The Large Hadron Collider just keeps confirming the Standard Model, almost as if there was some basis for believing it to be correct. Rob Sheldon thinks the current mood is desperation: If you don’t know where you are going, you will certainly arrive. Information is finite, ignorance infinite.
Tag: Standard Model
Will the Large Hadron Collider doom particle physics?
They’ll find the money to continue. Consider: The Standard Model begins with the hated Big Bang. Nothing that supports string theory, eternal cosmic inflation, or a multiverse has been found. Don’t many people just have to keep looking and keep quiet about what they find that wasn’t what they hoped for?
Is cosmology “in crisis” over how to measure the universe?
We are told that the Standard Model just doesn’t work: Every night, astronomers post new ideas to arXiv, the open access publishing site. Cosmologists, in particular, use arXiv to engage in timely back-and-forths that formal journals don’t permit. “We’re just holding on for dear life, trying to keep up with what’s coming out,” says Scolnic. […]
Electron’s nearly perfect roundness stymies the search for “new physics”
The Standard Model of physics holds that electrons should be almost perfectly round. As it happens, The electron gets its shape from the way that positive and negative charges are distributed inside the particle. The best theory for how particles behave, called the standard model of particle physics, holds that the electron should keep its […]
Researchers: Bizarre Antartic particles might shatter modern physics
Recent cosmic ray activity in Antartica is provoking question and speculation: Physicists don’t know what it is exactly. But they do know it’s some sort of cosmic ray — a high-energy particle that’s blasted its way through space, into the Earth, and back out again. But the particles physicists know about — the collection of particles that […]
Researchers: Fewer galaxies have formed since the Big Bang than should have
They hope to be surer of that fact after a couple of years more data. From ScienceDaily: It all started with the measurements of the Planck satellite, which was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) to measure the cosmic background radiation. This radiation is, to some extent, an afterglow of the big bang. It […]
Experiment to probe the weak points of the Standard Model of our universe
Better known as Big Bang cosmology, it is not very popular in some quarters: Developed in the 1960s and ’70s, the standard model has some sizable holes: It can’t explain dark matter — an ethereal substance so far detected only by its gravitational effects — or dark energy, a mysterious oomph that causes the cosmos […]