
Hints of an unexpected new particle could be confirmed within days - s9w
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/is-particle-physics-about-to-crack-wide-open
======
Trombone12
What a shitty article. First of all, the excesses presented in December are
more noteworthy because they demonstrated how much information flows between
the supposedly "independent" general experiments. In December the global CMS
excess (the one that matters) was 1.2 sigma, but heyoo a little bird told us
ATLAS sees a 2 sigma global excess at the same place so into the slides it
goes! So much for independence...

Since then there was an update in march where ATLAS still sees a global
significance of 2 sigma and CMS is down below 1. Local significances are up
though CMS has pushed their 2.6 to 2.8, and ATLAS has gotten their 3.6 sigma
into 3.9 (Both have also added a new model for interpreting this, I'm just
giving the largest sigma values reported). The reason improvement is so modest
is because there hasn't been any new data on account of the LHC being set in
the "off" position.

Anyway, the reason the OP article is such crap is that it doesn't mention any
details about the rumour it is so clearly based on. Perusing more technical
rumourmongers I find a mention of a 4.7 sigma excess in an ATLAS analysis that
wasn't approved in time for the big conference in March. So if the article is
based on that rumour, it is about three months old by now. But we can't tell,
since the author wusses out on even saying what detector will "CRACK PARTICLE
PHYSICS WIDE OPEN"... -_-

~~~
pizlonator
5 sigma or it didn't happen!

(And thanks for the great summary.)

------
pdonis
Unfortunately, this sort of linkbait headline has become typical for
Scientific American (which is one of the reasons I haven't subscribed for
years). As has already been pointed out in these comments, the Standard Model
is already believed to be incomplete by particle physicists, and discovering a
new particle in this general energy regime is exactly what everyone has been
hoping for for a couple of decades now. Yes, such a new particle is not
included in the Standard Model--because there hasn't been any experimental
evidence for one. If this discovery pans out, particle physicists will finally
be able to start model building again the way it was done when the SM itself
was built: based on good experimental data.

~~~
arcticfox
I don't understand what's wrong with the article headline. For years, the
theorists were ahead of the experimentalists and were just waiting for the
Higgs to be confirmed while they simply speculated about what might be next.

This, for the first time in a long time, would put experimentalists ahead of
theorists. That could easily 'crack wide open' a new set of theories to
explain the possible particle. Hardly click-bait here, IMO - the content is
sufficiently exciting relative to the headline.

~~~
pdonis
_> I don't understand what's wrong with the article headline._

"Crack Wide Open" implies, to me, that this discovery somehow shows that
particle physics is on a wrong track and needs to drastically change course.
(In other comments I've pointed out statements in the article itself that give
the same impression.) That's not the case at all. Particle physics has been
stalled because of the lack of new experimental data to help theorists extend
their models. This discovery, if it pans out, will help particle physics to
start up again, exactly as particle physicists have wanted to do for quite
some time.

~~~
jessriedel
"Crack Wide Open" does not imply that at all. It implies a difficult problem
that suddenly yields. When the police officer on the murder drama says this
clue will "crack the case wide open", he doesn't mean they've been doing their
police work wrong.

~~~
pdonis
_> "Crack Wide Open" does not imply that at all._

In isolation, it might not. Taken by itself the phrase is open to multiple
interpretations. But in the context of the article as a whole, I think it
does.

~~~
erikpukinskis
I agree with jessriedel. I don't think the implication is there.

I also think it's generally bad for discussion to do what you are doing, which
is to latch on to a very specific interpretation of a single phrase, and
pushing to get everyone else accept that interpretation, instead of taking
other comments as additional information about how the words can be
interpreted and allowing for those different interpretations to coexist.

~~~
pdonis
Personally, I think that what is bad for discussion is to do what Scientific
American did, which is to talk about a scientific discovery in terms that make
it seem much more radical than it really is, for no reason that I can see
beyond trying to attract readers. The headline is only one aspect of that, as
my other comments in this discussion (not just this subthread) should make
clear.

------
ifdefdebug
"It would be bigger than the detection of the Higgs boson, which was just
confirmation of what was already known."

This is so wrong. Finding the Higgs where it was expected was very important
because otherwise "what was already known" would have been false.

~~~
ThePhysicist
I think the difference that the author wants to stress here is that this new
particle would be something that no one has predicted. The discovery of the
Higgs, on the other hand, was an experiment that confirmed a theory which had
been formulated several decades ago. And while this is also an amazing
achievement, finding a particle that can't be accounted for with our current
theories is much more exciting (to me at least), as it means that our current
understanding of particle physics is fundamentally or at least partially
wrong.

This, I think, is exactly the kind of discovery that people expected from the
LHC: Something new and exciting that invalidates our current theories and
gives us a possibility to devise / test new ones against real experimental
data. After all, the real shortage in particle physics is not the number of
theories (we can invent a quasi infinite number of them), but the data against
which we can test them.

~~~
ifdefdebug
As I see it, before the Higgs was seen, this search was also a search for "new
physics", because if Higgs was wrong, a lot of new physics would have been
needed to explain the things Higgs was trying to explain. It's just that
everybody was expecting a confirmation because all of the rest of the SM
turned out to be right so far, so nobody really expected new physics to come
from there.

Now since the last chance of "new physics" due to the lack of a signal where a
signal should have been is gone, everybody turns their hope to finding a
signal where no signal was expected. This is of course totally legitimated,
but it doesn't take away any of the importance of the former.

I would love to see something new too, but if the SM explains everything we
are able to measure today just fine, then be it. Then the SM is all we need,
until we are able to measure more. It's just like the people in the 19th
century: they had to go with Newton because they couldn't measure anything
beyond Newton. But on the other hand, back then Newton was all they needed,
because Newton could explain everything they saw.

~~~
acqq
> people in the 19th century: they had to go with Newton because they couldn't
> measure anything beyond Newton

As far as I know in 19th century there were already the measurements and the
calculations resulting from them that didn't match Newton's model.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbain_Le_Verrier#Precession_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbain_Le_Verrier#Precession_of_Mercury)

By the way, Le Verrier also discovered Neptune just by studying the measured
movements of the known planets.

~~~
ifdefdebug
I stand corrected. Please read my sentence as: "in the 18th and early 19th
century".

------
tremon
Any physicists around to elaborate on the prevailing theories for this? The
article isn't exactly heavy on the details...

Is this suggested particle something like the muon-equivalent of the Higgs?

(edit: I've found [http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-new-boson-
at-750-g...](http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-new-boson-
at-750-gev.html), which at least has more details and more speculations)

~~~
ifdefdebug
I am not a physicist, but you can already read tons of crack pottery about the
bump all over the internet, while most serious scientists are still waiting
for the confirmation of the bump. But if it goes away unconfirmed, and odds
are still high for that, it will be silently buried.

~~~
jsprogrammer
Wouldn't retractions need to be issued and explanations given?

~~~
Etheryte
Retractions of what? There have been no (serious) publications regarding this
yet. Presenting experiment data is just that, stating what was measured, not
necessarily saying why.

~~~
jsprogrammer
"it", according to the post I responded to. Admittedly, it was never defined,
but seemed to be used in place of "claims by the few serious scientists who
are not waiting for confirmation".

------
archgoon
For those of you have heard about this back in December, there is no new data
at the moment. The only update is that CERN is firing up again; hopefully
we'll hear an update in the next several months or so.

------
gus_massa
I agree with the other comments that this is a bad article, but I want to
highlight yet another bad quote.

> _But this particle is not the Higgs boson: it is six times more massive.
> Nobody had predicted anything like this._

This is false, there are a lot of alternative expansions of the Standard
Model. Each one include a few new particles that are difficult to find because
it's necessary to use a bigger (or much bigger) particle accelerator.

For example, the first paragraph of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Alternative_models](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Alternative_models)
explains a theory that predict a family of 5 Higgs bosons. The lighter one
is(would be) the one we had seen. The other 4 are unobserved yet (don't exist
because the theory is wrong).

------
akeruu
No. As per Betteridge's law of headlines [1].

Joking aside, while the article has some content, the headline is definitely
tending way to much towards click-bating.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

~~~
gaur
> Who will win the US presidential election?

> No.

I have no idea why people insist on quoting an obviously nonsensical
formulation of this aphorism. It clearly can only be applied to headlines
phrased with yes-no questions, so saying it applies to " _any_ headline that
ends in a question mark" is false.

~~~
partisan
I am sure that we can institute an HN corollary that states that for any
headline in which there is a question mark in the title, someone on HN will
quote Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

Forgive me if this has been done already.

------
joshmarinacci
When the headline is a question, the answer is always no.

Even if this does mean new physics it doesn't mean the standard model will
'fall'. It will simply be expanded.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> When the headline is a question, the answer is always no.

People keep saying this, but it's so obviously false to me I don't understand
how a thinking person could believe it.

~~~
tremon
It's still a good heuristic. When presented with a question as headline, I
immediately answer it with "no". If I still want to read the article when the
question has been answered, that might mean I'm genuinely interested in the
topic.

