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New Large Hadron Collider data may show that Standard Model of physics is incomplete?

Denyse O'Leary
November 19, 2011
Cosmology, Intelligent Design, News
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In “Is ‘the new physics’ here? Atom smashers get a big surprise” (MSNBC, November 17, 2011), Clara Moskowitz reports,

The world’s largest atom smasher, designed as a portal to a new view of physics, has produced its first peek at the unexpected: bits of matter that don’t mirror the behavior of their antimatter counterparts.

Now researchers at the accelerator’s LHCb experiment are reporting that some matter particles produced inside the machine appear to be behaving differently from their antimatter counterparts, which might provide a partial explanation to the mystery of antimatter.

From the experiment, the researchers found a 0.8 percent difference in the probabilities that the matter and antimatter versions of these particles would decay into a particular end state.

Possible significance? If the result holds up, by the end of 2012,

… it would be a big deal, because it would mean the reigning theory of particle physics, called the Standard Model, is incomplete. Currently the Standard Model does allow for some minor CP violation, but not at the level of 0.8 percent. To explain these results, scientists would have to alter their theory or add some new physics to the existing picture.

With luck, “new physics” means new physics, not a further outlier of crackpot cosmology. Stay tuned.

See also: Just in: Faster than light neutrinos confirmed for now, contra Einstein

and

“Seismic” new paper on quantum mechanics?

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Comments
Speaking of William Lane Craig, he reflects on his UK tour here:
Dr. William Lane Craig on His Reasonable Faith UK Tour http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbKniDyYs10
bornagain77
Christian philosopher William Lane Craig wrote the following a number of weeks ago: "The reason for the panic you sense in the press releases on the CERN results is that the scientists interviewed implicitly assume either an Einsteinian or Minkowskian interpretation of STR. But Lorentz would be rejoicing. In fact, Lorentz himself predicted that something like this might happen. In 1913 he wrote,... [...] Here Lorentz clearly discerns the crucial role played by Einstein's verificationist theory of meaning and rejects it. In defense of absolute simultaneity, he appeals to the use of arbitrarily fast signals, even though they were not presently observable. He quite rightly expresses caution about our never being able to detect empirically such superluminal velocities. Lorentz’s interpretation, like the original Einsteinian interpretation, presupposes an A-Theory of time. But it enjoys the advantage over Einstein’s interpretation in making the physical deformations suffered by objects in motion relative to the fundamental frame intelligible. I hope you’ll forgive the triumphalism of my title for this Question of the Week. Lorentz is one of my scientific heroes. The results obtained at CERN may not hold up. But I sure hope that they do." See full article here: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=9089 BlakeG

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