Scientists at Fermilab close in on fifth force of nature

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 210 points – Scientists at Fermilab close in on fifth force of nature
bbc.com

Scientists at Fermilab close in on fifth force of nature::Physicists believe that an unknown force could be acting on sub-atomic particles known as muons.

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fuck yeah I live for this shit. Glad there’s smart people doing their thing. Wonder what they’ll call it. Muon force?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Since then, the research team has gathered more data and reduced the uncertainty of their measurements by a factor of two, according to Dr Brendan Casey, a senior scientist at Fermilab.

In an experiment with the catchy name 'g minus two (g-2)' the researchers accelerate the sub-atomic particles called muons around a 15m-diameter ring, where they are circulated about 1,000 times at nearly the speed of light.

The researchers found that they might be behaving in a way that can't be explained by the current theory, which is called the Standard Model, because of the influence of a new force of nature.

Dr Mitesh Patel from Imperial College London is among the thousands of physicists at the LHC attempting to find flaws in the Standard Model.

Prof Graziano Venanzoni, of Liverpool University, who is one of the leading researchers on the project, told BBC News that this might be caused by an unknown new force.

Researchers know that there is what they describe as "physics beyond the Standard Model" out there, because the current theory can't explain lots of things that astronomers observe in space.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I know of course but for the people in the cheap seats... What are the first four?

“All of the forces we experience every day can be reduced to just four categories: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. These four fundamental forces govern how all the objects and particles in the Universe interact with each other.”

I thought gravity had been reclassified as "not a force" since it doesn't have a carrier particle and is a fundamental property of spacetime interacting with mass?

Just quoting the article, but Dr. Wikipedia also lists them as part of the four “fundamental interactions”.

Not an expert in any way, but there’s this short article that seems to go into that some, that it’s more an “emergent force”, but then he goes on to say that if we’re not defining gravity as a “real force”, then we can’t define the other forces as “real” either. It just seems like a bunch of disagreement over terminology that I’m not nearly educated enough to care about the distinctions being made.

But electromagnetism and weak force has already been understood as a single force, electro weak. So they are not fundamental

Just quoting the article, but Dr. Wikipedia also lists them as part of the four “fundamental interactions”.

I’m not an expert, but at everyday low energies, electromagnetism and weak interaction apparently behave differently, it’s only at higher energy that they unify into a single force (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_interaction).

Right. they appear different but fundamentally they are the same.

Clearly they havent met my mom.

Scientists abondon search for dark matter after finding your mom.

"Turns out there isn't any missing mass, we found it all".

Yo momma so fat...she's the fifth force of nature. OOOOOOHHHHHH

Seriously, can we stop with the yo momma jokes, please? They've been done so much that they're old and worn out now.

Just like yo momma!