There’s a Dennis Overbye article in the Times today with the Web headline “From Fermilab, a New Clue to Explain Human Existence?” which I like to think of as a back-handed tribute to the person who linked to an interview with Sean Carroll by calling him “The cosmologist, not the scientist.” This is the secret of human existence explained by science, not biology.
The physics issue in question is why we have more matter than antimatter in the universe, as symmetry would seem to demand they be created in equal amounts in the Big Bang. Had that happened, though, all of the matter should’ve annihilated with the antimatter very quickly, leaving us with a big empty space full of photons and not much else. So there must be some breaking of fundamental symmetries, the technical term for which is “CP-violation,” in order for there to be all the matter we see around us.
New results from Fermilab hint at this CP-violation– B mesons produced there turn out to be slightly more likely to decay into matter, in the form of muons, than into antimatter. The D0 collaboration sees this asymmetry as being a little more than three standard deviations away from the Standard Model prediction, which is around the point where physicists start talking about it most likely being a real effect, not a statistical fluke. If it holds up, this would be a solid sign of physics beyond the Standard Model, which has proven unreasonably effective for the last couple of decades.
I’ll defer the actual explanation to Resonaances and Tommaso Dorigo, because I don’t have the two hours it would take to write an explanation that wouldn’t spawn a dozen comments pointing out some mistake or another. I will, however, quote Tommaso’s final paragraph:
One further thing to note: it would be ironic if new physics required a deep study of B mesons (particles which do not require the highest energy to be produced) rather than pushing to higher and higher energy our investigations. The LHC might turn out to be a spectator in this race for a while… Of course, the ATLAS and CMS experiments will one day have more data than CDF and DZERO and will surpass by far the sensitivity of their Fermilab cousins even in B-physics measurements; but it will take years!
It’s no secret that I’m rooting for the AMO-based searches to scoop the LHC for finding new physics, because I think that would be the most amusing end to years of particle hype. If they can’t get there, though, having them scooped by Fermilab would be an acceptable second choice.
It’s pretty clear that if the future of particle physics is building more and more giant research centers like the LHC then particle physics is going to die out. It’s not easy to sell the usefulness of fundamental physics anyway(despite arguments like “We invented the internet”). Exponentially increasing price tags doesn’t make it easier…
It would be better if the media didn’t focus so much on it, as if it’s the only thing going on. There are a lot of experiments being done at nuclear reactors and other small detectors that is just as important if not more important than what happens at the LHC. Also a lot of our knowledge of particle interactions comes from astrophysics observations. I personally wouldn’t be at all upset if particle physics turned from the crazy large detector obsession to something that could be done on a tabletop like AMO… But it’s not as exciting to people I guess.
“Half of all three-sigma results are wrong”
explained by science, not biology
Biology isn’t a science?
Then surely they should have been 0.675-sigma events? (or the distribution is not normal).
Mary, we can assume that he was poking back at the ‘cosmologist, not the scientist’ comment, biology’s Sean Carroll being a pretty terrific writer in his own right. James Watson at the World Science Festival said it succinctly (and with Brian Greene 10 feet away, even funnier) “biology doesn’t need string theory. Evolution works.”
There has always been competition between physical and life sciences, but hard science has gotten softer and some in physics have fallen back to the ‘without X, nothing makes sense’ default explanations for big questions, X being whatever the latest popular hypothesis is.