Last week physicists working at the Tevatron Accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Chicago, Illinois, may have encountered the greatest discovery in modern physics since the Manhattan Project during WWII. That new discovery could create quite a stir for particle physicists everywhere, mostly because this "new" particle was wholly unexpected. No one even knows what it is, and because of the sheer surprise of the data, some question its legitimacy. The scientists who ran the experiment estimate its potential error at less than .25% probability, but it's still not enough to publish a hard-core report. Assuming the data are real, this discovery introduces more problems than it solves: Why didn't anyone predict its arrival? How does it fit in with our idea of the atomic model? What is it?
Current speculation of this particle's identity is a variant form of the infamous Higgs Boson, which scientists have been hoping to view in a collision since its proposed existence in the 1990s. The Higgs Boson is theorized to be responsible for the mass found in other particles, and since any freshman physics student knows that energy can never be created or destroyed, the discovery of the Higgs Boson will elucidate the beginning of the universe and show scientists how mass came to exist.
Cool, right?
Of course, with so many different physicists from all over the world working on this project, there are many alternate theories as to what this could be, one of which is that this is a new physical force which works only a very small distances, such as the strong nuclear forces that holds atoms together. Yet another theory is that we have constantly missed something in our hazy understanding of physics, and this is the first clue as to what that "something" is. If this is true, it could have major implications in a major issue in today's physics: how to unify the theory of quantum gravity.
Because the data are so small and, as of now, unsupported, more tests are absolutely essential in the study of this new particle (or force, or representation of a model heretofore unknown). Unfortunately for every particle physicist on earth, the Tevatron is going to be shut down sometime this year, as late as September and as early as when FermiLab runs out of funding money. If allowed to run this same test again, the FermiLab group would have about four times as much data to analyze, enough for either a refutation or a proposal.
So maybe with all the new cloud computing software going into effect, the Government will be able to spare that money and give it to the scientists at Tevatron. Who knows? This could be the dawn of a new age in particle physics.
Current speculation of this particle's identity is a variant form of the infamous Higgs Boson, which scientists have been hoping to view in a collision since its proposed existence in the 1990s. The Higgs Boson is theorized to be responsible for the mass found in other particles, and since any freshman physics student knows that energy can never be created or destroyed, the discovery of the Higgs Boson will elucidate the beginning of the universe and show scientists how mass came to exist.
Cool, right?
Of course, with so many different physicists from all over the world working on this project, there are many alternate theories as to what this could be, one of which is that this is a new physical force which works only a very small distances, such as the strong nuclear forces that holds atoms together. Yet another theory is that we have constantly missed something in our hazy understanding of physics, and this is the first clue as to what that "something" is. If this is true, it could have major implications in a major issue in today's physics: how to unify the theory of quantum gravity.
Because the data are so small and, as of now, unsupported, more tests are absolutely essential in the study of this new particle (or force, or representation of a model heretofore unknown). Unfortunately for every particle physicist on earth, the Tevatron is going to be shut down sometime this year, as late as September and as early as when FermiLab runs out of funding money. If allowed to run this same test again, the FermiLab group would have about four times as much data to analyze, enough for either a refutation or a proposal.
So maybe with all the new cloud computing software going into effect, the Government will be able to spare that money and give it to the scientists at Tevatron. Who knows? This could be the dawn of a new age in particle physics.