Posted on 04/10/2011 6:32:18 PM PDT by neverdem
Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are planning to announce Wednesday that they have found a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature.
The results, if they hold up, could be a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilabs Tevatron, once the worlds most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it.
Nobody knows what this is, said Christopher Hill, a theorist at Fermilab who was not part of the team. If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.
One possible explanation for this mysterious bump, scientists say, is that it is evidence of a new and unexpected version of the long-sought Higgs boson. This is a hypothetical elementary particle that, according to the reigning theory known as the Standard Model, is responsible for endowing other elementary particles with mass.
Another explanation might be that it is evidence of a new force of nature in addition to gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces we already know and are baffled by that would manifest itself only at very short distances like those that rule inside the atomic nucleus.
Either could shake what has passed for conventional wisdom in physics for the last few decades. Or it could be there is something they do not understand about so-called regular physics.
Giovanni Punzi, the Fermilab physicist who is spokesman for the international team that did the work, said by e-mail that he and his colleagues were strongly thrilled at the possibility, and cautious at the same time, because this would be so important that almost scares us so...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
That’s what crossed my mind, as I was reading...
Blink really fast?!
Is there no reason that none of this stuff can ever be funded privately?
LOL-Perfect answer
Been there...Done that...Nice try guys...
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