Mass of Muons Messing Up The Standard Model of the Universe

Particle physics isn't just about the colliders. While the news has been full of the trials and tribulations of the Large Hadron Collider, the computing systems required to interpret the data resulting from the collisions are every bit as massive as the huge collider itself. This is because we can't observe the collisions directly. Scientists have to work out what happened by reassembling all the bits that fly out - it's like a jigsaw where all the pieces are made of equations and quantum. Only by fitting the fragments together can researchers learn about the standard model - until the pieces don't match.

That's what's happening at the Fermilab "Tevatron" accelerator. Recent experiments have shown a surge of muons (heavy elementary particles), and when they try to plug the pieces into the standard model they just don't go in. Scientists don't panic when this sort of thing happens, since investigating the unknown is kind of their job description, they just keep at it. They've kept at it until they've seen it happen a hundred thousand times, in fact, so they're fairly sure that whatever-it-is is actually happening.

But not entirely sure. While everyone at the facility has seen the results, a third of them - fully two hundred people - are not putting their name on the paper announcing the events, for fear that it all turns out to be the super-expensive particle accelerator equivalent of having your thumb over the camera lens. But the fact that the rest of them are prepared to announce "This is what we've seen, and we don't know what the hell" is what makes science great. Pure scientists aren't scared of failure - where a politician and a businessman cannot say anything unsure for fear of reprisals, the idea of science is that even if someone says "You forgot to turn off the thingimy-doo-dad and carry the two, idiot!", the scientist then goes "Thanks!" and can fix the problem.

Exciting new results with unknown implications? Oh, you just know that the blogging community is using the anomaly to "prove" everything from superstring theory to who killed JFK, in many cases with the same understanding of subatomic physics one might expect from a boiled lobster. Beware of over-eager science writing for the next little while - remember, if the guys who actually run the Tevatron haven't figured it out yet it's unlikely to be because the real expert was busy with his Wordpress at the time.

The bottom line is that this is an exciting new result of the best kind: the kind where we don't know what the hell it means. This is where advances are made, and whether it turns out to be a new dimension or a dusty camera lens, the debate will spur the advance of science.

By Luke McKinney

Image credit: CERN