Chicago scientists to choose Sterile Neutrinos or Symmetry Violation

June 6, 2018 2:13 PM

Boffins quietly cheering possible discovery of new fundamental particle

Some good news from Chicago, for those with a particle physics bent. For others, a mishmash of promising new band names.

posted by GhostRider (18 comments total)

I hope one is the Bozon, the fundamental particle of stupidity.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 2:47 PM on June 6, 2018 [3 favorites]

Boffins! I hate these guys.
posted by thelonius at 2:55 PM on June 6, 2018 [3 favorites]

Boffins, blighters - a bit of color in the science reporting, but very interesting. Now for one more sigma.
posted by blue shadows at 3:18 PM on June 6, 2018

I knew it was TheRegister because "boffins"
posted by sjswitzer at 3:20 PM on June 6, 2018 [7 favorites]

I misread this as puffins and am disappointed not to see little birds in lab coats
posted by JDHarper at 3:33 PM on June 6, 2018 [6 favorites]

I just want to know how many of those boffins died to bring us this information.
posted by Ranucci at 4:22 PM on June 6, 2018 [21 favorites]

Well, I found the Hugs Bison 6 years ago and bought the shirt.

But seriously, does this involve the Higgs Boffin???
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:29 PM on June 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

I expect they will celebrate by firing a beam of neutrinos at South Dakota.
posted by The Incredible Gnome at 6:40 PM on June 6, 2018 [3 favorites]

If this is confirmed over time it's actually really exciting as it'll be the first discovery that sheds shade on the Standard Model. As great as the Standard Model is, it's boring, little room for FTL or jumping between universes, just very realistic and un-scifi. This naked sterile neutrino give hope for all the crazy ideas!
posted by sammyo at 7:32 PM on June 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

little birds in lab coats

We've tried, but they just can't hold a clipboard properly.
posted by bonehead at 8:24 PM on June 6, 2018 [6 favorites]

The Standard Model being boring, as in, we turned it into engineering and used it to come up with electronics and stuff? Do we need some exciting theories with no known practical applicability.... Maybe string theory?

QM is fantastically accurate -- 0.2 parts per billion difference between calculated and measured values of a certain fundamental constant. (Oddly enough that value happens to be almost exactly equal to 1/137. How weird is that.) It would be really cool if QM was overthrown by superstrings or M-theory or some such but it seems a tough act to follow. Exciting times ahead, hope we don't have to wait too long....
posted by phliar at 8:48 PM on June 6, 2018

I hope one is the Bozon, the fundamental particle of stupidity

The Standard Model already includes the moron, if I recall correctly.
posted by flabdablet at 9:55 PM on June 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

So IIUC it's basically like mosquitoes: these scientists want to release lots of sterile neutrinos to stop the other ones reproducing and breaking standard models.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:55 PM on June 6, 2018 [5 favorites]

String theory and its variations aren't something that will overthrow quantum field theory, but will emerge locked hand-in-hand with it from a more fundamental theory in which locality and unitarity are outputs rather than inputs.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 1:20 AM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

Particle physicist blogger Jester pours some cold water on the sterile neutrino hype:

The anomaly is not really new: similar results showing a 3.8σ excess of νe-like events were already published in 2012. The increase of the significance is hardly relevant: at this point we know anyway that the excess is not a statistical fluke, while a systematic effect due to underestimated backgrounds would also lead to a growing anomaly. If anything, there are now less reasons than in 2012 to believe in the sterile neutrino origin the MiniBooNE anomaly, as I will argue in the following.

posted by mubba at 7:35 AM on June 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

And here's another skeptical take from Tommaso Dorigo. (Again not skeptical that there's a significant anomaly in the data, but that new physics is required to explain it.)
posted by mubba at 1:08 PM on June 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

There’s no way this pans out. Always bet on the Standard Model, absent overwhelming evidence.
posted by persona au gratin at 1:44 AM on June 8, 2018

it's a good model Brent
posted by flabdablet at 6:16 AM on June 8, 2018 [4 favorites]