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Physicists discover never-before seen particle sitting on a tabletop
- a9h74j 4y agoAnother story of mixing up (misrepresenting in press releases and reporting) a solid-state physics result with a high-energy physics result. And a "tabletop experiment" in physics refers to it being at room-scale or lab-scale, not looking for particles literally "on a tabletop".
- Retric 4y agoWhile that’s the title the post makes it clear: ‘Physicists didn’t Discover Never-Before Seen Particle Sitting on a Tabletop.’ Seems like editing the title might be reasonable.
- _mhr_ 4y agoPretty sure he's being funny by pretending to be breathlessly excited about something false.
- WhitneyLand 4y agoColumbia physicist calls out click-bait style abstract, by writing an article with it’s own click-bait title. If this is supposed to be ironic it’s not working for me.
- wombat_alpha 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- foven 4y agoThere's a bit of history here where condensed matter physicists enjoy finding analogues and porting over mathematical ideas and theories applied primarily in higher energy particle physics. See: the humble skyrmion that started its life as a doomed particle physics model. The rub here is calling is a Higgs MODE and specifically not a higgs particle. The scientists aren't really at fault here, since it looks like within the field the Higgs mode is well understood and the main aim of these paper is other scientists.
- hirundo 4y agoImagine the claim is justified, and pools of quantum fluids can transition into a phase that is decoupled from electromagnetic fields, and become dark matter. It would still be baryonic and would become ordinary matter just by heat. We don't have a lot of experience with what happens when quantum mechanical effects expand to a cosmological scale. Who would be surprised to find new physics there.
- westurner 4y agoTIL about (models of) Superfluid Quantum Gravity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31377395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31377395 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-31383784 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-31383784 > How is "GR on Bernoulli", GM cannot describe n*x*oo more precisely than oo, and Conway's surreal infinities aren't good axioms either (for GR or for QM with (chaotic) fluids which perhaps need either infinities plural or superfluid QG (instead of QFT fwics); not making sense? Is this coherent after so much constructive interference in fluids?
- ColinWright 4y agoDeleted ... misunderstanding. /mea culpa/
- tmabraham 4y agoThe link submitted here is Woit's link.
- ColinWright 4y agoSorry, I was going by the title and the search results, I should have checked. I was going to delete it but the replies mean I can't, so I've replaced the text with an apology.
- Braxton_Hicks 4y agoYeah... that's a link to the same article as this HN post. I think you meant to post this comment on those other livescience submissions.
- ColinWright 4y agoSorry, I was going by the title and the search results, I should have checked. I was going to delete it but the replies mean I can't, so I've replaced the text with an apology.
- shepardrtc 4y ago> “This result is almost elegant in its simplicity — it’s really rare to find a new particle with a super clean signature without a lot of fanfare,” said Prineha Narang, an assistant professor at Harvard and a principal investigator through the QSC, a U.S. Department of Energy National Quantum Information Science Research Center headquartered at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Well, to be fair...
- godelski 4y agoI'm a bit confused by the article here. The author states > The authors, who begin their abstract with >> The observation of the Higgs boson solidified the standard model of particle physics. However, explanations of anomalies (for example, dark matter) rely on further symmetry breaking, calling for an undiscovered axial Higgs mode. > which has nothing to do with the result in their paper. But also in the abstract is > Here, we discover an axial Higgs mode in the CDW system RTe3 using the interference of quantum pathways Similarly, they call out a tweet that is actually by the last author of the paper which states the discovery of a new particle. > Excited to report our latest @Nature discovery of __a new particle__, the Axial Higgs mode So I'm not confused about the skepticism of discovering an Axial Higgs mode, but the article is about hype not the experiment. They should at least add that the author and lab is accountable as well as giving some evidence why this experiment is wrong. I'm not a particle physicist so I can't really make conjectures as to if the experiment is right or wrong, but considering that the authors are claiming to discover a new particle I'm not sure I really blame the media in this case (despite the overall messaging resonating with me as I see this happen a lot in my current field: ML). I agree that it doesn't look like a new particle is discovered here, but I think the authors are culpable here. Similarly Nature, where the reviewers should have had this foresight.
- mr_toad 4y agoHiggs mode != Higgs boson. https://www.azoquantum.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=69 https://www.azoquantum.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=69
- cecilpl2 4y agoAh it was right there under my coffee cup the whole time!
- f0e4c2f7 4y agoShould be retitled to indicate that the initial reporting was false.
- 8bitsrule 4y agoOh well ... at least it led me to learn more about Raman scattering today. And wonder about that as a possible explain for some FRB phenomenae.