Particle Physics Experiments Reinforce Evidence of New Force of Nature

Ancient Origins

An experiment recently completed at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in suburban Chicago has produced strong data suggesting that a new force of nature may have been discovered. If this result is ultimately confirmed, it would require a revision of the Standard Model of particle physics, which currently posits the existence of only four laws that govern interactions at the subatomic level: electromagnetism, gravity, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force. The apparently new force of nature discovered in the Fermilab and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is creating enormous buzz in the world of quantum physics.

“It has the potential to turn physics on its head,” Aderin-Pocock added. “We have a number of these mysteries that remain unsolved. And this could give us the key answers to solve these mysteries.”

In the Fermilab Muon-2 experiment, muons were accelerated around a 45-foot (14-meter) ring, before being passed through a magnetic field. Muons traveling through such a field should wobble at a certain rate, in accordance with predictions derived from conventional four-force interactions (calculated with the effects of electromagnetism, gravity, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force.) But the muon experiment suggests a fifth force of nature.
To the surprise and delight of the Fermilab physicists, measurements of the muons in this experiment showed they were wobbling more rapidly than expected. This means some other force of nature must have been at work that impacted muon wobble rates. Therefore, in this experimental environment, a new and previously undetected force of nature would be the most logical way of explaining the muon wobble inconsistency.
According to current calculations, there is a one in 40,000 chance that this result could be a statistical fluke. While this may sound impressive, scientists are conservative with respect to such matters, and the custom is to not to categorize a new finding as a true discovery until the chance of a coincidence can be reduced to just one in 3.5 million.


"The race is really on now to try and get one of these experiments to really get the proof that this really is something new,” said Dr. Mitesh Patel, an Imperial College of London physicist who was involved in the Large Hadron Collider experiment. “That will take more data and more measurements and hopefully show evidence that these effects are real."
While significant work still needs to be done, it likely won’t take long for the relevant research to begin, in multiple locations. If indeed the laws of physics are about to change, that change may occur in the very near future.

This is kind of big. Even though they just discovered a "wobble" in a particle, it really should not be there. That indicates that there are more forces at work in nature than the standard model can account for.

Anyone who had a physics class since 1940 on was taught the that standard model was pretty much the way to go if you wanted a career in physics, not to think too much about certain problems, and to "put your head down and calculate. not philosophize"

Time for some more philosophers?

Would be interesting to know if it's a metallic meteorite or rock. Billions of years could shape and polish metal and make it seem to be some type of object. I like ooparts, and trying to figure them out.

I posted above in wrong topic
a reply to: Mark08

a reply to: Mark08
No worries. I knew what you were saying...

a reply to: Havamal

Standard model is still intact and no one was taught to not think about problems and calculate. In fact, the very experiment you source shows they were taught to do the opposite, which is why they are doing it.

Can the anomalous data be replicated consistently? That would give indication that there in fact may be other unknown forces.

a reply to: OccamsRazor04
Standard Model works - run the math. Still the most accurate thing we have to explain the universe. But there are still flaws:

First, the SM never even attempts to explain gravity. Boy, that was one of the goals from the 1920s - 1940s. And here we still are.


What is dark matter? It is a made up name because the SM does not address it, and currently cannot explain missing mass in the universe.

Why is there so much matter in the universe? Where is all the anti-matter? The SM says nothing about this fact.

Why do neutrinos have no mass under the SM, yet how do the three oscillate, or transform without mass? Is the model missing a neutrino?

Why is the universes' expansion speeding up, not slowing down as the SM would predict?

Why does gravity not have an effect on sub-atomic particles? This fourth and weakest force of nature does not seem to have any impact on the subatomic interactions the Standard Model predicts.

SM also does not incorporate neutrino oscillations and their non-zero masses.

How is it that something only exists when observed? The SM ignores anything not observed.

originally posted by: ATSAlex
Can the anomalous data be replicated consistently? That would give indication that there in fact may be other unknown forces.

People are working on that very hard right now. Either way, someone is going to be disappointed by the results. The SM folks are going to be sad if this is true, the "young turks" will say "we told you the SM was incomplete."

Could this be the missing piece?

Starships and teleporters by next decade?

A guy can dream

a reply to: Havamal
I hear a lot of claims of "New Force of Nature". There was another one earlier this year:

CERN experiment hints at new force of nature.

There may be other forces in nature we don't know about yet, so it's interesting to see if we might have actually really discovered one this time. But, more often than not (maybe always, so far?), the alleged new force of nature turns out to be not that. Sometimes the existing forces of nature can explain observations in ways that were not considered at the time of the announcement of "new force". Sometimes the experiment is not replicated or there turns out to be some other problem with the experiment.

So I wouldn't get overly excited every time you hear this kind of claim because the track record of proving these claims true hasn't been very good. How many such claims have there been, and how many new forces do we actually have? When was the last time we actually did discover a new force?

Here is a leading physicist who gives us an insider's perspective. The TL;DR is maybe there's new physics, maybe there isn't, as usual with these things. Time and more research will tell.

The Muon g-2 experiment announced one of the most tantalizing physics measurements in over a decade. It is possible that the measurement tells us that our theoretical calculation is missing some new physical phenomena. It is also possible that a new theoretical prediction points to the possibility that measurement and prediction basically agree. In this exciting video, Fermilab’s Dr. Don Lincoln gives you an insider’s perspective.

Wobbletrons?

a reply to: Arbitrageur
Thanks. I will look into this.

I can say that the world of physics has changed since I took courses at my University. There is much more openness to new ideas and concepts. It was somewhat "restrictive" during my time in study in the 1980's.

Wait until you see what we do with perpendicular muon beams utilizing gauge theory around a cone of a specific Element 116 isotope.

I am very interested in this subject. I am unsure how physicists will proceed to "prove" something that can't be measured. I revert to fairly modern expert on this subject to explain it in terms I can understand.

a reply to: Havamal

Progress within the scientific community has stagnated and been bogged down by the unnecessary ridicule of any paper not generally accepted or peer reviewed, science has been hijacked by Academia.

originally posted by: Havamal
a reply to: Arbitrageur
Thanks. I will look into this.

I can say that the world of physics has changed since I took courses at my University. There is much more openness to new ideas and concepts. It was somewhat "restrictive" during my time in study in the 1980's.

I'd be interested to know what you're basing that comment on. From watching popular physicists like Brian Greene and Michio Kaku it might seem that way, but when I read blogs by physicists I'm not sure how much they have changed. I think they still need convincing of new ideas, just like they always did, before they will accept them. Many weren't very open to the idea of the faster than light neutrinos that were measured at CERN for example, though people in the public were so open-minded they went gaga over that. Though I think that did generate a flurry of new papers proposing new physics, sort of like the topic of this thread. In that case the experimental measurement was off, in this case I think the theoretical prediction may be off, after all, it's an extremely challenging thing to calculate so so many digits of precision.

originally posted by: Havamal
a reply to: OccamsRazor04
Standard Model works - run the math. Still the most accurate thing we have to explain the universe. But there are still flaws:

First, the SM never even attempts to explain gravity. Boy, that was one of the goals from the 1920s - 1940s. And here we still are.

True, in fact the standard model does have some holes and you made a pretty good list of them, but I don't know whre you got this one from, is this supposed to be a restatement of gravity's absence from the standard model?

Why does gravity not have an effect on sub-atomic particles? This fourth and weakest force of nature does not seem to have any impact on the subatomic interactions the Standard Model predicts.

It's hard to measure because gravity is so much weaker than other forces, but the effect of gravity on neutrons was measured in 1951 and in 1965:

Gravitational Acceleration of Free Neutrons – Published 9 August 1965

The gravitational acceleration of free neutrons from the Oak Ridge Research Reactor has been measured in the evacuated 180-m flight path at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

How is it that something only exists when observed? The SM ignores anything not observed.

That's more of a problem with the way our monkey brains evolved than the model I think, and it's also a bit of a misleading over-generalization, for example, what about virtual particles? They are not actually observed, are they? But I think the standard model does not ignore them even though they are not observed:

Are virtual particles really constantly popping in and out of existence?

The Standard Model of particle physics predicts the mass of the Z boson, but the measured value differed a little. This small difference could be explained in terms of the time the Z spent as a virtual top quark if such a top quark had a certain mass. When the top quark mass was directly measured a few years later at the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, the value agreed with that obtained from the virtual particle analysis, providing a dramatic test of our understanding of virtual particles.

originally posted by: Grenade
a reply to: Havamal

Progress within the scientific community has stagnated and been bogged down by the unnecessary ridicule of any paper not generally accepted or peer reviewed, science has been hijacked by Academia.

I don't know what unnecessary ridicule you're talking about, but, what the physicists say on PhysicsForums is that there are so many legitimate reearchers publishing so many peer reviewed papers that it's a challenge to keep up with those, and they probably don't even read all of those. So the less qualified papers usually don't even get read by physicists, much less ridiculed.

Exceptions exist, like Blacklight Power, where a handful of physicists have looked into it because so many millions of dollars were being invested in it, and they concluded it was not good science and I did see some ridicule. But so what? If the physicists are wrong about that, Blacklight Power doesn't need them, BLP got millions from investors to develop their technology that physicists say is pseudoscience, so if it works they can laugh in the faces of the physicists when they prove it. Aside from attention-getting investment schemes like that though, there are a lot of people thinking outside the box, many unsuccessfully because they don't even know where the box is, and no physicist wants to waste their time on those, not even taking the time to ridicule them.

A Muon sounds like a big fat electron. Could it be missing some of it's family or buddies when going on this roller coaster ride?

a reply to: kwakakev

The problem is that you were taught wrong on how to think about physics. Particles do last forever. They bounce into existence then become their own opposite particle, or a totally different one. But we are taught is the dumb “it is like the solar system (but really, really, small) model of these objects.

What is really going on is hard to grasp as a concept because the concept involves math and things like I infinity. And we can barely count to multiples of ten!

Everything is a quantum field. And these things can, and do, interact. But the math that explains them has infinity’s in them. So you ask, “what is negative infinity cross multiplied with positive infinity”? “Zero? One? Negative infinity plus one? Positive one, only if the Riemann Hypothesis is true??” Because of the unknown maths, the real particle world, where quantum fields clash at night, is a tough quandary that we have not solved!

Here is an article that just showed up (how does Universe know we are pondering such thoughts??? And gives us the answer. How many times do we miss the answer?? Weird, huh?!)

Quantamagazine.org : www.quantamagazine.org...

a reply to: Grenade

Well, I'm not sure it's accurate to say another force was discovered. What was discovered is the standard model cannot explain what we are seeing. Ill try to make this as simple as I can.

Lets start with leptons there are 3 and the standard model treats them as carbon copies of one another. Meaning they are interchangeable we have the electron the muon and the tau. These are the basic building blocks of the universe along with quarks and bosons. Now, these interchangeable leptons means the universe doesn't care what we use this is known as lepton universality. And replacing one with another should not affect the likely hood of an interaction occurring.

However the LHC found through ‘beauty experiment that this may be wrong. What they do is create "beauty (b) quarks" and watch their decay. Well, when they decay they should be equally likely to produce muons as electrons. However, this doesn't appear to be the case there seems to be a bias towards electrons. According to the standard model, the value of RK should be 1. The value of RK measured was actually 0.846 + or - 0.044.

So this means nature has a preference for b quarks to decay to electrons instead of muons.So since we see this failure of the standard model that means we would need a new particle or force to explain this. Now this isnt a certainty because statistically speaking getting an RK value of 0.846 is roughly 1 in 1000 or a 3 sigma result. To verify results in physics requires a 1 in 1.5 million chance AKA the 5 sigma standard.

So as of right now the experiment needs to continue to run and we will have to continue to monitor the data.

Now we can speculate for a second what could be causing this difference in decay rates???

If its a particle it has to be able to interact with both quarks and leptons meaning it would have to be a leptoquark so far has not been seen but are only speculation there are labs hunting for these.
en.wikipedia.org...

Or there is a force we are unaware of that creates this bias.

Sorry everyone I tried to make this as easy to understand as I could

This discovery backs up some of what Boyd Bushman of Lockheed Martin was saying.In an old interview he mentioned that besides the four fundamental forces of nature there are four more additional fundamental forces in the universe that are known only to the black world scientific community.

He said that these forces are similar to one another and are very,very weak,their effects being felt on a very large macro level scale (galactical scale and beyond).He claimed that harnessing these new forces with new advanced materials will make faster than light travel much,much easier than we think.