4 ms·
Scientists may be on brink of discovering fifth force of nature
- lordfrito 3y ago[flagged]
- azalemeth 3y agoIt's a report on the g-2 measurements of the muon, discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37088274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37088274
- gpvos 3y agoThat sounds like uncalled-for negativity. Is the Guardian really known for bad science reporting?
- lordfrito 3y agoJust my way of saying that I would expect real new-physics evidence/breakthroughs would first be reported through science journals before eventually ending up as a watered down story on The Guardian. I was mainly surprised to see it there first, and that triggered my automatic skepticism.
- marcosdumay 3y agoYou mean it's uncalled that people react negatively to an article with a title claiming that all of physics is broken when the fact is that there's a small adjustment in a value that we don't have a good theory to predict?
- moribvndvs 3y agoI mean they didn’t claim that all of physics is broken, but ok.
- marcosdumay 3y ago"There is an entire fundamental force that we didn't take into account" is as close to declaring every physics model broken as you can get. That tittle implies a very surprising result.
- jfengel 3y agoThe Guardian is fine as general news sources go. But something like this is extremely speculative, and there's not much for a general reader to take away. It's not the Eureka stage, it's the "that's funny" stage.
- wiredfool 3y agoIs spelling part of science?
- Aromasin 3y agoA lot of people shirk at the Guardian because it's a notoriously left-wing, progressive paper politically. People often mirror their sentiments about that onto other, none political articles unfortunately. On the science side it's mostly written by Nicola Davis. She has a MChem and DPhil in organic chemistry from the University of Oxford, which is more than most sciences journalists can say. However, she has a pretty prestigious output; anywhere between 5 and 20 articles a month. Seems like a lot of "read a journal article, write a slightly sensationalist story around it". Not the worst in the industry by any means. Her Guardian bio: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/nicola-davis https://www.theguardian.com/profile/nicola-davis
- gpvos 3y agoI see the first item as a plus (it's why I pay them a little); it certainly shouldn't impede good reporting. Looks like the science department is a bit thinly staffed though.
- jakey_bakey 3y agoWhatever happened to blaming results on cosmic rays?
- eappleby 3y agotldr; the fifth force of nature is love
- v3ss0n 3y agoYou beat me to it. I was just gonna quote the fifth element.
- tessierashpool 3y agounderrated movie. the world needs more weird sci-fi pairing Chris Tucker with Jean-Paul Gaultier and Milla Jovovich. and not to sell Bruce Willis short, but Gary Oldman stole the show with a dead-on Elon Musk impression which he somehow performed before Musk got famous. (so maybe Musk is the one doing a Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg impression.)
- lesuorac 3y agoUnderrated by who? I don't think I've ever heard somebody "Eh, it was alright".
- diimdeep 3y agoThere is now even more underrated, than The Fifth Element but not less weird and good sci-fi [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerian_and_the_City_of_a_Thousand_Planets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerian_and_the_City_of_a_Tho...
- romusha 3y ago[flagged]
- addaon 3y agoSemantics is generally not the most interesting topic, but since the actual science behind the title claim is well-discussed elsewhere... We already have strong evidence of a fifth force, the Higgs force, by most accountings (assuming you enumerate the other low-energy forces as gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces; or, if you look at the higher-energy gravity, SU(3), SU(2), and U(1); either way). IF the g-2 experiments point to unknown particles (which seems unlikely), that could (and also could not) point to a sixth force.
- pdonis 3y ago> We already have strong evidence of a fifth force, the Higgs force AFAIK the effects due to the Higgs are not normally considered a separate force; to the extent they are a "force" at all, they are considered part of the electroweak interaction (the Higgs mechanism for giving mass to other particles, for example, is an effect of electroweak symmetry breaking).
- addaon 3y agoAs I said, semantics. But Higgs bosons do mediate momentum transfer, which is about as good a definition of a force as I can come up with. See e.g. http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/01/higgs-force-awakens.html http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/01/higgs-force-awakens....
- pdonis 3y ago> Higgs bosons do mediate momentum transfer The blog post you reference appears to say that this is true in theory (though impossible to detect experimentally as the effect is so tiny), but it would be nice to see an actual paper describing the specifics. For example, what do the Feynman diagrams for this "Higgs force" interaction look like?
- addaon 3y agoSee e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.05087 https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.05087; the area around eq 3 discusses the attractive force due to Higgs boson exchange, and the paper as a whole discusses testability.
- FreshStart 3y agoMy bet is on something created by matter anti matter annihilation and very hard to measure. Like you annihilate two parucles a c and gravity wobble for a splotsecond..
- fguerraz 3y agoThe leading theory being defended here is tha bigger and bigger particule accelerators are a good investment for society. Not blaming the guardian, but the PR of physicists.