7 ms·
X17 Particle
- make3 7y agothis is extremely exciting. makes me hope that we will see a unified theory of physics in our lifetime
- lokimedes 7y agoUsually discovering new fundamental forces will move us away from unification, not towards it.
- orbifold 7y agoNot necessarily, because it could give a hint. It is possible to get from various higher dimensional gauge groups like SO(10) to almost the standard model. But the left over particles often couple in unfavourable ways and lead to proton decay for example.
- make3 7y agoevery single article on the matter has says that it would be a step towards potentially explaining dark matter and dark energy, which would help towards a unified theory
- semiotagonal 7y agoDiscovering new physics doesn't move us away from a unified theory, it just means we were wrong about how much farther we have to go.
- echelon 7y agoNot sure why you're being downvoted. I hope to see a lot of things in my lifetime: life discovered outside our planet, human cloning, artificial organs and blood, AGI, humans on Mars, cures for a broad spectrum of cancers and Alzheimer's, human life extension / slowing aging, broad advances in chemistry and materials science, major advances in metabolomics, protein folding, drug discovery, gene therapies and repair...
- otabdeveloper2 7y ago> I hope to see a lot of things in my lifetime: life discovered outside our planet, human cloning, artificial organs and blood, AGI, humans on Mars, cures for a broad spectrum of cancers and Alzheimer's, human life extension / slowing aging, broad advances in chemistry and materials science, major advances in metabolomics, protein folding, drug discovery, gene therapies and repair... The same list of things people were 'hoping for' in 1988. (From personal experience; probably a high estimate.) We're not a iota closer here in 2019. Wishful thinking isn't enough; no matter how hard you hope and how much money you waste, you're not going to make a fundamentally better airliner or horse buggy.
- joycian 7y agoWhat? Human cloning is basically possible but illegal, we can absolutely grow artificial organs (intestine, heart, certain brain structures), life extension and diseases cures are closer via Crispr, metabolomics has advanced, hospitals use glycomics for diagnosis, gene therapy is used in clinical trials, machine learning for materials science, drug discovery and protein folding is coming along. What is your definition of iota? We're not there, but to say there's no progress is just untrue.
- isoprophlex 7y agoSomeone knowledgeable, please tell us why this is just runaway science journalism before we get too excited! This is potentially the most groundbreaking stuff in decades, right?
- tomrod 7y agoTrust, but verify. The fun of science is discovering what a new discovery unlocks. The responsibility of science is replication, replication, replication!
- ddavis 7y agoWe're going to need an independent experiment to see this "X17" before anyone truly believes it's a new particle. Some example major particle discoveries over the last few decades (and the independent experiments which observed them): Higgs (ATLAS & CMS at CERN); Top quark (CDF & D0 Fermilab); W & Z Bosons (UA1 and UA2 at CERN); J/Psi (Richter's team at SLAC & Ting's team at MIT). Some other fundamental particles were observed by a single experiment (the bottom quark, for example) and the community believed it, but in those cases it's always because a theory has already predicted the particle, and we've always been able to study them with future experiments anyway. So this won't gain traction unless another experiment can observe it.
- knzhou 7y agoIt's important to keep in mind that there are always plenty of outstanding experimental anomalies in physics. At the moment, this is one of ~40 roughly equally credible hints towards new physics, and it's more likely than not that all of those hints will fade away over time. That isn't anybody's fault either: it has always been like this, and it happens because experiments are difficult and subtle. Personally, I still find this extremely exciting, even though history tells us it has less than a 1% chance of panning out. A 1% chance of revolution is still meaningful. But don't be too surprised if we land in the 99%.
- beaner 7y agoAny chance you know of a list of such anomalies?
- est31 7y agoMaybe this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hypothetical_elementary_particles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hypothetical_elementa...
- MrEldritch 7y agoI do not, but I can think of a few off the top of my head - the muon g-2 anomaly, the Antarctic upward-moving particle anomaly, the Hubble constant tension, the proton radius puzzle was one until quite recently (but is now largely resolved), the (not statistically significant yet, but they've been in the data since 2013 and they keep not going away) hints of lepton universality violation at the LHC...
- knzhou 7y agoLet's also add the PVLAS anomaly, the white dwarf cooling hint, the 'too big to fail' problem, the cusp/core problem, missing satellites, the DAMA/LIBRA anomaly, the MiniBooNE excess, the Valentine's day monopole, the reactor neutrino anomaly, the Hooperon, the AMS positron excess...
- 7y ago
- andyljones 7y agoThere is some skepticism around this to say the least[1]. The core of it is that this group has found new bosons twice before: The Atomki group has produced three previous papers on their beryllium-8 experiments — conference proceedings in 2008, 2012 and 2015. The first paper claimed evidence of a new boson of mass 12 MeV, and the second described an anomaly corresponding to a 13.45-MeV boson. (The third was a preliminary version of the Physical Review Letters paper.) The first two bumps have disappeared in the latest data, collected with an improved experimental setup. “The new claim now is [a] boson with a mass of 16.7 MeV,” Naviliat-Cuncic said. “But they don’t say anything about what went wrong in their previous claims and why we should not take those claims seriously.” [1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-boson-claim-faces-scrutiny-20160607/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-boson-claim-faces-scrutin...
- ajkjk 7y agoHere is another highly critical article: https://www.science20.com/tommaso_dorigo/the_17_mev_anomaly_that_would_not_die-243528 https://www.science20.com/tommaso_dorigo/the_17_mev_anomaly_...
- RandomTisk 7y agoI find the E8 lattice incredibly interesting, if for no other reason to find out if it's truly representative of particle physics. It predicts more particles we haven't observed yet. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory_of_Everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory... [1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/theory-of-everything2.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-m...
- K0SM0S 7y agoHonestly, even if the E8 lattice is nothing but imagination, it's so beautiful that we need to make a para-verse like that someday. You know, when we've mastered creating universes and stuff, at least when we're able to live in virtual fluff. The beings in such a simulated universe would be so in awe of 'everything' as they uncover the theory thereof.
- pavel_lishin 7y agoIf you haven't yet, you should read some of Greg Egan's books.
- Lerc 7y agoI felt like the idea got a bit of a bad rap because of the pun in the title inadvertently created a lot of media publicity of the sort "Surfer dude discovers simple answer to everything" The E8 structure does make for a compelling idea, while I'm not aware of any particular evidence that makes it logically any better than existing ideas. It certainly is aesthetically pleasing. I only which my math skills were up to calculating the properties and values of particles based on the idea so I could better understand what people should be looking for to prove/disprove it.
- beezle 7y agoFind it really hard to believe they find something at 17 MeV that was never seen at Tevatron, RHIC, CEBAF, HERA, LEP, SLAC, etc.
- noobermin 7y agoYou also need a beryllium nuclei. It comes a nuclear physics experiment.
- dang 7y agoRelated thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616381
- 2bitencryption 7y agocould someone explain something-- I have a faint understanding of the "Standard Model" of physics, which lays out a pattern of particles and forces that has so far held up to experimentation i.e. the Higgs boson fit neatly into the model, exactly where the model predicted it would go. The standard model predicted the Higgs, and the Higgs was found exactly how the model predicted, right? But I've never heard of this X17 particle before. Is this something the standard model has predicted? Does it go against the standard model, strengthen it, or neither?
- mo-1 7y agoWhat, you say> Nobody should argue that advancements haven't been made since 1988, but nobody's manufacturing organic human organs yet --- chemical pieces of: probably.