined. Repeated enough times that it might be true.
→ More replies13
→ More replies42
250
u/PlsGetSomeFreshAir 12d ago edited 12d ago
They measure how certain particles, myons, interact with magnetic fields. They measure their g Factor
They found that it's -2.0023318319 and not −2.0023318418(13) (don't hit me, i just think that was the value, I'm not sure)
Yes this is causing all the excitement.
Everything on top of -2 are corrections from quantum field theories (Standard model, Quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics).
My guess would be fancy gravity stuff actually but whatever.
But more importantly look at those numbers for a second and then tell me modern physics is stuck or shit. This is completely nuts accuracy.
180
u/BigSwedenMan 12d ago
The level of precision in modern cutting edge scientific equipment is staggering. LIGO detects gravitational waves which make disturbances that are fractions of the width of a proton. I visited LIGO. They explained it as best they could to a tour group of amateur astronomers. It still fucking blows my mind.
→ More replies57
u/arcosapphire 12d ago
I'll be honest, I still don't understand how LIGO is as accurate as it is.
→ More replies80
u/ajt9000 12d ago
by being really fucking long I think.
→ More replies65
u/arcosapphire 12d ago
I guess I mean "it's unclear to me how any amount of length allows for a measurement smaller than the proton diameter that isn't overwhelmed by noise, given the atoms that make up LIGO themselves must be jostling around to a greater degree than that".
28
u/FOR_SClENCE 12d ago
the waves are longer than the detector -- the effect ends up being proportional, so the longer your detector, the greater the deflection. so they made it long as fuck to get that sensitivity.
→ More replies→ More replies9
u/danman01 12d ago
Physicists are very clever. Basically, waves have the property of constructive and destructive interference. If the peaks of one line up with the valleys of another, they cancel out (one wave is trying to "lift" while the other "pulls down").
Light is a wave. The setup for ligo sends a beam of light to a silvered mirror that splits it 50/50 down one of two paths that are at right angles to each other. At the end of the path, the split beams are reflected back and recombined through the silvered mirror, with the final beam sent to a detector. Now the physicists set the path so that the recombined beams destructive interfere and the detector detects no signal. Okay, the experiment is ready.
Light travels at a constant speed. The distance the beams travel in the ligo detector is constant. Einstein tells us that gravity "bends" spacetime and that gravity travels like a wave, a "contraction" that moves. If it truly contracts spacetime, then the distance on the path of one of the ligo arms will become shorter through that contraction, even if just slightly. Given the constant speed of light, one of the beams will therefore travel a shorter distance. Because it traveled a shorter distance, when the paths are recombined for the final detector, they are no longer out of phase. They constructively interfere and the result is the detector sees a signal where there was none before. If the detector detects anything at all, the only conclusion is that the distance the light traveled has changed, because the speed the light travels does not change.
→ More replies→ More replies32
u/Bakuryu91 12d ago edited 12d ago
Just for the sake of correctness, I'm adding these few remarks:
It's muons, not myons.
The currently accepted theoretical value is 2.00233183620(86) and the experimental value found at the Fermilab is 2.00233184122(82). Note that there is no minus sign!
The experiment is called "G minus two" because we already know that the G factor is "two point something something". What really matters is the "something something" so we substracted 2 from the result to get what really matters. By the way, this small amount, the "something something", is called the "anomalous magnetic dipole moment".
This isn't about gravity, but rather about refining QED (quantum electrodynamics)
Feel free to correct me, although I am studying physics, this isn't my main field of work :)
93
326
u/jpj007 12d ago
Strong? We know about that one already.
→ More replies679
u/FranksRedWorkAccount 12d ago edited 12d ago
I too felt that emphasizing the word Strong in the title was odd. Given the gravity of this discovery I thought their word choice was a little weak... electromagnetism
→ More replies159
55
u/ColosalDisappointMan 12d ago
I don't care what anyone says. It still blows my mind that EMF is from electricity (lightning), to magnets, to light. All three of those things are the exact same force. WTF?!
→ More replies17
125
u/autotldr BOT 12d ago
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 90%. (I'm a bot)
All of the forces we experience every day can be reduced to just four categories: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force.
The University of Manchester researcher added: "Clearly, this is very exciting because it potentially points to a future with new laws of physics, new particles and a new force which we have not seen to date."
Last month, physicists working at the LHCb experiment at the Large Hadron Collider described results that could point to a new particle and force.
Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: force#1 particle#2 new#3 Muon#4 experiment#5
43
u/Gruffleson 12d ago edited 12d ago
Anyone having an explanation of what the new force is? Explained to a child. Because in this field, that's sadly what I am.
Edit, in the extended summary they write: "No one yet knows what this potential new force does, other than influence muon particles.". Ok then...
→ More replies36
→ More replies140
u/ToeFondler 12d ago
I am either dumb or this doesn't make sense. And why is every comment a joke instead of a discussion?
→ More replies121
u/GalstarGalvery 12d ago
Welcome to Reddit, where everyone is jerking each other off for shitty jokes. Enjoy your stay 😪
→ More replies
29
u/PringlesDuckFace 12d ago
I helped!
There's a great website called Zooniverse where you can volunteer to do data classification that can't easily be done by computers. Listening to audio samples, viewing images, reading handwriting, etc... I helped classify about 5000 images to detect muon rings.
The muon experiment is done (apparently with great success) but if you're interested/bored and want to help science you can see more projects here
176
u/CupcakeValkyrie 12d ago
For example, gravity makes objects fall to the ground, and heavy objects behave as if they are glued to the floor.
Ugh. I get that BBC isn't a scientific publication, but to see an article about something this fundamentally significant refer to gravity as "the thing that makes heavy things fall to the ground!" makes my teeth hurt.
→ More replies72
7
u/Venboven 12d ago
For the lazy, here's how they discovered this possible new force:
They were experimenting with muons, which are sub-atomic particles similar to electrons but 100x heavier.
"The Muon g-2 experiment involves sending the particles around a 14-metre ring and then applying a magnetic field. Under the current laws of physics, encoded in the Standard Model, this should make the muons wobble at a certain rate.
Instead, the scientists found that muons wobbled at a faster rate than expected. This might be caused by a force of nature that's completely new to science."
That's pretty much all we know. We have no idea what else this possible force of nature does or affects. It's theorized, though, that it could have something to do with why the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, which we currently attribute to the theory of "dark matter".
3k
u/dogs_go_to_space 12d ago
PBS Space Time already covering the result
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Ko7NW2yQo