144 | Solo: Are We Moving Beyond the Standard Model?

144 | Solo: Are We Moving Beyond the Standard Model?

I've been a professional physicist since the 1980's, and not once over the course of my career has a particle-physics experiment produced a completely surprising new result. We've discovered particles (top quark, Higgs boson) and even phenomena (neutrino masses), but nothing we hadn't either predicted or could easily accommodate within the Standard Model of particle physics. That might have changed just this month, with possible confirmations of two "anomalies" in particle-physics measurements involving muons. They might be new physics, or they might just go away. I talk about what it might mean, and (more importantly) how we should feel about the likelihood that these results really do imply physics beyond the Standard Model.

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Here are some relevant references for the first result, from LHCb at CERN, that B-mesons are seemingly decaying at different rates into electrons and muons:

And here are some references for the other result, from the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab, on the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon:


Jaksot(415)

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28 | Roger Penrose on Spacetime, Consciousness, and the Universe

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Holiday Message 2018

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17 Joulu 20181h 8min

26 | Ge Wang on Artful Design, Computers, and Music

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Everywhere around us are things that serve functions. We live in houses, sit on chairs, drive in cars. But these things don't only serve functions, they also come in particular forms, which may be emo...

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25 | David Chalmers on Consciousness, the Hard Problem, and Living in a Simulation

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3 Joulu 20181h 22min

24 | Kip Thorne on Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar

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I remember vividly hosting a colloquium speaker, about fifteen years ago, who talked about the LIGO gravitational-wave observatory, which had just started taking data. Comparing where they were to whe...

26 Marras 20181h 19min

23 | Lisa Aziz-Zadeh on Embodied Cognition, Mirror Neurons, and Empathy

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