7 ms·
New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard model if confirmed
- juanjmanfredi 7y agoThis research group has claimed previous discoveries of different bosons before [0]. They have never succeeded in reproducing a result. The scientific community is right to be skeptical. If there is real physics there, then follow up experiments should be able to reproduce the effect. [0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-boson-claim-faces-scrutiny-20160607/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-boson-claim-faces-scrutin...
- ddavis 7y agoThe field is not sold on this. Some previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616084 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21616084
- bilekas 7y agoI am skeptic also, but at the same time, I remember the skepticism of the higgs. I am more than welcome to be proven wrong though! This news is a little crazy and I don't think people 'not being sold on it' should stop people trying.
- machrider 7y agoThe Higgs boson was expected though, while this claimed boson is not predicted by the model at all?
- amelius 7y agoYes, a better comparison would perhaps be the faster-than-light neutrinos.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoWell, I guess in the sense that the faster-than-light neutrinos turned out to be false.
- jessriedel 7y agoThat is a better comparison, but not a great one. A new boson (and associated force) would be exciting but completely in line with known physics. Speed-of-light violations would be absolutely revolutionary, threatening almost everything we know about fundamental physics.
- bilekas 7y agoFair.. Absolutely fair, personally I don't believe faster-than-light neutrinos exist. It will be an incredible change, if something else happens: that's really all, I'm not pushing some agenda.
- zamalek 7y ago> personally I don't believe faster-than-light neutrinos exist. You don't have to believe they they exist, they were quickly and conclusively disproven. As I recall, GPS was used as a time source and there was timer inaccuracies on Earth due to relativistic effects.
- bilekas 7y agoI wouldn't go so far as to say it was expected, it was more of a placeholder. It was more: 'Well, something doesn't add up here, so the 'boson' should fill that gap. And people went and searched for it. I feel something simular to what we see here, the problem is trying to tie everything else that we know back into it.. I say problem but I really mean excitement to understand a bit more! Again, this could all be completely wrong and it could even draw down to a bad input along the chain, but the idea is definitely something worth investigating! Remember, the Higgs Boson brought us the imagination of changing a light particle (photon) to a particle with mass.. It's a quite wacky idea if you look at it from a point we knew many moons ago!
- jessriedel 7y agoNo, the Higgs was considered the most probable thing the LHC could find, including the null result of "nothing". People are always going to be skeptical of particular measurements because this stuff is so tricky and the incentives are huge for discoveries, but the prior of experts was that the Higgs would exist.
- thefringthing 7y agoI studied the philosophy of science a bit in university and one of my professors did some work on reactions in the scientific community to the Higgs boson discovery. I remember her remarking about how "this is a huge discovery" and "we knew we would see this; it's not a big deal" narratives were popular simultaneously.
- jessriedel 7y agoI don't actually think those narratives are in strong tension, especially if each were stated precisely. In short, "surprisal" is not the sole measure of importance for a scientific discovery.
- ssivark 7y agoSurprisingly confident tone in the title for an experimental result that is far from confirmed! Experimental research is damn hard and it is very easy to make tiny oversights resulting in signals like this (in an absolute sense — with all respect to the Hungarian lab which has made this claim). While the possibility is exciting, public facing communication should be very careful to not jump the gun. > ”...breaks Standard Model” SMH
- ephimetheus 7y agoOne of the people on the paper works at cern actually.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- archgoon 7y agoThis will probably get much more traction once an independent group confirms it. I don't believe this article presents any new information on X17 that we haven't already heard.
- ncmncm 7y agoMeaning they said they got it from He, too, before?
- throwaway_tech 7y agoAnyone know if this boson was predicted by E8 Theory?
- dschiffner 7y agoI was wondering the same thing!
- jerf 7y agoIf this is substantiated, it will be retrodicted by any number of theories. I keed, I keed... but I'm also partially serious. There's been a ton of theories over the years that would produce new particles, whose only flaw is that those particles weren't found. It wouldn't be at all surprising if there are past theories that with just a little tiny sensible tweak will turn out to contain this particle, and possibly also some other explanation as to why it wasn't found until now. In a sense, that's just a rephrasing of the fact that particle physics has been starved for data over the past couple of decades. No shortage of ideas, but no data to test them against. It really wouldn't be that surprising that several of the tons of ideas will be able to easily accommodate this new data, even as others are completely destroyed by it.
- throwaway_tech 7y agoWell I can't speak to any number of theories, but the beauty of E8 is either the boson was predicted or it wasn't...if it wasn't, they don't have the luxury of revising E8 to create another boson or particle.
- etiam 7y agoAntony Garrett Lisi of E8 Theory and the Pacific Science Institute, care to weigh in on that?
- isoprophlex 7y agoI was extremely hyped the last time something about this news was posted; someone explained to me that potentially model-breaking things happen all the time, and that this needs super intense cross validation before it's actually considered valid. Reader beware.
- bilekas 7y agoReader beware should be replaced with : 'Proof required' There is nothing wrong with being hyped about a potential find. I will remain excited without passing assumptions!
- worldsayshi 7y agoWe should have this kind of attitude more often!
- SubiculumCode 7y agoNot proof. This is not mathematics. More evidence is required. Further confirmation. More work identifying potential confounds. But not proof.
- reggieband 7y agoNot really directly related to the article, but YouTube recently recommended to me a series of videos from "Strange Loop" which is some kind of tech conference. One of the talks was "Jagged, ragged, awkward arrays" by Jim Pivarski [1]. It is fairly narrow in scope talking about a very particular data modelling problem but it introduced me to the kind of data processing physicists do to make these kinds of discoveries. Just wanted to share in case anyone else finds this kind of thing interesting. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NxWpU7NArk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NxWpU7NArk
- ephimetheus 7y agoYeah, his awkward-array and uproot most of all let me do a lot of my analysis in python and Jupyter. That was almost impossible before.
- ejwhite 7y agoHeh, I went to grad school with him. Haven't heard what he's been up to in over a decade. I was solidly in the "C++" column back then, but have since become a data scientist who now uses numpy/Python for all machine learning. That talk was a very interesting, helped me to understand what they're doing in my old field these days. Thanks for sharing.
- athaht 7y agoHaha
- particleguy 7y agoThis result isn't even peer-reviewed yet. All of this hype about the X17 particle is coming from a pre-print on the arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.10459 https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.10459 They claim a 7.2 sigma result, but the distribution of the null-hypothesis (called PDF(exp) in the paper) was determined from simulations of one atomic transition and "external pair creation on the target backing", and the only source of systematic error they took into account was the position of the target relative to the beam-line. It seems a little paltry to me in terms of trying to take into account possible sources of error... And given that the excess appears in only a particular angular region, they seem to be ignoring the Look-elsewhere effect ("oh, no excess signal here? Let me look elsewhere...") and over-stating their significance. The paper also is riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes, and while that doesn't have anything to do with the science, it does say something about the sloppiness of the researcher, I think. Anyway, I can't imagine this passing the muster of peer-review in its current state. But I'll be curious to see the revised paper with more details included (if they can actually get it published). EDIT: They did explain how they determined the background distribution, I edited my comment above.
- yiyus 7y ago> The paper also is riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes, and while that doesn't have anything to do with the science, it does say something about the sloppiness of the researcher, I think. I have reviewed many papers that were originally quite badly written, but were not bad papers at all. Many non-native speakers are bad at English, so they rely on some external editing service, and they do not want to pay this service until the paper has been properly reviewed and they have made the proposed changes. Of course it does not send a good signal, but the content of the article should not be judged in basis to that.
- cwillu 7y agoHow many of those papers were making exceptional claims?
- keithnoizu 7y ago
- ufmace 7y agoWell that's rather interesting. Sounds like 2 separate detections by the same team and no other confirmations yet. And the presumptive new particle doesn't sound like it's predicted by any of the current beyond-standard-model theories. So we're gonna need a few more detections by a few more teams. Going to be very interesting results for theoretical physics if it holds up though.
- dudydidudy 7y agoThat seems more like not speaking English than not being a native English speaker. If you can't be bothered to pay for something until it's published why should the reviewers be obligated to give you the benefit of the doubt?
- derefr 7y agoBecause being cheap has no correlation with being a bad scientist?
- dudydidudy 7y agoIf you can't be bothered to communicate clearly then you have expressed a lack of interest in being understood clearly. If you don't want to publish in English then don't publish in journals that require English.
- tspiteri 7y agoThere's a difference between bad grammar/spelling and ambiguity; ambiguity is the worse issue. Some journals have fields in their review report where reviewers can say if the text is unambiguous, but no field about grammar or spelling in general.
- yiyus 7y agoIt is not unusual (at least on some fields) seeing specific questions about grammar. It must be checked and maybe fixed, and in some extreme cases it can even imply rejection independently of content, but in most cases a revision is enough.
- tspiteri 7y agoOh, by field I meant it as a field in a record, not an area of study. For example in some reports I had to check a box for unambiguous text but I had no check box for grammar or spelling. That's some ambiguous text from my part! :)
- amriksohata 7y agoCan someone explain to me like I'm a five year (that understands the standard model)
- mrandish 7y agoIf I'm reading this correctly it seems like it's pretty interesting even if it's not validated. They either discover a new particle or they discover a new way to arrive at anomalous results. I'm thinking back to the team that had the result that appeared as if it was faster than light communication (IIRC). Even they didn't fully buy into their result but they published because they checked it every way they could think of and couldn't explain it. As I recall, the underlying error was pretty interesting on its own and in some sense contributed something new to our understanding of "how not to be wrong".
- danellis 7y ago"Essentially, the scientists took some lithium and shot protons at it." How does this actually work? Presumably it's a very small amount of lithium. What is it held in? How are the protons so accurately steered towards it? The accelerator ring is comparatively very wide, right?
- ncmncm 7y agoLithium is cheap. It prob'ly has to be chilled while it's being blasted so they can do it long enough. Steering proton beams is what accelerators are for. You need a small target spot just so the detectors get things from a fixed angle.