
Weird neutrino excess won’t go away, hints at new physics - mpweiher
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/weird-neutrino-excess-wont-go-away-hints-at-new-physics/
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panic
A few other comment threads about this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17210982](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17210982)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225957](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225957)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17253127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17253127)

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sterlind
This one has new info, though:

 _Now Fermilab is back with its latest update, using two additional years of
MiniBooNE data. The excess is still there, and it has edged even closer to the
statistical standards for discovery. If you combine the Fermi and Los Alamos
data, we 're already there. It's looking more and more like another break in
the Standard Model, and the possible explanations include an entirely new type
of neutrino._

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yorwba
Given the publication dates, those other articles are almost certainly also
based on [https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12028](https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.12028),
which incorporates those two additional years of data.

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saagarjha
> a proposed additional type of neutrino, called a sterile neutrino

Does this imply the existence of a new lepton?

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zakk
Do you mean a new generation of matter, with two new leptons and two new
quarks?

Cosmological data show that there should be only three generations of matter.

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saagarjha
> Do you mean a new generation of matter, with two new leptons and two new
> quarks?

Yeah, that's what I was getting at: one of the leptons being the sterile
neutrino and the other being the "sterile particle".

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lifeisstillgood
Is there a guide to science for people like me who have barely grasped Special
Relativity. I am a full _century_ out of date and I do wonder if I should be
worried before we throw the stuff I don't know out and replace it with other
stuff I don't know

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bufferoverflow
Watch PBS Space Time channel starting from the early videos:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g/videos?view=0&sort=da&flow=grid)

They range from easy to follow to quite technical.

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mehrdadn
Dumb question that I feel I may have asked before, but that I don't recall the
answer to:

Why does it seem like everyone believes the number of "fundamental" particles
is finite? What fundamental reason is there for this?

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pixl97
Because there is no evidence of an infinite number of different fundamental
particles.

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mehrdadn
What would count as evidence for this?

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pixl97
Particles have energy levels. There is a maximum energy level and a minimum
energy level. We already know that every energy level does not have a particle
associated with it (quanta). Therefore there cannot be an infinite number of
particles.

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mehrdadn
Huh, interesting. What is the maximum energy level a particle can
theoretically have? How do we know it is the maximum?

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pixl97
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_hot](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_hot)

Tl;dr, put enough energy in a particle and it turns into a singularity.

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netman21
Wow. 1,959 detections out of 10^21 interactions. And they talk about
statistical significance. In any other field that is so close to zero you
would ignore the results.

~~~
auntienomen
Think of it this way: With 10^21 samples, you can be pretty certain that your
sample mean will be the theoretical one.

~~~
yorwba
The absolute error will be low, but the relative error can still be high. E.g.
if you're dealing with events that have a frequency of 1 in 2 million, then 1
million samples can't have exactly 0.5 occurrences, so the relative error is
at least 100%.

