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"When you look at the data it's not some disagreement with the Standard Model, it's a nicely formed bump in the distribution that looks really like the kind of bump you'd get if a new particle was being exchanged in this process," said Dan Hooper, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab who was not involved in the research. source
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/image...3_52057981.jpg
One step closer to god :grin:
I will be honest: My particle knowledge is zero.
I mean, I never felt the need to go to a smaller level than the proton-electron-neutron thing.
However, this way of conducting science, doing hundreds of thousands, or millions of collisions with the hope that something will pop up, looks to me very fishy, and for me, intuitively is a bad way of doing science... almost as if they ran out of fresh teories that could be contrasted in a more ingenuous and cheap way.
Anyway, I am not (yet) a researcher of a scientist myself, and probably I am wrong, but...
:thinking:
I often think about dogs when it comes to science:grin:. Imagine a dog trying to understand the concept of colour, as they only perceive black and white. A dogs biological make-up is not developed enough to perceive something humans can.Quote:
Originally Posted by Spion Stirlitz
So if we can observe this short coming in one animal why would we presume that humans are perfectly design to be able to solve the mysteries of the universe. I wonder if we are perhaps biologicaly speaking under developed to truly come to grips with the answers.
I have similar thoughts about the limits of humans to discover the "ultimate truth".Quote:
Originally Posted by edao
For starters, as you say, we humans have evolutionary limitations in grasping "objective reality". Our senses and capacity of perception evolved in a particular direction and do not perceive but a small range of the physical properties of objects.
However, science is a "special kind of knowledge" that seeks precisely to overcome appareance and delve much deeper.
110 years ago, the most brilliant minds of humandkind still were debating if atoms existed or not. And much has been discovered since, a tremendous leap in knowledge.
However the deeper we delve, the more complex things become...
(I personally believe, that complexity of Reality is infinite, so there could only be aproximations).
And as the article says, since decades we have been colliding particles, first in fog chambers (I really don't know what kind of technology they are using right know to register the particles emitted), but somehow there has not been what I consider a breakthrough in many many years. The article itself says that the results are "inconclusive" and that weird statistical flukes occure precisely because you have made so many similar trials...
Naturally the effort to augment knowledge is to be praised by itself... but they look more like an "burocratization and industrialization of science", something that I intuitively do not like.
The experiments of Robert Millikan or that of Geiger & Marsden were much more ingenious and allowed to obtain extraordinary knowledge in a much more cheaper way...
Code:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMfYHag7Liw
... I mean, in terms of ingeniousness, they seem qualitatively different from these collisions experiments that last decades and decades, going nowhere, except spending $$$$$ ...Code:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger%E2%80%93Marsden_experiment
(But in any case, I am not a physicist... )
Anyway, thanks @Edao... it is a very intersting topic. :good_job: