Muon g-2 Experiments - Possible New Physics

[The Wookie]

Surprised noone has posted about this yet:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6538/11...

I don't have enough knowledge to understand the implications of this but the potential for physics that is outside the standard model sounds like a significant development?

[SpudLink]

The BBC have covered this, but I’m none the wiser.
https://youtu.be/A9yAFp0_QyE

[Flooble]

Unfortunately I think we've reached a point with physics where the discoveries are so complex, so esoteric and so far removed from being likely to have any clear "use" that it's hard to get excited by them.

I appreciate that modern computers actually have to take into account things like quantum tunnelling so when I say "use" I am putting it in speech marks, however, I am viewing the discoveries today against those in the past when things progressed fairly quickly and directly from "Okay so we discovered that if you excite electrons in a glass tube it fogs photographic plates" to "hey we can put your hand in front of the plate and get an image of the bones".

These days we have things like the Higgs boson being predicted and then found but there's a bit of an element of "great ... now what?". Bearing in mind it's nearly a decade since they found the Higgs boson but it's not led to anything other than further refinement of models and looking at it in more and more detail. I imagine if you want a career in research you have to be super-specialised and can probably spend your entire career on a tiny aspect of one part of the model these days - the days of making new discoveries every few years and those discoveries unfurling brand new (accessible) fields of study seem to be over, it feels like it's more a case of just gradually filling in the gaps in the existing picture, a bit like one of those crime dramas where the hero keeps saying "enhance" and a murky photo gradually becomes crystal clear.

[rxe]

The Wookie said:

Surprised noone has posted about this yet:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6538/11...

I don't have enough knowledge to understand the implications of this but the potential for physics that is outside the standard model sounds like a significant development?

I don’t even begin to understand the maths needed for this, but essentially it means that our understanding of how the universe works may be a bit wrong. It may be very wrong, or a bit wrong.

To use an analogy, we have have a very good set of models to describe burning stuff. The more logs you put on the fire, the hotter and smokier it gets. We even start to understand chemical reactions, and have models of forces that liberate energy when chemical changes happen. So far so good. Then someone slips an atomic bomb into the log pile. There is a loud bang and once the dust has settled, we look at the crater. Gosh, our models of burning stuff are ..... wrong. There’s more out there than chemical reactions.

This could be as big as the discovery of nuclear reactions, or it could be a small tweak. I’m not smart enough to know. But think of these guys in the same light as Marie Curie, experimenting with things that don’t behave as expected.