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Has a Hungarian physics lab found a new force of nature?
- mcherm 10y agoIn my opinion, it is unlikely to be a new force, but WELL worth pursuing to confirm the results and explore further because of that small chance that it revolutionizes physics in important ways.
- delibes 10y agoNo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... I'll wager a pint (or suitable non-alcoholic equivalent) on it :) Win-win, since if I 'lose' I buy you a pint but something truly wonderful will have been discovered :)
- pc86 10y ago30 minutes seems to be close to the upper bound of someone linking to Betteridge. It's impressive that this thread lasted almost 40.
- sklivvz1971 10y agohttp://ccdb5fs.kek.jp/cgi-bin/img/allpdf?199007095 http://ccdb5fs.kek.jp/cgi-bin/img/allpdf?199007095.
- Dolores12 10y agoAccording to Poreto Principle i expect this law to work in 80% of cases. :)
- anoonmoose 10y agoI think it's ridiculous that you're being downvoted, it smacks of HN not wanting to admit they're susceptible to upvoting clickbait nonsense. Just because your post is obvious doesn't mean it's not also the right response to this article.
- abiox 10y agoi hypothesize that the votes aren't about right-ness or wrong-ness, rather it may be more akin to "yes, we know, we've seen the betteridge link in every other post". it's also not clear that the article is "clickbait nonsense".
- spuz 10y agoPeople are not downvoting the comment because they believe that the headline is not clickbait, and the article is not nonsense. They are downvoting because the comment adds nothing that has not already been discussed many times already in other contexts. Headlines are often click-baity, now let's move on please.
- deathhand 10y agoTo derail the discussion even further: 1.)The given audience in any form is always changing. He might have given new information to someone who hasn't seen it before(young,new english speaker, ect) 2.)We are talking about SCIENCE and whats great about SCIENCE is that to do it well requires SKEPTICISM. The article itself even says that the results haven't been confirmed by a different specialized lab. I would be floored if we discovered another fundamental force but like all things we should ANALYZE all points of a subject.
- privong 10y ago> 2.)We are talking about SCIENCE and whats great about SCIENCE is that to do it well requires SKEPTICISM. The article itself even says that the results haven't been confirmed by a different specialized lab. I would be floored if we discovered another fundamental force but like all things we should ANALYZE all points of a subject. I think you're being too generous with regard to the OP's comment. That comment appeared to be mostly a throw-away attempt to reference Bettridge's law, rather than offering any substantiate thoughts on the potential discovery or its likelihood of being a spurious result.
- Dolores12 10y agoWhy read article if nothing new were found? Betteridge Law is a timesaver. You can get instant answer without reading whole article.
- Vendan 10y agosounds like https://xkcd.com/955/ https://xkcd.com/955/ :)
- Dolores12 10y agoCan we just auto-add a link to Betteridge Law to all topics ending with question mark?
- gaur 10y agoObviously does not work: "Who will win the US presidential election?" "No."
- Aelinsaar 10y agoI don't see how this really suggests a new fundamental force, but certainly it's known that everything about nuclear physics and radioactive decay are not fully understood. Hopefully this is a signpost to some of those answers.
- drpossum 10y agoThese types of signals are a very common path that people who look for new forces follow. The phase space to search for deviations in the standard model is very big, so when things like this pop up they offer better avenues of exploration than throwing darts. Is it a new force? It looks like the type of particle that would explain it hasn't been entirely ruled out from all the global data we have. If other planned experiments that will be sensitive to the same properties of the proposed particle and aren't dependent on nuclear decays do see it, then there you go. If they don't then they don't.
- zakk 10y agoTheir point is: the experimental data is most easily explained in terms of a new boson, all (elementary) bosons currently known mediate a force. A false sillogism, indeed, but that's how you make headlines. And btw doesn't make the discovery any less exciting.
- gpderetta 10y agoThe Higgs is an elementary boson, but it is generally not considered to mediate a force. If it were, it would be a better candidate for the 5th force.
- 21 10y agoIsn't this a matter of interpretation? One interpretation I've seen is that there are 4 Higgs bosons, three of which are "swallowed" by 3 of the the weak-force bosons which and become the W+ W- and Z. The remaining 4th Higgs boson (the 4th degree of freedom of the Higgs field) is what we can see, together with the 4th weak-force boson, the photon, which remains massless. So I think it's reasonable to consider that the Higgs boson belongs to the weak force.
- okket 10y agoAt least it makes a nifty headline (like the faster-than-light neutrinos[1], but without the PR disaster) and encourages a lot more research. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...
- pif 10y agoHi, what PR disaster are you talking about?
- okket 10y agoA decent review of the events: "The Data That Threatened to Break Physics" http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/the-data-that-threatened-to-break-physics http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/the-data-that-threatened-to-...
- arethuza 10y agoBut that sounds more like bad science reporting rather than bad PR?
- creshal 10y agoThe former usually leads to the latter, because John Doe on the streets doesn't know (or care) about the difference.
- thisisdave 10y agoSome of each. It's hard to blame the media for thinking it could be important in light of the press conferences and press releases. The last section of this article gives some details. http://news.discovery.com/space/opera-leaders-resign-after-no-confidence-vote-120404.htm http://news.discovery.com/space/opera-leaders-resign-after-n...
- tremon 10y agoThis is a great write-up, thanks!
- deadtofu 10y agoOk, so not a physics expert so this might sound stupid, but could this mean that radioactive decay is not truly random, just that we can't currently model it? If so, that could have some interesting implications for crypto systems that use radioactive decay as a random seed...
- drpossum 10y agoNo, this doesn't mean that at all. There are lots of other (accountable) structures in energy/angle correlation spectra like this, but it doesn't change the quantum mechanical aspects of it and the randomness in time distributions.
- claudius 10y agoNo. It just means that there are some more events that may occur and may change the probabilities of some events slightly. That is, where before we assumed that decay only occurs through events A and B, with A chosen 45% of the time and B chosen 55% of the time, we now know (assuming all these findings are true) that there are actually B' and B'', chosen 0.001% and 54.999% of the time respectively, which result in the same outcome particle-wise but with take different paths to get there, resulting in different particle properties (momentum, mostly). For systems using radioactive decay as seed, this should have very little effect, as the involved previously-unknown effects are extremely small and the properties influenced by them are unlikely to be used as a source of randomness anyway.
- PepeGomez 10y agoWhat if there's no such a thing as radioactive decay and we've been observing interactions with dark matter all along?
- castis 10y agoIf I understand this correctly, the search for another fundamental force is attempting to explain dark matter using the standard model? Are there any pools of thought that try to explain the universe without dark matter? This may not be the right thread to ask this in but it's right enough I suppose.
- drpossum 10y agoThere certainly are. For example things like modified gravity you might say are in the next tier of popular. edit: good example discussion http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-matter-modified-gravity/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dark-matter-modifi...
- avian 10y agoModified gravity theories might be second in popularity to dark matter. What should be added is that it is a very distant second place. Vast majority of researchers currently favor dark matter. Observations like those from the Bullet cluster are hard to explain otherwise.
- jessriedel 10y ago> If I understand this correctly, the search for another fundamental force is attempting to explain dark matter using the standard model? No, the standard model is just three forces (electromagnetic, weak, and strong) plus gravity. A fifth force would be beyond the standard model.
- adrianratnapala 10y agoWhat exactly does it take for a thing to count as a fundamental force? I loosely associate forces with bosonic fields -- photons for EM, gluons for strong, and something confusing for weak. But then no one seems to want to call the Higgs field a "force".
- jessriedel 10y ago
- arenaninja 10y agoHighly unlikely, but exciting nevertheless. A 17-MeV anomaly is rather large. It would be nice if it did shed insight into dark matter / energy, but the connection does seem to be a stretch.
- PepeGomez 10y agoCould it be explained if what we interpret as radioactive decay was in fact matter interacting with dark matter particles?
- 21 10y agoI'm not sure exactly what you're asking, but radioactive decay is perfectly explained today, without any need of dark matter particles.
- arenaninja 10y agoI mean, it could. But I haven't seen any mention that the conditions of this experiment match the interstellar conditions that indicate Dark Matter (which is usually the angular velocity of galaxies not matching the theoretical prediction). There's smarter people than me working on dark matter, but one thing to consider is that dark matter may well be simply that -- matter that we're unable to see for inane reasons such as being on a plane of vision that we're unable to see, similar to the unified model of an active galactic nucleus: http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~ski/skipicture-1.html http://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~ski/skipicture-1.html. Again, exciting, but too soon to really say anything. Everyone should be suspect of the claims, it's just par for the course in physics.
- Natanael_L 10y agoObservations of accelerated particles' decay follow relativity, they decay with slower frequency relative to the observer. If dark matter collisions were the cause we shouldn't be observing that.
- PepeGomez 10y agoThat's a good point.
- yk 10y agoLooking quickly through the two papers mentioned [0, 1], there is a (statistically) very solid result that something is going on with 8Be, which is only very barely a nucleus and is probably better thought of as a bound state of two alpha particles. In [0] there is a experimental observation of some kind of effect which can be explained by a 17 MeV boson. [1] looks at other experiments and finds a way around current experimental bounds by building a "protophobic" model, that is a boson that does not interact with protons. Interestingly they find that in this model they can explain the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, if the parameters are somewhat close to already excluded limits. (Fig. 1 bottom panel in [1]) So the next generation of experiments should rule out or discover the X boson. (And actually there are many experiments which seem to have a shot at this.) My take on this, it is probably a parametrization of something we do not understand in terms of a particle. This something may be a experimental effect or a theoretical lack of understanding or insufficient methods for calculation, or a new particle. The energy range is sort of interesting since it is close to the energy range of hadron spectroscopy, a field which is littered with 2-sigma 'tantalizing hints' of new physics. To end this, I believe it is a temptation to speculate (read I will claim I resisted the temptation until "told you so" is an appropriate response), that a heavy charged particle, cough di-photon excess, could be involved in creating the different couplings to u and d quarks. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01527 https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01527 [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07411 https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.07411
- ssivark 10y agoAha! I'm currently at a conference where one of the authors of [1] gave a talk [2] about this and there was an interesting follow-up discussion. Never expected it to be on HN already! Some thoughts from the thick of things: 1. It's important to remember that nuclear physics backgrounds for such an experiment are hard to model (so that one can subtract them out). The field is littered with "anomalies" coming from systematics and backgrounds. This is why physicists are very cautious with this claim. The authors of the theoretical model claim that it should be easily testable (interesting signals in several different experiments) over the next 2-3 years, so that's one reason to be optimistic about knowing where this stands. 2. This model goes against the grain of most of our theories for how the baryonic matter (essentially nuclei of all kinds) could be created in the universe! If you believe in this newly proposed model as truly another force of nature, then one might need a new paradigm for generating all the matter we see. There are some theoretically intriguing aspects of the model, so I'm looking out for the follow-up paper by the authors (sometime in the next few weeks?) dealing with several of these aspects. -- Edited to add a link to the slides and elaborating on point #2 below For more advanced readers (along with the caveat that I don't fully understand the details of their model): We understand very well the production of nuclei soon after the big-bang [3] and there's no room to modify that theory. So, any more fundamental model will have to produce baryons before that era of the universe. The Sakharov conditions [4] for producing baryons require a breaking of Baryon number (you can't have a net excess of baryons over anti-baryons unless you break the symmetry between the two). Usual models produce baryon number by using the fact that U(1) baryon number is anomalous in the presence of electroweak sphalerons [5]. However, in the newly proposed theory U(1) B-L [6] is gauged and hence cannot be anomalous (thereby invalidating the conventional paradigm for generating baryons). Maybe a spontaneous breaking of that symmetry happens early enough in the universe to not mess with the theory of nucleosynthesis but I'm not aware of work along such a paradigm. -- [2]: https://indico.cern.ch/event/518614/contributions/1198831/attachments/1277655/1896398/1605texasam.pdf https://indico.cern.ch/event/518614/contributions/1198831/at... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryogenesis#Sakharov_conditions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryogenesis#Sakharov_conditio... [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphaleron#Sphalerons_and_baryogenesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphaleron#Sphalerons_and_baryo... [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_%E2%88%92_L https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_%E2%88%92_L
- gus_massa 10y agoOne of the difficult part of reading the press articles is to understand what the scientific really saw in the experiment. The original paper is https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01527 https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01527 The important graph is figure 4 in page 4. I made a colored version: http://imgur.com/Mya66KZ http://imgur.com/Mya66KZ The black circles are the experimental data. That's what they really saw. (Actually, these measures are very indirect and noisy, so this is the data after a lot of processing, but let's assume that this is standard incontrovertible processing.) Each measurement has an experimental error, that is marked by the + cross in each circle. So imagine that each circle is a bigger fuzzy ellipse that is 7 times wider and 3 times taller than the circles. If they assume that there is no new particle, in their simulation they would get the dashed curve, that is always decreasing. It's dashed in the original graph and painted in gray in the "improved" version. The problem is that the experimental data in the ellipses are too far from the theoretical curve of the simulation without a new particle, so something strange is happening. (A new particle, experimental error, other ...) They assume that the difference is caused by a new unknown particle, with some properties. In particular, they have to guess the mass of the particle. If they guess that the particle is very heavy, for example 17.6MeV, they get a curve that looks like an "U", it's dot-dashed in the original and painted in blue in the "improved" graph. It coincides with the "no particle" curve when the angle is less than 130°, but then it starts increasing. The new curve doesn't look like the experimental ellipses at all, so they have to keep trying. If they guess that the particle is very light, for example 15.6MeV, they get a curve that is also decreasing, it's dotted in the original graph and painted in yellow in the "improved" graph. It coincides with the "no particle" curve when the angle is less than 110°, but then it is bigger. But comparing it with the experimental data, it is too big for 110°-130° and too small for 130°-160°. The new curve also doesn't look like the experimental ellipses at all, so they have to keep trying. If they guess that the mass of the particle is 16.6MeV, they get a curve with a bump, it's solid in the original graph and painted in red in the "improved" graph. It coincides with the "no particle" curve when the angle is less than 110°, it's slighter bigger at 120° and has an interesting maximum near 140°. The new curve pass through all but the last ellipse, so it looks like a good fit. So the conclusion is that they probably have a new unknown particle with a mass of 16.6MeV!!! Actually, they (obviously) tried with more possible masses, not only this three values. And compare the simulation with the data using statistics, not the drawings. The details are in figure 5. With 16.6MeV they got the better agreement with the experimental data. The particles have other properties besides mass. Some of them can be calculated with theoretically, for example the charge. Others, like spin, have to be tested using simulations, because using other values produces different looking curves. Obviously, the complete paper has more details, but I hope this is a good starting point to start reading it. EDIT: Fixed "GeV" -> "MeV"
- gradstudent 10y agoDid anyone else find this article a bit jarring? Hungarians make the discovery but it isn't news until (reputable??) American academics glom onto it?
- dmix 10y agoWere you expecting a virtuous "Build it and they will come" thing to happen in the community? I'd imagine a ton of reports coming out all the time, not everything of value bubbles to the top right away.
- gradstudent 10y agoMy point is not that it wasn't picked up right away -- it's that the discover only became news when Americans got hold of it. More, the reporting is more about the American confirmation and interpretation than the Hungarian discovery! It's honestly a bit jarring.
- hackney 10y agoNo. Considering the amount of time it took for the original research to begin with and for any subsequent attempt to replicate, the fact that 'americans' were cited as the replicators is superfluous.
- scotty79 10y agoWhy is that not just a very energetic photon?
- yk 10y agoA photon would produce a different shape of the electron spectrum. (It would not produce a bump at 16 MeV, but some extra contribution to the entire shape, since it is massless.)
- hackney 10y agoMy favorite quote was “Perhaps we are seeing our first glimpse into physics beyond the visible Universe”. This sounds very likely. Considering that the 'bump' occurred at a certain angle and only then. This reminds me of the science that purportedly exists when combing specific minerals with specific elements. God how I would love to be a mad scientist.