Links for 2010-06-26

  • Testing the Best-Yet Theory of Nature « Berkeley Lab News Center
    “”[I]t should be remembered that the Standard Model is not a final theory of all phenomena, and is therefore inherently incomplete,” says Dmitry Budker, a staff scientist in the Nuclear Science Division of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley.

    Budker has long been interested in testing widely accepted underpinnings of physical theory to their limits. In the June 25 issue of Physical Review Letters, he and his colleagues report the most rigorous trials yet of a fundamental assumption about how particles behave on the atomic scale.”

    (tags: science physics quantum optics atoms experiment precision-measurement news)

2 comments

  1. Like fitting a sine wave single cycle with an odd-order algebraic polynomial or the whole of economics, the Standard Model only works where it has been jury-rigged to work.

    http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/constants.html

    Extrapolations are disasters: Chiral symmetry breaking, matter-antimatter abundance; failure of quantum gravitations (SUGRA), neutrino mass and neutrino-antineutrino mass, zero SUSY partner detections, Higgs meson non-appearance; dark matter. Contemporary physical theory derived from assumed fundamental symmetries is empirically defective, an illusion of knowledge.

    To criticize is to volunteer. Somebody should look! The worst it can do is succeed,

    http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/erotor1.jpg
    Do opposite shoes violate the Equivalence Principle?

  2. Am I alone in feeling a bit uncomfortable in the way this experimental result is promoted? I just think the possibility that photons violate the spin-statistics theorem is, a priori, incredibly small. But strangely, the experimenters seem to be using this enormous unlikelihood as an argument in favor of doing the experiment.

    The following quote also leaves me speechless:
    “There’s a mathematical proof of the spin-statistics theorem, but it’s so abstruse you have to be a professional quantum field theorist to understand it,” says Budker. “Every attempt to find a simple explanation has failed, even by scientists as distinguished as Richard Feynman. The proof itself is based on assumptions, some explicit, some subtle. That’s why experimental tests are essential.”

    Again, he seems to be saying that anything which cannot be explained in words of one syllable is open to doubt.

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