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What a wishy washy nothing burger of an article. It's written the way I imagine I would describe computers to my gran.
"We squeezed rocks and filled them with lightning, so that they can think incredibly fast but with no imagination at all."
Yeah - early measurements of the magnetic moment of a muon aren't coming out as per theory. Could be the setup, could be a fifth fundamental force, could be that someone's fucked the sums on the four that we know about, could be invisible gremlins loading up the particles with slightly charged nothingburgers to foul up the experiment.
Could the invisible gremlins be sophons?
How do we even know there is another fundamental force?
We don’t know for sure, it is one of the possibilities why prediction and result don’t line up.
“If the measurements don’t line up with the prediction [calculated with the standard model], that could be a sign that there is some unknown particle appearing in the loops—which could, for example, be the carrier of a fifth force,” particle physicist Jon Butterworth told The Guardian.
The article overstates the case. I posted it because it's interesting, but the headline is hyperbole. It is the usual situation where an anomalous observation could lead to an important new discovery and a revolution in theory, but it may turn out to be an issue with the experimental setup, a confounding factor that no one has thought of, or some new phenomenon that can after all be accommodated without major theoretical upheavals.
Here's another source that reports that a Russian experiment has obtained results that fit with the Standard Model, so the discrepancy could be caused by any of these other factors, not by a deficiency in the Standard Model itself:
Dreams of new physics fade with latest muon magnetism result
So it's far too early to be saying we're on the brink of a scientific revolution due to these anomalous results. All we know is that the anomaly seems intermittent and is so far unexplained.
It’s in the article, the standard model is proving to be incomplete, not covering new phenomena, it works for other things but there’s something missing
Love. The fifth force is love.
Multipass
If what theyre seeing is real, it could indicate the presence of unknown particles. Not necessarily a force but something. Essentially quantum mechanics predicts that the magnetic moment of the electron, muon etc. are a little bit off from what would be expected without interactions with the quantum foam. Space isnt empty, there are virtual particles popping into and out of existence constantly over short time periods that still manage to interact with other things before they dissappear. This quantum foam's effects on the magnetic moment of electrons, muons etc. depend on what particles are in that quantum foam. The standard model can be used to predict the magnitude of these effects given what particles it predicts should be in that foam. But if there's more particles there that it doesn't predict should be there, the magnetic moment measurement won't quite match predictions. I.e if there is stuff in the quantum foam that we don't know about, we can infer their existence through indirect effects.
I don't understand virtual particles. Everytime I ask someone for an explanation, they just tell me they "pop into existence" and I can't get anything specific on that. What is the energy that produces these particles?
Energy itself is a weirdly defined thing at those sizes. It's sort of a wavy property rather than a physical action.
Vacuum has a lot more energy than its "supposed to" have. This is a huge problem because Einstein says that energy equals mass (multiplied by a constant), so if there is no mass, how can there by energy?
The energy of vacuum is observable, but the mass is not. So the question really is "Where is the rest of this energy?"
The idea of virtual particles is then that the vacuum is full of these energy fluctuations that equals out without ever turning into actual particles with mass.
It's the energy of the quantum fields that permeate space. They're less "particles" per se, and more just the random jiggles in the quantum fields that aren't coherent enough to be a full-on normal particle of that field, so the ripple starts and then dies out.
Is it a onepom?
@floofloof I was just pondering Quantum Cable Entanglement. There's proof?
No, there's no proof of anything. There's an anomalous result in some of the experiments, while others claim to give the expected result. It's too early to draw conclusions.