Well, remember the new paper? We're pretty much entering that worst case scenario.

I believe you mean "best case"! There was much hue and cry after the Higgs discovery because the result, at least from the outside, seemed like "welp, we predicted a thing and found it and we don't have any new physics to disagree with; what a letdown!"

worst case here would be something like "oh, we thought it was 7 sigma, but actually we can completely account for the discrepancy because the instrument deformed slowly under its own weight for the last decade and now we're 4 angstroms off and we still don't have any new physics to disagree with!"

This was hilarious and plausible at the same time. Nice work!

And from a different field, but closer to the quip: semiconductor lithography lenses' own weight causes stresses that cause birefringence in the optics that has to be explicitly corrected for. And that was true 20 years ago already.

(Recovering particle physicist here and thinking about this even much later gives me mild trauma. ;) )

Have more info on this or link about it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...

1 a : a study where participants seek to disprove their own conjectures

  b: the practice of getting excited when proven wrong because it means more work

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Power is the same, but acting on the former.

Stay away from mirrors or that definition collapses on itself.

The question we still do not have any after standard model. Whilst we have some big question similar to ultraviolet crazy (like today vaccuum space has so much energy the world has been gone in 10 power negative 30 sec) etc.

Still waiting.

SO WHAT if it means other things are wrong? we need to know what we are wrong about if we are ever to get any of it right.

If you can't do that, then you build another instrument that uses a different technique but reaches similar sensitivity. If the two instruments disagree, this will tend to lead to confusion and general wringing of hands. If at all possible, do the aforementioned higher-sensitivity plan.

This is not possible

https://non-trivial-solution.blogspot.com/2022/04/do-we-have...

It seems to align with measurements from:

* D0 I

* CDF I

* OPAL

* ALEPH

I do not know what refinements happened between D0 1/2, or CDF 1/2.

I don't understand this mindset? Why (aside from creating jobs) is it good to discover that the universe is more complicated than we knew, or that we were wrong?

To me, what we want in "new physics" is explanations for unexplained phenomena, or resolutions to know problems/inconsistencies (like quantum vs gravity), or emergent effects that less to interesting applications.

Because this would give us hints to new degrees of freedom in the current models that seem to contradict each other but otherwise work extremely well in their respective their domains. Finding a crack in those hermetically closed models would be wonderful.

Some teams are working trying to resolve the Quantum Gravity problem. I doubt this is useful for them, at least for now.

Other team are working in particle colliders. They get a Nobel price if they discover a new particle or a correction to the "Standard Model".

Hopefully both teams will meet somewhere in the middle. Perhaps a new experiment will give a hint about how to make quantum gravity work. Perhaps a new theory of quantum gravity will predict a result that can be tested in a particle collider. Don't expect this to be soon.

And there are many other teams that are working in one of the N-2 areas of Physics that are unrelated and their research is not affected by a Quantum Gravity theory or modification to the "Standard Model".

New physics are the only thing that can guide discovery of the correct answer.

simply can't happen without

> is it good to discover that the universe is more complicated than we knew, or that we were wrong

Tommaso Dorigo [1] covers a lot of the points where some of their assumptions/methods can be reasonably questioned but the effects would not push the result that much closer to the current SM theoretical value.

[1] https://www.science20.com/tommaso_dorigo/is_the_cdf_w_mass_m...

For me personally, the discussion by the researchers about their guiding principles for conducting scientific research was a great reminder for all researchers..

As that section concluded :

"Science is organized in skepticism."

Feels like it's aimed at 5th graders...

Analogies have the problem that you never know where they stop, and so you can't safely reason any further from what you've been told. It is bad if you walk away thinking you know more than you really do.

If you're not reading the math, you're fundamentally in the business of being told simplified stories made up of lies we tell to children. If anything, the article that makes you feel like a 5th grader is honest. As far as I'm concerned, it might still be talking up to me.

Newly Measured Particle Seems Heavy Enough to Break Known Physics(https://www.quantamagazine.org/fermilab-says-particle-is-hea...) 189 points|digital55|7 days ago|122 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30948260

Measurement of the W boson mass reveals 7σ deviation from calculations(https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk1781) 355 points|nvalis|6 days ago|151 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30955033

Scientists are worried about the W Boson: 'Something is amiss'(https://www.cnet.com/science/why-scientists-are-worried-abou...) 74 points|hsnewman|4 days ago|41 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30977931

It's already known that what we call dark matter in some contexts (e.g. the mass that holds galaxies together) is at least partly made of black holes. We just don't know if black holes account for 100% or 1% of the dark matter that we believe exists in a typical galaxy.

Hopefully this opens doors for plenty of new research and discoveries.

Anyone in the know that can help me on this one?