NYTimes, Science News, etc: On the latest mystery bumps and squiggles as particles collide – and physicists cross their fingers
Maybe new kinds of physics – you know, particles and fields whose imprints in the detectors of big colliders make new rules or break old ones – are finally arising from the noise. They make the science more exciting then just waiting for Mr. Higgs’s particle to show up and explain mass. The Higgs is on the agenda. Maybe it’s finally rapping on the window at Chicago’s Tevatron, in an unexpected incarnation. Some of the new things rising toward statistical significance, one gathers, are surprises. This is a good omen for excitement when the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Europe stretches its legs in earnest in coming months and years. The Tevatron for its part may finish its glorious run by giving its operators – before the professors. their post docs, and their grad students all migrate to the LHC - important credit in drafting StandardModel.2 .
Several outlets in recent days have covered the rumors and rumblings, chiefly a beguiling bump in the mass and energy curve of proton-on-antiproton smashup debris in the Tevatron’s CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) pictured above :
- NYTimes (Apr 6) Dennis Overbye – At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths ; Overbye appears to have been first out of the gate with the news. The money quote: “Nobody knows what this is. If it is real, it would be the most significant discovery in physics in half a century.” Wow. Bigger than top quarks? Bigger than neutrino mass? Bigger than the Cosmological Constant/Dark Energy thing? J/Psi? The Donald Trump All-Hair Theorem and the dense hole in the center where mis-information is frozen in time inside the non-event horizon, plastered and lacquered yet forever enroute to collapse? Woops. Maybe I got off topic for a sec.
UniverseToday – Nancy Atkinson: Particle Physicists See Something Little That Could be Really Big ; More nifty quotes, such as “It was hard for us to not go crazy” upon seeing results. Plus Atkinson, among several, provides a histogram of the bump itself.- New Scientist – Amanda Gefter: Mystery signal at Fermilab hints at ‘technicolour’ force;
- Guardian (UK, Life and Physics Blog) Jon Butterworth: The Tevatron goes bump / The last and greatest breakthrough from a fantastic machine, or a false alarm on the frontiers of physics? ; A bit technical, hardly for the average reader (but then, not requiring a physics B.A. either). See also Jim Al-Khalili: Is Tevatron’s particle a new force of nature? / Physicists have evidence for a particle that – if true – would rock theories of how the universe works. ;
- BBC – Jason Palmer: Tevatron accelerator yields hints of new particle;
- LiveScience – Clara Moskowitz: Particle Discovery Has Physicists Abuzz; Good idea. Lede has the word “huge,” and second sentence includes “many researchers skeptical’. Also a followup: Clara Moskowitz: New subatomic particle: real or anomaly? / More tests and data required to scrutinize bold claim ;
- The Economist: A Parthian shot ; Provides the 1995 Top Quark as a standard of comparison on the importance meter. Does a good job describing the statistical significance of this – just a one in 3,500 chance its a fluke. But physicists like things a thousand times better than that. It should have pointed out that a place like Tevatron provides millions of events to scrutinize so a very high statistical standard, and demand for duplication, is clearly needed to confirm a signal as real.
- Discovery News: What Has the Tevatron Really Discovered ; An extended explanation in plain English.
- Symmetry Magazine – Rob Roser, Giovanni Punzi ; Fermilab’s data peak that causes excitement; The pub. is the Fermilab-SLAC inhouse magazine, so this explainer could as easily go in Grist below.
- CNN – Bill Nye (link goes to video) Hunting for Higgs boson ;
- SmartPlanet – Boonsri Dickenson: A new particle discovery has heads spinning ; Dickenson links to Overbye’s piece, and follows with a Q&A with a physicist who is in the loop.
- Scientific American – John Matson: U.S. Collider Offers Physicists a Glimpse of a Possible New Particle / The soon-to-be-retired Tevatron collider has uncovered an unexplained signal that could be a previously unknown particle ;
Many more specialty and new media outlets covered this. My apologies for not being able to read them all to see who aggregated, repackaged, or relabeled material from other outlets and who employed original reporting and analysis. That could be a good paper for a science journalism student to pursue. Examples are at PC Magazine – Peter Pachal, Huliq – Norman Byrd ; Conceivably Tech – Wolfgang Gruener ; Escapist Mag – Scott Bullock; Science a Gogo – Kate Melville ; The Next Big Future ; Tecca – Mike Wehner ; PopSci – Rebecca Boyle ; Gather.com – Chuck Larlham ; Science in the Headlines – Lorin Hancock; TechNewsWorld – Richard Adhikari ; Geeks Are Sexy Technology News – J. Lister ;
AND DON’T FORGET: At Science News reporter Ron Cowen, two days prior to the NYTimes’s Oberbye breaking news on the Fermilab bump, reported that other evidence at Fremiolab of things new arising on the horizon. See Earlier Post. Cowen is a savvy reporter and maintains that while the bump is intriguing, so is the recently discovered asymmetry in the behavior of the top quark and that it’s an error to mention one but not the other. This seems sensible. Cowen wraps them together this way:
- ScienceNews – Ron Cowen: Fermilab data hint at possible new particle ; Powerful collisions of protons and antiprotons produce undexplained result ; Notably, Cowen finds a physicist who thinks one previously hypothesized particle, the Z-prime boson, could explain both sets of data.
Grist for the Mill: CDF Collaboration Paper on arXiv.
- Charlie Petit
