Posted on 10/11/2017 7:35:44 PM PDT by MtnClimber
When it comes to physics, fewer things are more exciting than proving something wrong. Proving theories wrong has led to entirely new fields of study. The fruits that come from wrongness can be so rewarding that scientists devote a considerable amount of time to probing well-known theories, hoping to find a crack.
But a team of JILA physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado, Boulder is reporting that, once again, the theory was right—specifically, the Standard Model of particle physics and its prediction of just how spherical the distribution of an electron’s charge really is. Researchers haven’t gotten their experiments down to the sensitivities of the theory yet, but they’re getting closer. This leaves less room for deviation and less room for more interesting things they were hoping to see beyond the Standard Model.
“We know that the Standard Model can’t be completely correct, said William Cairncross, a Ph.D student at the University of Colorado Boulder, in an interview with Gizmodo. “There are things that we see in the large-scale universe that can’t be explained, like different amounts of matter and antimatter or things like dark matter and dark energy.”
In this specific case, the researchers are aware that an asymmetry in how the electron’s electric charge is distributed means it should behave differently forwards versus backwards in time, said Cairncross. They’re hoping to find this asymmetry so that, in a circuitous way, it could help explain other mysteries of the Universe, like why even though every kind of particle has an antiparticle, scientists still observe way more regular matter than antimatter. Unfortunately, the scientists who performed this latest experiment still did not uncover the desired asymmetry.
Electrons are single points without a real size,
(Excerpt) Read more at gizmodo.com ...
“The Standard Model is surprisingly accurate.”
Yes it is until we start playing with dice for the Universe per Einstein. Einstein was wrong and so admitted. Heisenberg was right but neither Einstein nor Heisenberg understood what they observed. Once you observe you have changed what you observe and it is no longer a valid observation, and this leads to quantum entanglement which is very very very strange. Not one physicists understand it. They can use it and manipulate it but they do not understand it.
I doubt anyone will understand. It is all about uncertainty.
Per Einstein “ God does not play dice with the Universe.” He was wrong and admitted he was wrong but to this day not one understands why God plays dice, but he does.
I think God has a sense of humor for us mere mortals.
Yet Newton remains the standard within the practical realm, up to and including interplanetary travel. The Newtonian view has been humbled, no doubt, in having to acknowledge its status as an approximation, but it carries on.
There's irony in that, since the metaphor of DICE is entirely classical, insofar as practical uncertainty in the roll of the dice overshadows whatever quantum uncertainty may lurk at its base.
OTOH, I often feel that THE QUANTUM does lurk closer to us than we recognize.
Thanks MtnClimber.
There was even a period before the Special Theory of Relativity when physicists would say “everything obeys Newtonian mechanics, except for electric current.”
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Yep. A lot of the fundamental work for relativity was already done by Lorentz and Poincare. But Einstein was the only one to come up with the proper reasoning.
Such a negative story.....
I just wish they’d figure out a way to make the d@mn little things stay where they are and not shock me in the winter.
distressingly accurate... according to the article
They do love their made up gibberish “science” though, don’t they?
Yes, Einstein was wrong: he thought he made a mistake several times but it turned out he was wrong.
There are many explanations for the observed experimental results, all certain to be wrong, but sometimes useful to pretend they are true. All explanations have to give up either on locality or causality. The Copenhagen interpretation gave up on causality to keep locality, a reasonable choice, concluding the universe is fundamentally random. However recent experiments have proven the universe is in fact non-local. That puts deterministic explanations back on the table.
An article if interested: Fluid Tests Hint at Concrete Quantum Reality
“There was even a period before the Special Theory of Relativity when physicists would say ‘everything obeys Newtonian mechanics, except for electric current.’”
As Albert Einstein said: “The special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell’s equations of the electromagnetic field.” Newton and Maxwell were the two greatest inspirations for Einstein’s contributions.
As Albert Einstein said: “The special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell’s equations of the electromagnetic field.”
...
Maybe, but Einstein also said that all he needed was the observation of stellar aberration and the Fizeau experiments to come up with Special Relativity.
Einstein’s three miracle papers of 1905 also required the belief that particles were real. That may not sound like much today, but in the mainstream physics of the time, it was all but a forbidden belief. That’s why Lorenz and Poincare couldn’t come up with Special Relativity, but Einstein could. Einstein wasn’t a physicist in 1905 and his university work was based on the concept of particles. It could be that’s because some of Einstein’s university advisors didn’t like Einstein. Almost all famous physicists also had famous advisors. That’s not the case with Einstein. In fact, he had to switch advisors because of disagreements.
When Boltzman developed a theory that relied on particles, it is said that he was driven to suicide by the physics community for such heresy. When Planck did the same he apologized profusely.
Ohm....my, your resistance is showing.
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