Scientists at Fermilab close in on fifth force of nature

a reply to: Arbitrageur

No, to the contrary, scientists are not doing it wrong, they are doing it beautifully! They are doing it the correct way and are therefore have made amazing leaps and bounds over the last few centuries.
I am saying to the contrary... scientists should apply their method even further. There is so much more to reality than meets the eye. In doing so, they will quickly come to the realization that our flawed definition of 'observation' has been a major stumbling block, not to mention 'nature'!

A better analogy would be you struggling to understand a movie by studying each pixel individually in real time (for it is impossible to observe them all at the same time), with the expectation that once you eventually accomplish this impossible task, the movie plot will explain how pixels work.
So you misused the overall experience of relaxing on the sofa and watching a movie, you still misunderstand how pixels work and you missed the entire plot of the movie too.

To put it simply, I believe that in a few centuries, looking back at today, humanity will give the title of scientist not to those in lab coats, but to those who applied a higher state of critical thinking, awareness and observation to the whole of reality, not just the energy of material observation, thereby redefining science. Achieving a higher state of consciousness...

In the barbaric days of old, those we call scientists/researchers today were seen as heretics back then, some even died for this. Ask yourself, today, in a world where everyone worships material, science and self, who are the heretics?

You wont know the answer... it would be too much, although Isaac Newton got this answer (which is what impressed me the most about him)... but i think you get the jist!

ANyways i respect and am thankful for gods gift of science and scientists to humanity and all that it brings! And also for your inputs...

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.

a reply to: ErosA433

Its not that i dont know what further even means. I can explain to you how this is done by humans. But that i dont have time for now, and to be honest its not easy for me to put into writing. There's a reason why it has been passed down orally over the generations. These things that are not as easily quantifiable on paper as science would prefer.

Again, Isaac Newton clocked onto this toward the end of his life... literally one of the only sceintists ever to do so! IF only he knew of those in his time that coudlve shown him!

Please dont misundertand me, i do not disrespect science!

a reply to: ErosA433

About whether a paper is peer-reviewed.
There is no need for this. Peer-review is not a golden standard anymore and most publications are preprints at one point, with many to be good enough for publication.

Physics isn't politicalized like other subjects and you could expect the peer-review process to verify the results or the models and the mathematics behind whatever models are used.

I am not saying peer-review is to be abandoned but a quality paper is...a quality paper regardless of peer-review. This process can be easily politicalized in other disciplines (biomedical sciences and medicine for example)

a reply to: AlienBorg

again though dont get me wrong, but, a lab report isnt a paper, peer reviewed or otherwise. The other form of document which can be more useful than a paper is when a paper comes from a PhD thesis... if you can get that thesis they are typically a treasure trove of information, typically reviewed by a hand full of people.

Some level of politics can always get invovled but peer review is at heart to get the information both correct, and robust. It doesn't mean the process is perfect but in physics, we largely go to preprint while having things peer reviewed. It gives everyone a chance to have their say and give feedback.

Its not a gold standard, but it isn't actually a thing to avoid or be cynical of, not for physics in general... maybe other subjects? but iv not really seen the use for politicization in physics. There are not many subjects etc that physics wants to hide in general. Like... there isn't an agenda to push dark matter for example... if you saw the amount of papers discussing its existance, non existance etc, its a free for all... but what the field does agree upon in general is that its worth looking for.

I work in the field, iv never for example seen someones research get so far only to have the rug pulled from under them by shadowy figures, like gets suggested here so many times.

originally posted by: ErosA433
a reply to: AlienBorg

again though dont get me wrong, but, a lab report isnt a paper, peer reviewed or otherwise. The other form of document which can be more useful than a paper is when a paper comes from a PhD thesis... if you can get that thesis they are typically a treasure trove of information, typically reviewed by a hand full of people.

Some level of politics can always get invovled but peer review is at heart to get the information both correct, and robust. It doesn't mean the process is perfect but in physics, we largely go to preprint while having things peer reviewed. It gives everyone a chance to have their say and give feedback.

Its not a gold standard, but it isn't actually a thing to avoid or be cynical of, not for physics in general... maybe other subjects? but iv not really seen the use for politicization in physics. There are not many subjects etc that physics wants to hide in general. Like... there isn't an agenda to push dark matter for example... if you saw the amount of papers discussing its existance, non existance etc, its a free for all... but what the field does agree upon in general is that its worth looking for.

I work in the field, iv never for example seen someones research get so far only to have the rug pulled from under them by shadowy figures, like gets suggested here so many times.

Physics is the least politicalized.
Other subjects such as the biomedical sciences are very different.

Yep, a lab report isn't a paper but you can construct a very good paper based on theory and results. Especially when you have a range of results and have invested effort and time to obtain them. Very different to theoretical physics btw as you have obtained actual results, the aim in science.

I should say that im not poo pooing the lab report, it was simply a statement of why they would put something out there that they admit is wrong or flawed. Largely because its a lab report and the open discussion of all aspects of the study is always interesting and offers a hand for future people to not have to repeat the same pitfalls or to be aware of possible issues.