CON-cern: New Particle Fizzles, Leaving Physicists to Soul Search

[*marbusfeld]

New Particle Fizzles, Leaving Physicists to Soul Search

http://discovermagazine.com/2017/ja...ysicists-to-soul-search#.WI9oqyjOAkE.facebook




The hype started in December 2015 when two experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland showed puzzling hints of a massive new particle. Scientists wrote hundreds of papers about how this potential particle might solve mysteries about anything from dark matter to quantum gravity. But further tests showed that the much-discussed “bump” in their data was nothing more than a statistical ghost. The signal was just noise. Discovering a new particle could have revolutionize...

444 Chronos

 

[sniffy]

From Wired Magazine
The last thirty years of particle physics have been a little disappointing. A scientist’s job is to prove themselves wrong, but despite their best efforts, despite recreating the conditions of the Big Bang, particle physicists just keep being correct. Aside from a few unexplained observations (meddling neutrinos!), the Standard Model, which describes interactions between all known particles, has exactly predicted the outcome of every experiment in the history of particle physics. Physicists try to prove it wrong, and they keep failing.

Last December exposed the field’s latent craving for novelty. That’s when CERN announced a collection of unexpected observations at the Large Hadron Collider. Scientists quickly submitted over 500 papers, each inventing a new way to explain the observations, which seemed to blast holes in the hull of the unsinkable Standard Model. But in a new paper uploaded last night, CERN makes it clear that the search will have to continue: The exciting measurements were nothing more than statistical blips.