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Re:Newly Measured Particle Seems Heavy Enough to Break Known... by ben_w on Friday April 08, 2022 @09:14AM (#30956410)
The mass estimate in this isn’t story isn’t from a single event, it’s “based on an analysis of about 4 million W bosons produced at the Tevatron between 2002 and 2011”.
Re:Newly Measured Particle Seems Heavy Enough to Break Known... by XCSme on Friday April 08, 2022 @09:23AM (#30956494)
So the "measured" mass is not a single value but a set of samples with varying masses? And those samples have a standard deviation from the theoretical value?
Re:Newly Measured Particle Seems Heavy Enough to Break Known... by ben_w on Friday April 08, 2022 @09:53AM (#30956760)
As I understand it, the mean of those values is seven standard deviations away from the theoretical value, and you should only expect a result that extreme to occur by chance roughly once per 3.9e11 reruns of the entire experiment.

But I would caution that precision is so important to both physics and statistics that what I think I understand may be quite different from what’s actually going on.

Re:Newly Measured Particle Seems Heavy Enough to Break Known... by codethief on Friday April 08, 2022 @01:54PM (#30960349)
No, it's the average value taken from (naturally) slightly varying measurements of (hopefully) the exact same mass. In the standard model, all particles of a given type are assumed to share the same properties, including the same mass, and so far we have no reason to believe otherwise.