News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Measurement of the W boson mass reveals 7σ deviation from calculations. Parent comment

Re:Measurement of the W boson mass reveals 7σ deviation from... by krona on Friday April 08, 2022 @08:38AM (#30956129)
Also not knowing anything about this topic, I'd assume it wasn't normal because we're talking about mass close to zero, and mass must be greater than zero.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Measurement of the W boson mass reveals 7σ deviation from... by gus_massa on Friday April 08, 2022 @12:39PM (#30959347)
The mass in their result is 80433.5±9.4 MeV/c^2. The result of the experiment is a Gaussian like distribution. If you consider a Gaussian distribution with μ=80433.5 and σ=9.4, the probability to get a result that is less than 0 is 4E-15899105.

I filled this widget https://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/view.jsp?id=53fa34c5c66...

And got this result https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=mean%3D%5B%2F%2Fnumber%...

Note in the graphic that σ is 10000 smaller than μ so the probability to get a negative result is almost zero and you can just ignore it.

[ Parent | on HN ]