Very cool! If you live in the Chicago area, once the pandemic is over, I highly recommend attending the monthly lectures they hold at Fermilab. They bring in top scientists to discuss their work...
Very cool!
If you live in the Chicago area, once the pandemic is over, I highly recommend attending the monthly lectures they hold at Fermilab. They bring in top scientists to discuss their work in an accessible, but not usually dumbed-down way. When I lived in the area, I got to see Freeman Dyson talk about how to find life on asteroids and other non-planet places, lectures on cancer, reconstruction of old audio, multidimensionality of our universe, and a variety of other topics. After the lectures they usually have cookies and wine, and you can meet the lecturer and ask questions.
They also have a music series, as well. It tended towards world folk styles. I don't remember many of the acts, as we never attended, but I know they had the Gypsy Kings at one point, and an American folk group another.
Overall, it's a really cool place to go and open to the public.
So the craftly little muon is dancing to a tune that only it seems to be able to hear, and that tune has no theory at all. Let's get that five-sigma result. New physics is priceless, though one...
So the craftly little muon is dancing to a tune that only it seems to be able to hear, and that tune has no theory at all. Let's get that five-sigma result. New physics is priceless, though one could tally up the costs of all these experiments to find out what we're willing to pay for it. :P
To clarify, for those not familiar with this topic, this experiment is making measurements at such exquisite precision that even the calculations for the theoretical prediction are extremely...
To clarify, for those not familiar with this topic, this experiment is making measurements at such exquisite precision that even the calculations for the theoretical prediction are extremely non-trivial and require careful estimation of many many pieces which are then combined. Which is to say that debugging the theoretical prediction is (almost) as hard as debugging the experiment. So I would expect the particle physics community to be extremely circumspect while the details get ironed out.
The Quanta magazine article on this topic explains it quite nicely. To quote their example of what has happened in the past:
”A year after Brookhaven’s headline-making measurement, theorists spotted a mistake in the prediction. A formula representing one group of the tens of thousands of quantum fluctuations that muons can engage in contained a rogue minus sign; fixing it in the calculation reduced the difference between theory and experiment to just two sigma. That’s nothing to get excited about.”
Very cool!
If you live in the Chicago area, once the pandemic is over, I highly recommend attending the monthly lectures they hold at Fermilab. They bring in top scientists to discuss their work in an accessible, but not usually dumbed-down way. When I lived in the area, I got to see Freeman Dyson talk about how to find life on asteroids and other non-planet places, lectures on cancer, reconstruction of old audio, multidimensionality of our universe, and a variety of other topics. After the lectures they usually have cookies and wine, and you can meet the lecturer and ask questions.
They also have a music series, as well. It tended towards world folk styles. I don't remember many of the acts, as we never attended, but I know they had the Gypsy Kings at one point, and an American folk group another.
Overall, it's a really cool place to go and open to the public.
Fermilab is such a cool place. They really do care about making physics accessible to anyone who wants to learn more. And they have bison!
Here is an article from the NYT.
Scientific American
A neat explanatory comic: The Muon g–2 Anomaly Explained
So the craftly little muon is dancing to a tune that only it seems to be able to hear, and that tune has no theory at all. Let's get that five-sigma result. New physics is priceless, though one could tally up the costs of all these experiments to find out what we're willing to pay for it. :P
This is great news.
To clarify, for those not familiar with this topic, this experiment is making measurements at such exquisite precision that even the calculations for the theoretical prediction are extremely non-trivial and require careful estimation of many many pieces which are then combined. Which is to say that debugging the theoretical prediction is (almost) as hard as debugging the experiment. So I would expect the particle physics community to be extremely circumspect while the details get ironed out.
The Quanta magazine article on this topic explains it quite nicely. To quote their example of what has happened in the past:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/muon-g-2-experiment-at-fermilab-finds-hint-of-new-particles-20210407
PBS Space Time video on the topic :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Ko7NW2yQo