tagged w/ Theoretical Physics
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At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths
By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: April 5, 2011
Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature.
The results, if they hold up, could be a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab’s Tevatron, once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it.
“Nobody knows what this is,” said Christopher Hill, a theorist at Fermilab who was not part of the team. “If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.”
One possible explanation for this mysterious bump, scientists say, is that it is evidence of a new and unexpected version of the long-sought Higgs boson. This is a hypothetical elementary particle that, according to the reigning theory known as the Standard Model, is responsible for endowing other elementary particles with mass.
Another explanation might be that it is evidence of a new force of nature — in addition to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces we already know and are baffled by — that would manifest itself only at very short distances like those that rule inside the atomic nucleus.
Either could shake what has passed for conventional wisdom in physics for the last few decades. Or it could be there is something they do not understand about so-called regular physics.
Giovanni Punzi, the Fermilab physicist who is spokesman for the international team that did the work, said by e-mail that he and his colleagues were “strongly thrilled at the possibility, and cautious at the same time, because this would be so important that almost scares us — so we think of all possible alternative explanations.”
Physicists outside the Fermilab circle said they regarded the results, which have been widely discussed in physics circles for several months, with a mixture of awe and skepticism.
“If it holds up, it’s very big,” said Neal Weiner, a theoretical physicist at New York University. Lisa Randall, a theorist at Harvard, said the same thing: “It is definitely interesting, if real.”
But Nima Arkani-Hamed of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., said he did not find the bump convincing, saying it could be an artifact of how the data was sliced and diced.
The important thing, he said, was that if this and other anomalies recently reported at the Tevatron are real, then the Large Hadron Collider, a rival machine run by CERN, “will see dramatic evidence in not too long — that’s certainly what I’m waiting for.”
The key phrase, everyone agrees, is “if it holds up.” The experimenters estimate that there is a less than a quarter of 1 percent chance their bump is a statistical fluctuation, making it what physicists call a three-sigma result, enough to attract attention but not enough to claim an actual discovery. Three-sigma bumps, as every physicist knows, can come and go.
The Tevatron has been colliding beams of protons and their opposites, antiprotons, that have been accelerated to energies of one trillion electron volts, for more than two decades looking for new forces and particles. The bump showed up in an analysis of some 10,000 of those collisions collected by the Collider Detector at Fermilab, one of two mammoth detectors at the facility, which is outside Chicago.
They found that in about 250 more cases than they expected, what came out of the collision were two jets of lightweight particles, like electrons, and a heavy-force-carrying particle called the W boson were produced. The team found that in about 250 times more cases than expected, the total energy of the jets clustered around a value of about 144 billion electron volts, as if they were the decay products of a hitherto unsuspected particle with that mass-energy. For comparison, a proton weighs about one billion electron volts.
This could not be the Standard Model Higgs, Dr. Punzi and his colleagues concluded, because the Higgs is predicted to decay into much heavier particles, namely quarks. Moreover, the rate at which these mystery particles were being produced was 300 times greater than Higgs bosons would be produced.
If real, it was something totally new, Dr. Punzi said. The result had recently been strengthened, he said, by new calculations of interactions between quarks, which are notoriously difficult to compute. “It is so new, so astonishing, we ourselves can barely believe it,” he said. “We decided we had to let the whole world know.”
Dr. Punzi and his colleagues have submitted a paper that was to be posted on a physics Web site Tuesday night and has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.
Joe Lykken, a Fermilab particle theorist, said Dr. Punzi’s group would have four times as much data in an analysis later this year. “This would be enough to claim a definitive major discovery,” he wrote in an e-mail, “just as the Tevatron — and perhaps Fermilab itself — is being shut down for budget savings.”At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths
By DENNIS... more
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Extra dimensions are old news. The newest mind-bending descriptions of reality dreamed up by the world’s smartest physicists, and explained by superstar superstring theorist Brian Greene in his latest book The Hidden Reality, include untold numbers of extra universes. A million universes isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Ten to the 500th power universes. Greene likes to drop you into the middle of the action first and then explain the backstory (and sometimes it does feel like a full-scale intellectual invasion is happening), but he has an elegant knack for anticipating questions and immediately dealing with any confusion or objections. http://www.makeahistory.com/index.php/your-details/32324-superstring-theorist-brian-greene-and-his-idea-of-an-infinite-number-of-universesExtra dimensions are old news. The newest mind-bending descriptions of reality dreamed... more
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Researchers at Fermilab are building a “holometer” so they can disprove everything you thought you knew about the universe. More specifically, they are trying to either prove or disprove the somewhat mind-bending notion that the third dimension doesn’t exist at all, and that the 3-D universe we think we live in is nothing more than a hologram. To do so, they are building the most precise clock ever created.
The universe-as-hologram theory is predicated on the idea that spacetime is not perfectly smooth, but becomes discrete and pixelated as you zoom in further and further, like a low-res digital image. This idea isn’t novel; recent experiments in black-hole physics have offered evidence that this may be the case, and prominent physicists have proposed similar ideas. Under this theory, the universe actually exists in two dimensions and the third is an illusion produced by the intertwining of time and depth. But the false third dimension can’t be perceived as such, because nothing travels faster than light, so instruments can’t find its limits.
This is theoretical physics at its finest, drowning in complex mathematics but short on hard data. So Fermilab particle astrophysicist Craig Hogan and his team are building a “holometer” to magnify spacetime and see if it is indeed as noisy as the math suggests it might be at higher resolution. In Fermilab’s largest laser lab, Hogan and company are putting together what they call a “holographic interferometer,” which – like a classic interferometer – will split laser beams and measure the difference in frequencies between the two identical beams.
But unlike conventional interferometers, the holometer will measure for noise or interference in spacetime itself. It’s actually composed of two interferometers – built one atop the other – that produce data on the amount of interference or “holographic noise.” Since they are measuring the same volume of spacetime, they should show the same amount of correlated jitter in the fabric of the universe. It will produce the first direct experimental insight into the fundamental nature of space and time, and there’s no telling what researchers delving into that data might find out about the holographic nature of the universe.
So enjoy the third dimension while you still can. Construction on the first instrument is already underway, and Hogan thinks they will begin collecting data on the very nature of spacetime itself by next year.
Read more: http://www.darkgovernment.com/news/#ixzz13ZLYljxUResearchers at Fermilab are building a “holometer” so they can disprove... more
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A long time ago, in a universe much larger than our own, a giant star collapsed. Its implosion crammed so much mass and energy together that it created a wormhole to another universe. And inside this wormhole, our own universe was born. It may seem fantastic, but a theoretical physicist claims that such a scenario could help answer some of the most perplexing questions in cosmology.
(click on the link to read all about it)A long time ago, in a universe much larger than our own, a giant star collapsed. Its... more
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Of all the places you'd expect to see a "theory of everything" develop you might be forgiven for not thinking it would grow out of the sport of surfing. But the world is full of surprises and this surfer who has no money has shocked the world of physics with his unifying model of everything!
It's as interesting as it is complicated!Of all the places you'd expect to see a "theory of everything" develop... more
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An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which as received rave reviews from scientists. An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the... more
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"In my dialog with Willis Harman, published as Biology Revisioned (North Atlantic Publishers, Berkeley 1998), I reversed the scientific story I was taught from seeing consciousness as the end product of evolution to seeing consciousness as the source of evolution. In other words, the universe, to me, is fundamentally Consciousness -- alive, aware and intelligent. This Consciousness is non-local, i.e. everywhere, and is what different cultures variously personify as God, under many names. It is also what physicists now call "zero point energy" -- the infinite energy existing at every point in space. They are discovering that it is conscious and that it non-locally records all information ever produced in the universe. This Conscious non-timespace energy is vaster than our local universe. It can and does transmute itself into electromagnetic energy, and, in turn, matter, in the creation of universes such as ours, though it can also create itself into other pure energy patterns in a myriad ways (they include angelic realms, for example, and all the "worlds" we exist in between lives, and eternally).
"This All-That-Is God Source is perceived as I-Am from the perspective of the local consciousness created in beings such as you and me, when we go into meditation, expanding our little consciousness into the Great One we are all part of. In this state we not only perceive union with God, we transcend our local selves such that we recognize ourselves as God."
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Chant OM.... uh... click on the link for the full article."In my dialog with Willis Harman, published as Biology Revisioned (North Atlantic... more
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