Wednesday, April 21, 2021

Wobbling Muons May Hint at Unknown Forces




Reversing river

Every six months the Tonlé Sap River reverses direction.


Coffee crisis

Vietnam is the second-largest producer of coffee in the world because of a crisis in 1970s East Germany


 Once again, the world is more right-wing than you think.  Even Stanford academics.  And these ants shrink their brains for a chance to become queen(NYT).

2. World’s longest rabbit theft moral hazard? (NYT): “Darius was insured for $1.6 million and traveled with a bodyguard, according to NBC’s Today show in a 2010 article.”  Note that his status as the world’s longest rabbit already was under threat from his own descendants.

3. MIE: $4,000 Star Wars armchair (why?).

4. “Today in Markets in Everything, from the Netherlands: informal insurance for curfew violations via Whatsapp:

https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/5225039/verzekeringsfonds-whatsapp-tegen-avondklokboete

For a €10 prepaid fee, the owners of the Whatsapp group will wire you €95 (the fine for violating the curfew) after sending in a picture of the fine. It will also provide ‘safe’ routes through the city where policing is light.”

5. China-Taiwan chip scenarios.


Wobbling Muons May Hint at Unknown Forces


Muon Ring

The preliminary results of a study of elementary particles at Fermilab and elsewhere show that the behavior of particles called muons deviates from standard physical theories, indicating that previously unknown forces are at work.

Evidence is mounting that a tiny subatomic particle seems to be disobeying the known laws of physics, scientists announced on Wednesday, a finding that would open a vast and tantalizing hole in our understanding of the universe.

The result, physicists say, suggests that there are forms of matter and energy vital to the nature and evolution of the cosmos that are not yet known to science.

“This is our Mars rover landing moment,” said Chris Polly, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill., who has been working toward this finding for most of his career.

The particle célèbre is the muon, which is akin to an electron but far heavier, and is an integral element of the cosmos. Dr. Polly and his colleagues — an international team of 200 physicists from seven countries — found that muons did not behave as predicted when shot through an intense magnetic field at Fermilab.

The aberrant behavior poses a firm challenge to the Standard Model, the suite of equations that enumerates the fundamental particles in the universe (17, at last count) and how they interact.

“This is strong evidence that the muon is sensitive to something that is not in our best theory,” said Renee Fatemi, a physicist at the University of Kentucky.

UPDATE ·  Apr 08, 2021At Quanta Magazine, Natalie Wolchover dives deeper into the preliminary resultsand what they might mean.