new physics dlc about to drop?? poggers
It ain’t cheap but it’s worth every penny
I assume the scientists got a sense of pride and accomplishment from this.
Announcing the Horace-Armour particle!
Yeah but how much is it? Is it only for premium members?
I haven’t even caught up with old physics, slow down, people.
irately:
physics is physics!!!
Finally… Science 2
Science 2: Electroweak Boogaloo
I REALLY need to finally sit down and watch this damn movie.
Just a warning: the first Breakin’ is waaaaaayyy better than Electric Boogaloo
Huh.
I thought it started with the Pikachu thing. TIL.
Science journalism try to be accurate and non-clickbait mission impossible
So the Sophons have finally arrived.
I tried reading, then simply skimming, but this is over my head and I didn’t think I could get through it comfortably. I was hoping for a paragraph that summed up a simple explanation, but if there was one, it was further in than I got. Can anyone summarize for dummies what this means for our understanding of physics?
There’s a particular particle, the kaon, which can be created. This particle is highly unstable, and so, decays rapidly into other particles. Ever so often, it doesn’t decay down the normal route but instead decays into a pion. This is extremely rare (6 in a billion).
In physics, we have what’s called the “standard model”. It’s our best guess as to how physics works at the fundamental level. It’s incomplete, however, with multiple slight variations. This decay pathway is interesting because it is quite sensitive to differences between these models. By measuring the energy and ratio of the resulting mess, we can disguard some variants of the model (their predicted energy is too high or too low).
By using a large number of little measurements, like this, scientists can home in on the most accurate “standard model” variant. This, in turn, informs work on a deeper understanding of physics.
Basically, a decade’s work to put a single new point onto a graph. A point that only theoretical physicists care about, and might, or might not be useful down the line. Welcome to modern physics.
To be fair those single points are important, they’ve led to things like nuclear energy and modern computers… come to think of it a lot of our modern technology is rather like the physics equivelent of exploiting an extreme edge case in a game physics engine.
I fully agree. It’s more the frustration that it now takes so much time and resources to make even a tiny bit of headway.
My favourite example of why pure research is useful, however, is the laser. When it was invented, they had no clue what it could be useful for. It was the classic “solution looking for a problem”. It was a fun quirk of quantum mechanics that allowed thek to function. Now, they are critical in multiple areas, but for business and research.
Thanks for this detailed explainer!
It’s just the creation of particles with an ultra-short lifespan, which then decay into other particles. Only there are more of this type than expected, but still within the tolerance of what the theory predicts. Additional tests are needed to say anything conclusive. That’s just what they normally like to do at CERN, they’re quite good at it. They also started the world wide web, back in the day.
Thanks!
Are we heading toward spicy physics or extra crispy physics?
chunky
“Ultra-rare” means
The number of kaon to pion and neutrino/antineutrino decays the team observed is higher than the 8.4 per 100 billion predicted by the Standard Model, but it’s still within the uncertainty parameters.
Is this a physics 2.0 kind of thing? Or just a small patch?
It’s nothing that would upend the Standard Model, but would define some new interactions and processes.
Phew, I feared I had to learn new physics. I already struggled with the old one.
will this discovery make it easier for me to get isekai’d into another world where I’m the hero that’s going to save the world with my big d magic skillz?
CERN confirms ultra-rare particle transformation.
Three Body Problem:
Scientists commit suicide.IRL:
Scientists get super stoked about “new physics”.Wasn’t the whole thing about the scientists in the Three Body Problem that they recognised that their work was being sabotaged by something enormously more powerful?
No. The scientists do not figure out that things are being meddled with until much later. The scientist suicides, especially the daughter of the woman who invites the aliens, committed suicide because everything they knew about physics had been “proven incorrect”. It was all a lie, but they didn’t know that.
Ahh my mistake
Actually, I think your take would have made more sense. It never sat well with me that scientists would resort to suicide because they found something they could not explain…yet.
Maybe that’s why I misremembered it. I agree, it does seem like the exact opposite to what scientists actually do upon finding something they can’t explain
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Do these things actually exist or are they the best matching set of equations
Well they observed them, so…yeah, they exist.
Did they observe them or measured effects of their hypothetical properties?
…Cristina Lazzeroni of the University of Birmingham in the UK and her colleagues have now established, experimentally observed, and measured the decay of a charged kaon particle into a charged pion and a neutrino-antineutrino pair.
Feel free to actually read the article if more clarification is needed.
experimentally observed - yes this is the crux of the philosophical issue that makes me unable to sleep. Real or an illusion of something else altogether
Do the things we measure are real or are just the symptoms
When you’re dealing with particle physics, unless I’m mistaken, the term “experimentally observed” means “non-wild” or “controlled environment observation” and is interchangeable with “observed” as in non-particle physics.
Humans can’t physically observe subatomic particles, nor can we (at current) capture real-time video or anything of them. We observe the measurements and math from designed and run experientns, and present the finding we make on those events. I’m not sure we’ll have any kind of technology to catch an observation in the wild in our lifetimes.
So… are these things real?
Well the things themselves are real. What they e just observed about them changing states is the new part. They will present their findings, wait for peer review, and we’ll see if what they observed checks out.
