[HN Gopher] Newly Measured Particle Seems Heavy Enough to Break ...
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Newly Measured Particle Seems Heavy Enough to Break Known Physics
Author : digital55
Score : 76 points
Date : 2022-04-07 18:11 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| mandy12xx wrote:
| Since the two experiments have already conflicting results, this
| likely will/should be replicated, before we can believe this
| result. As an example, this experiment on neutrinos traveling
| faster than light was later proved wrong.
| https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2011.554.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I remember this well. At the time even the scientists involved
| didn't think they'd broken the speed of light.
|
| A lot of news publications still ran with the headline that
| physics had been broken though, because that generates more
| newspaper sales / ad revenue.
| kitd wrote:
| The BBC article on this says there have been hints from other
| experiments that support these results, but they need deeper
| analysis:
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-60993523
|
| _The result, published in the journal Science, could be
| related to hints from other experiments at Fermilab and the
| Large Hadron Collider at the Swiss-French border. These, as yet
| unconfirmed results, also suggest deviations from the Standard
| Model, possibly as a result of an as yet undiscovered fifth
| force of nature at play._
| T-A wrote:
| From the same article:
|
| _But the excitement in the physics community is tempered
| with a loud note of caution. Although the Fermilab result is
| the most accurate measurement of the mass of the W boson to
| date, it is at odds with two of the next most accurate
| measurements from two separate experiments which are in line
| with the Standard Model._
| andrewflnr wrote:
| No one, including the original scientists IIUC, needed to be
| convinced the FTL-neutrino result was wrong. It was just a
| matter of what went wrong.
| MichaelRazum wrote:
| Feels kind of 1920. War. Inflation and Physics offer's some
| interesting mysteries. Maybe AGI will solve it all for us;)
| [deleted]
| Victerius wrote:
| I am equally eager and terrified to know if a new superweapon
| to surpass nuclear weapons could or will be invented in this
| century.
| tanto wrote:
| We will discover some new "dark quantum thingy" energy source
| which some scientist will want to use to create super cheap
| energy. Unfortunately because of the third world war someone
| will first build a bomb. Handheld sized enough to destroy any
| major city. Someone will than say: I have become death... and
| after we have destroyed half of the world we will rise from
| the ashes and fly to the stars. Afterwards we create an
| organization called The Federation!
| KrishnaShripad wrote:
| > I have become death
|
| I like the Oppenheimer quote [1].
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb13ynu3Iac
| eesmith wrote:
| An attitude really pissed off Truman:
|
| > The meeting between Oppenheimer and Truman did not go
| well. It was then that Oppenheimer famously told Truman
| that "I feel I have blood on my hands", which was
| unacceptable to Truman, who immediately replied that that
| was no concern of Oppenheimer's, and that if anyone had
| bloody hands, it was the president. ...
|
| > Truman had very little use for Oppenheimer then--little
| use for his "hand wringing", for his high moral
| acceptance of question in the use of the bomb, for his
| second-guessing the decision. Cold must have descended in
| the meeting, as Truman later told David Lillenthal of
| Oppenheimer that he "never wanted to see that son of a
| bitch in this office again". Truman would retell the
| story in different ways, but with generally the same
| result, waxing about how he dismissed the "cry-baby
| scientist".
| ethbr0 wrote:
| It's probably fair to assume that Truman had more
| immediate and frequent casualty reports and projections
| than Oppenheimer.
|
| So the former was weighing against alternatives, and the
| latter was weighing against inaction.
|
| In Oppenheimer's defense though, at the time he couldn't
| have known that (a) the US would refrain from using
| nuclear weapons in subsequent wars, (b) other countries
| would rapidly acquire nuclear weapons, (c) MAD would
| become normalized as the only acceptable use of nuclear
| arms.
|
| None of which were guaranteed to pass, meaning a very
| different perspective in 1945.
| _jal wrote:
| Truman was a bit of a shithead, and nowhere near
| Oppenheimer's caliber.
|
| He also lied heavily about about his finances as a
| sympathy play as he left the presidency, and basically
| stole petty cash on his way out the door.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_S._Truman#Financial_s
| itu...
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| Truman was one of the best presidents the US ever had by
| basically any measure. What a childish take.
| _jal wrote:
| You can like his policy or not, that's your aesthetic
| choice. But are you claiming he didn't do what I
| described?
| andrewflnr wrote:
| "Surpass" is a tricky concept. Nuclear weapons won't become
| less devastating, so they won't stop mattering, even if
| something more devastating comes along. Maybe being easier to
| build than nukes would do it, where suddenly everyone had the
| new superweapon including the old nuclear powers, since even
| they might as well use the new easier thing if they use
| anything.
| stult wrote:
| Surpass in destructive power doesn't mean much since we can
| already destroy all life on the planet with nukes. That's
| what makes the doomsday weapon in Dr. Strangelove so ironic
| and funny. But if a new weapon type that at least
| approximates nukes in destructive power while also
| surpassing them in ease of proliferation, cost of
| production, or detectability? Those are much scarier
| propositions.
| ben_w wrote:
| Nukes are several orders of magnitude away from
| destroying all life on this planet.
|
| https://youtu.be/JyECrGp-Sw8
| amelius wrote:
| How about some hypothetical technology that can scan space
| for nuclear weapons and destroy them from a distance even
| if stored within thick walls of lead and without leaving a
| trace?
| postingposts wrote:
| It already exists and is largely related to time (but not
| space)
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| Lasers and other energy weapons may become practical in this
| century as an answer to artillery and hypersonic missiles.
| They will change the balance dramatically.
|
| In addition to that we will see more robotic warfare and
| probably more information warfare.
| sgt101 wrote:
| We don't need to; nuclear weapons in the giga tonne range are
| practical. Anything over about 200 kilo tonnes just isn't
| that useful because cities aren't so big, and aren't
| circular.
| HughCannon wrote:
| An interesting thought: A superweapon more powerful than
| nuclear weapons might with a single use cause the end of life
| as we know it. As such, you would not test or demonstrate it,
| therefore the weapon might not be useful.
| blendergeek wrote:
| One could always test it on some other planet like the
| Death Star in _Star Wars_.
| schmeckleberg wrote:
| hypothesis: the Great Filter is that every sufficiently
| long-lived society eventually invents and uses the
| Deplorable Word from C.S. Lewis's "Narnia" universe.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Nobody needs a bigger bomb though, it wouldn't be any more
| of a threat. We can already destroy a whole city with a
| single weapon or trigger a mass extinction event in
| somewhere between an hour and a day, being better than that
| isn't really any more scary.
|
| No, the "better" superweapon would be about precision and
| speed of destruction... like the ability to resolve the
| whole surface of the planet at sub cm resolution and pick
| out and destroy any target in moments... imagine a
| starlink-type constellation but spy satellites with space
| lasers instead backed by enormous AI facial-and-other
| recognition to identify where anybody or anything was. Or
| maybe something like being able to read thoughts at a
| distance or even influence them.
|
| A bigger bomb though is just about doing something we can
| already do slightly more quickly. We can also already build
| bigger bombs than we have but there's no strategic
| advantage.
| 323 wrote:
| We're quite close to the moment where we'll be able to
| release 1000 drones/robot dogs in a city with the mission
| to blow up all the tanks or white/blue arm-band soldiers.
|
| Possibly with a human in the loop for final confirmation,
| which receives a target image on the screen for
| engagement approval. One human could approve hundred of
| hits per hour if you don't want to go fully autonomous.
|
| But to the main point, a nuke-like powerful bomb without
| radiation fallout would be quite valuable.
| sfink wrote:
| > Or maybe something like being able to read thoughts at
| a distance or even influence them.
|
| We have that, it just doesn't work quite the way you
| think. One of its many manifestations is called
| "Twitter".
|
| This isn't a joke. Consider the conventional notion of a
| mind control device, a magical mind-laser that can target
| one person at a time from a distance and modify their
| thoughts or even beliefs. Compare to what a motivated
| billionaire could accomplish, today, using paid botnets
| and content farms.
|
| Today's version is wildly more influential, can not only
| change beliefs but also inoculate the targets against
| future influences in the other direction(s), and operates
| at a mass scale. It is so successful and effective that
| it doesn't even need to be kept secret like the usual
| scifi version.
|
| The only thing exaggerated in my description is that it
| doesn't require the resources of a billionaire. You can
| operate it for far less.
|
| We need an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's "sufficiently
| advanced technology" quote.
| andrepd wrote:
| More like the 1930s. Don't forget economic crises and
| democratic backsliding.
| mrfusion wrote:
| Could this be what the Higgs or dark matter is?
| zarmin wrote:
| Did we not sort out the Higgs field in 2012?
| 323 wrote:
| We discovered one Higgs boson. But there could be a few more.
| This is not settled yet.
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| It's one of those "yes, but no" situations. We now have a
| particle that is ~126 GeV, behaves like what the Higgs boson
| was predicted to be.
|
| However, if the Higgs field is exactly what we think it is,
| it seems to imply energy densities several magnitudes bigger
| than the currently observed vacuum energy density of the
| universe. This leads to either the cosmological constant is
| wrong and/or there was no Big Bang, or the Grand Unified
| Theory is missing another major component instead of merely
| missing the discovery of the Higgs boson and an accurate
| measurement of the Higgs field.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I agree. More/alternative details:
|
| We discovered one Higgs boson that has a mass of ~126GeV,
| but no one is sure that it's the only one. There are plenty
| of alternative models that have more Higgs bosons yet to be
| discovered. More details in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H
| iggs_boson#Alternative_models It's a very obscure paragraph
| so if you (GP) don't understand the details don't worry, me
| neither. But the important part is that there are many
| models and each one has a different number of Higgs bosons
| with different properties. Until other(s) Higgs bosons are
| discovered it's very difficult to know which model is
| correct.
|
| For example there is a recent preprint about another Higgs
| boson with ~95GeV
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30807022 (88 points |
| 12 days ago | 26 comments) The idea is that there are two
| weird results in CMS and Atlas that "show" something with
| ~95GeV, but they only have 3 sigmas. So it may be a fluke,
| but it's unusual enough to keep an eye in those
| experiments. In the post I linked they interpret this as a
| family of 3 Higgs bosons, the old ~126GeV, the new dubious
| ~95GeV one, and a third one yet to be discovered. (Just to
| be super clear, the ~95GeV and the proposed family are
| unconfirmed.)
| awinter-py wrote:
| check for cavorite in the soil
| thestoicattack wrote:
| A new analysis from Fermilab measures the W boson as 76 MeV
| heavier than the Standard Model predicts. The uncertainty in the
| measurement is 9 MeV.
| lol_what wrote:
| less than 0.1% off the predicted value.
| ben_w wrote:
| Standard deviations are preferred to percentages, because
| they give you a better sense of how wrong your model really
| is.
|
| If we just looked at percentages, nobody would've paid any
| attention to the anomalies that led to general relativity.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Is 100 = 100.1 a hundred percent wrong or 0.1% wrong?
| sachinjoseph wrote:
| While it would depend on the tolerance level of the
| particular situation, generally, 100 = 100,00 is way more
| wrong than 100 = 100.1
| wintorez wrote:
| Sophon?
| a9h74j wrote:
| > "The W boson has to be the same on both sides of the Atlantic."
| GuB-42 wrote:
| The European W boson is 143 yoctograms while the American W
| boson is 5 heptilionths of an ounce, a small but significant
| difference.
| eesmith wrote:
| Given the small size, I prefer to think of it as 2.2127
| zeptograins. Troy grains, of course.
| D-Coder wrote:
| African or European?
| [deleted]
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