#new physics

On the topic of a new electron-positron collider in response to people saying they should spend money on something 'more important'! (I am open to differing opinions from my own - this is my own view and the evidence I formed it from!) This comes after a press release today from CERN on https://home.cern/news/news/physics/particle-physicists-update-strategy-future-field-europe 

This has caused quite a bit of controversy within the scientific community - that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, a climate crisis, why should we care about particle physics and a new expensive project that could just prove the standard model is more or less complete, and maybe ‘just fill in the odd gap’?

Firstly: in response to people saying the money should be sent on climate change or pandemic management, the tech that is developed to make such a particle collider, such as the LHC, causes huge tech advancements which can even be used in medical fields eg https://t.co/kwun6K7H6t?amp=1

Secondly: a high-profile project such as this, and the results it could bring, will be great for future research funding for all science, not to mention the job opportunities for scientists and engineers (eg, ATLAS has ~3000 authors from 181 institutions! https://atlas.cern/discover/collaboration)

Thirdly: although 'the Large Hadron collider' is one collider, it isn't just one experiment! There are 7 experiments at the LHC: ATLAS, CMS, ALICE, LHCb, TOTEM, LHCf and MoEDAL! There have been over 2725 papers published from the LHC experiment: see this article on what 10 years of the LHC have achieved: https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/10-years-of-lhc-physics-in-numbers

Finally, all I have to finish with is a quote from Stephen Hawking: “It surprises me how disinterested we are today about things like physics, space, the universe and philosophy of our existence, our purpose, our final destination. Its a crazy world out there. Be curious.”

Ask Ethan: What Could Solve The Cosmic Controversy Over The Expanding Universe?

“As you pointed out in several of your columns, the cosmic [distance] ladder and the study of CMBR gives incompatible values for the Hubble constant. What are the best explanations cosmologists have come with to reconcile them?”

If you had two independent ways to measure a property of the Universe, you’d really hope they agreed with one another. Well, the situation we have with the expanding Universe is extremely puzzling: we have about 10 ways to do it, and the answers all fall into two independent and mutually incompatible categories. Either you make the measurement of an early, relic signal that’s observable today, and you get a value of 67 km/s/Mpc, with an uncertainty of about 1%, or you measure a distant object whose emitted light comes directly to our eyes through the expanding Universe, and you get a value of 73 km/s/Mpc, with an uncertainty of about 2%. It’s looking increasingly unlikely that any one group is wrong, in which case, we absolutely require some new, exotic physics to explain it.

“A collision of protons captured today at the Large Hadron Collider. Today (23/05/17) marks the first day of data-taking since early December at the world's most powerful particle accelerator, which underwent extensive maintenance. Researchers hope to pin down the properties of the Higgs boson, follow up on some anomalous data from previous runs, and perhaps catch a glimpse of new physics.” - Physics Today 

The Cosmic Hologram – In-formation at the Center of Creation, by Jude Currivan, Ph.D. An interesting book. At first, I thought Dr. Currivan was about regurgitating twentieth-century science, much of which I’ve wrestled with these many years. But surprisingly it’s quite a bit more . She does skate past relativity and quantum theory but again, surprisingly, claims no need to identify a super…

LHC breaks energy record to chase new Big Bang physics

As Futura explained in a previous articleCERN researchers bring into collision protons that they accelerate to gears increasingly close to that of the light for just over 60 years, with the commissioning on 24 November 1959 of CERN’s first large particle accelerator: the Proton Synchroton (PS). At the time, the machine made it possible to produce protons whose energies reached 25 GeV, exceeding…

Which ‘Hints’ Of New Physics Should We Be Paying Attention To?

"7.) Does the Muon g-2 experiment break the Standard Model? This one is both highly contentious and also brand new. Years ago, physicists attempted to measure the magnetic moment of the muon to incredible precision, and got a value. As theory raced to catch up, they calculated (and, where calculations were impossible, inferred based on other experimental data) what that value ought to be. A tension emerged, and Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment returned their first major results, showing a strong discrepancy between theory and experiment. As always, “new physics” and a broken Standard Model were all over the headlines.

The experiment was sound, their errors were well-quantified, and the discrepancy appears to be real. But this time, it appears that the theory might be the problem. Without the ability to calculate the expected value, the theory team relied on indirect data from other experiments. Meanwhile, a different theoretical technique has recently emerged, and their calculations match the experimental values (within the errors), not the mainstream theory calculation. Better experimental data is coming, but the theoretical discrepancy is rightfully at the center of this latest controversy.

Verdict: Undecided; the biggest uncertainties are theoretical and must be resolved independent of experiment.

Most likely explanation: Error with the theoretical calculations, but new physics remains a possibility."