See subject. Physicists confirm possible discovery of fifth force of nature
It’s from phys.org, so it’s got cred behind the grabby “possible.” Something about dark photons…
Sorry I only have the secondary cite.
Before someone asks, 0so what’s your question," it is in OP hed: is this something?
I had the same impression: if it were really true there would be much bigger impact in the scientific world–so it seems just to be another theory…
My guess: It will turn out to be Chuck Norris.
How can one “confirm possible discovery”? The “possible” negates the “confirm”. Like “definitely maybe”.
That’s so funny, because I was thinking the same thing. Basically, this is still speculation and nothing has been "confirmed:.
A “protophobic” particle, which interacts with neutrons but not protons? I’m not buying it. They’re made up of the same components, just in different proportions.
Though I suppose that there could be some new chargelike quantity, that happens to have a value of +2/3 for down quarks and -1/3 for up quarks… I guess that would account for it.
It reads like there are some spurious numbers coming out of an experiment and some people have theorized how that could have happened.
I’d suggest checking to see if the excessive particle count is a fluke by rerunning the damn thing a few times.
I expected Chronos’ post in this thread to be enlightening, not to express his bafflement.
It looks to me like they just have a completely unexplained particle and are using a fifth force to try to corral it into something resembling the Standard Model. That it’s very low energy makes it very strange that no one else has seen it before. I suppose the details are over pretty much everyone’s heads, and the writer is doing the best job of explaining it as he can.
I guess the only possible answer is stay tuned. As to the odd wording, to me it meant that they had ruled out other obvious explanations and so feel certain that something odd is going on and they are proposing a possible explanation.
How can we call it a photon if it’s dark? Call it a ‘phuscon’ or something.
A photoff, surely.
Me three!
I suspect that is exactly what they’re trying to say.
sort of like: “When we first saw the data, it made no sense at all. We figured there was an error somewhere. So we kept quiet, and kept checking. But we’ve gotten to the point where we can say, 'This might really be something. It still might not, but it might be yes!”
It is a testament to how cautious scientists are about announcing stuff.
I wouldn’t get too excited—the group that made the alleged discovery has a little bit of a history of ‘finding’ new bosons: a 12 MeV boson in 2008, a 13.45 MeV boson in 2012, then the 16.7 MeV boson we’re looking at now. None of the previous ‘discoveries’ have been borne out by further experimental scrutiny, and what happened now is (if I understand the Phys.org article correctly) that a theoretical paper claiming a model for the new boson, which appeared on the preprint server arXiv in April, was published in PRL, with another preprint appearing on the arXiv. So, no experimental confirmation either. Here’s an article by Natalie Wolchover digging into the details of this case, including the story of one scientist who used to head the group now making this discovery who’s so far claimed evidence for as many as 10 new bosons—none of which anyone’s heard of again.
This is not to cast aspersions onto the group, nor meant as an instance of the genetic fallacy—it certainly could be the case that they’ve found something this time. But one thing to keep in mind is that nuclear physics simply is a messy, complicated business, with many models often having a semi-empirical character, rather than being strictly derived from fundamental physics; thus, claims for finding new fundamental physics in this regime should be handled with care, rather than trumpeted out into the world like this.
They are confirming the existence of a theory.
More likely, it’s a testament to how crappy science reporting is. We see it all the time. More generally, it something anyone who is knowledgeable in a given filed feels when he encounters an article about that field. There’s often that cringe moment when one realizes the reporter doesn’t quite understand the subject.
WIN!
Unfortunately the author could not be reached for comment…
Me, I shan’t allow myself to get excited until they discover the existence of another Earth-like planet that’s really, really super close by and that can solve all of our problems and also might have sexy women on it.
I remember a story back in the 1980s in “Science News” about a “possible fifth force.” Obviously it didn’t pan out, and this might not either.