a reply to:
combatmaster
What you are saying is actually pretty.... how do i put it.... ignorant of what scientists actually do vs what you think they do.
Your opening statement is actually i think a little meaningless and also not at all well motivated.
You are basically saying "Well done scientists, your observations are interesting... BUT... you are missing something, you need to look beyond!"
To which the scientists say... "Ok so what are we missing?" and you say... "You are just... you know... missing something! look deeper"
The reason why i am a bit dubious of your statement, is that the machines we build in order to observe various phenomenon... are only useful if we do
understand those machines, and the emergent properties of them, extremely well. Thats what Calibration is, thats what quantification is. The g-2
measurement is doing EXACTLY what you are saying already. Its an extremely hard measurement to perform, that machine they built, id make a statement
that the machine is extremely well tuned and calibrated.
And when i say this, i mean that some components have likely been individually studied in test stands in order to understand how every component
works, and what the performance is to an extremely precise level.
Real life example I can give is of a liquid scintillator detector surrounded by Photomultiplier tubes.
each PMT is read out via an extensive daq chain. However if you simply turn on the detector and look at the data you would find that, while the data
looks ok, its still a bit weird. And by weird i mean, you put a calibration source, something radioactive at the centre of the detector, and, you
would expect to see the whole thing light up the PMTs in a very uniform manner, with all PMTs indicating you saw a signal at exactly the same time.
What you see instead is that some PMTs see more charge than others, some see the signal many nanoseconds before the rest.
Well then you realise, OOOOH yes i forgot that the cable lengths between the electronics are supposed to be the same, but in reality we cut them and,
yeah they are probably different by up to 6 inches... ok so lets change the definition of TAC such that when we have this source in the geometric
center of our detector, the time the signal is observed is aligned. Great! but what about the charge?
You then remember that oh yes thats right every PMT has a slightly different gain, and a slightly different Quantum efficiency, You did put them in to
the detector in groups with roughly the same optimal voltage and thus, gain but yeah there is some discrepancy. So lets make a specific area of the
detector the standard and adjust the gain calibration of the rest to match the relative offset. But what about the QE? Well you take a spare PMT of
the same type and you look at it in the lab, you flash a calibrated light source at it from different angles and you map the efficiency, this should
give you a idea about what you expect the 'width' or resolution of your charge peak in the detector.
So now, via this simple calibration you can align the time of all the electronics, and unify the gain, and ensure you can minimise the energy
resolution of the detector.
Now with that information and the corrections you can look at your physics data and... Oh look, because the time isn't all kinds of messed up, and the
charges look better, you can actually pull out new information about events. Such as, events having a prompt cherenkov component that arrives just
before the scintillation light. giving you a way to tag directionality for events that enter the detector with high momentum as opposed to radioactive
decays inside the detector.
Unless i massively missunderstand your point... scientists are already doing what you think they are not.
My example above is very simplified but you can't even start to imagine how far down the rabbit hole one can go. In my case when it comes to photon
sensing, building simulations to look at charge carrier production in silicon depending on doping concentrations and pn junction shapes is something
that we did to ensure we understand fundamentally how some of our detector systems work.
When you understand a detector down to the near fundamental physics level... its hard to simply state "go further" if you don't yourself know what
further even means.