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Re:New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard ... by jerf on Friday December 20, 2019 @03:14PM (#21847040)
If 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.

Re:New boson appears in nuclear decay, could break standard ... by throwaway_tech on Friday December 20, 2019 @03:25PM (#21847110)
Well 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.