Poll of the Day > Can someone explain the Muon discovery and 5th force of nature for a big dummy?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Like what are the four forces right now... gravity, electromagnetism.. and strong/weak force? Idk what the last two mean.

But anyway what does this new discovery in the behaviour of muons mean in terms of the first four and a possible 5th?

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Strong and weak force have to do with how particles interact with each other. Strong force causes protons and neutrons to glue together and form atoms. Weak force is what causes atoms to decay and radiation to occur.

This possible new force, I honestly don't understand what it is or does, or how they know there might be a new force. But my understanding is muons are 200x heavier than electrons, thus they are far more likely to interact with unknown particles.

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Oh but the Muon thing, so they found that when ran through an accelerator, then an electric field, that Muons "wobble" way more than they should by just the electric field alone. So much so that no known physics can explain the wobble.

And what makes Muons such a great candidate to study and find new physics, is the electron, a particle that has been studied extensively for about a century, we know a lot about it and how it interacts with other particles in the standard model. And Muons are essentially, just an electron, but 200x heavier. But the catch is they decay in about 2 microseconds.

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scientists just make stuff up. it's like how theyll say ''there's no such thing as phlogiston'' but ''cars need a magical liquid called petrol in order to go''

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papercup posted...

Oh but the Muon thing, so they found that when ran through an accelerator, then an electric field, that Muons "wobble" way more than they should by just the electric field alone. So much so that no known physics can explain the wobble.

And what makes Muons such a great candidate to study and find new physics, is the electron, a particle that has been studied extensively for about a century, we know a lot about it and how it interacts with other particles in the standard model. And Muons are essentially, just an electron, but 200x heavier. But the catch is they decay in about 2 microseconds.

Aah so there may be a 5th unknown force acting on the muon that makes it wobble unpredictably? Because the wobble cant be predicted by using the other four forces?

But Im guessing itll be hard to study because they dont last long?

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They discovered the Force so jedi and sith are real now

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I haven't read extensively on it, but it would seem there's either a 5th force or a set of new particles that the Standard Model can't currently account for.

Since the Standard Model also can't quite pin down "dark matter" or "dark energy", this could be a major discovery.

Or it could just be a fluke.

I'm more concerned that if they keep messing with the Higgs Boson they may trigger the false vaccum state trap.

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TheNobleWoodApe posted...

I'm more concerned that if they keep messing with the Higgs Boson they may trigger the false vaccum state trap.

which is?

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they think they found more shit that we dont know about

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FatalAccident posted...

which is?

So fields like to sit at the lowest stable energy state. It's possible that the Higgs field isn't in its lowest energy state, and at any point somewhere in the universe a Higgs boson might spontaneously quantum tunnel to a new energy state. And this would create a bubble that expands in all directs at the speed of light, and would effectively be a new big bang, with a new universe with completely different physics inside. Anything the bubble touches would be erased and recombined into the new universe. Or that might not happen. Who knows!

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There is another particle glueing the universe together that's difficult to measure or observe. But it definitely exists.

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Fatal you should check out the youtube channel PBS Spacetime, they have tons of videos explaining all these things and more, it's a really neat channel.

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How do we know it's actually a new force and not just a previously unobserved phenomenon in muons... such as possibly inertia (which requires a relatively large time scale to observe compared to the life of a muon)

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papercup posted...

So fields like to sit at the lowest stable energy state. It's possible that the Higgs field isn't in its lowest energy state, and at any point somewhere in the universe a Higgs boson might spontaneously quantum tunnel to a new energy state. And this would create a bubble that expands in all directs at the speed of light, and would effectively be a new big bang, with a new universe with completely different physics inside. Anything the bubble touches would be erased and recombined into the new universe. Or that might not happen. Who knows!

between Higgs False Vacuum decay and Strangelets...the Bootes void and the "cold spot" fill me with a certain existential dread.

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Lokarin posted...

How do we know it's actually a new force and not just a previously unobserved phenomenon in muons... such as possibly inertia (which requires a relatively large time scale to observe compared to the life of a muon)

Inertia still requires mass though, and though a muon is 200x the mass of an electron, its still a subatomic particle. if its fizzing out in microseconds, its "inertia" isn't just sticking around before the particle mostly decays into a swarm of massless neutrinos.

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TheNobleWoodApe posted...

between Higgs False Vacuum decay and Strangelets...the Bootes void and the "cold spot" fill me with a certain existential dread.

I mean if false vacuum decay or strangelets are real, the Earth would be destroyed more or less isntantly, with no warning, so at least it wouldn't be a painful death?

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Also if a vacuum decay does occur, it's also entirely possible that it happens so far away, that the natural expansion of the universe outruns the expansion of the bubble, so the Earth is never affected by it.

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Oh also, the Milky Way Galaxy actually sits on the edge of a supervoid that's almost as large as the Bootes void, and it's even emptier. We're pretty much out in the sticks.

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papercup posted...

Fatal you should check out the youtube channel PBS Spacetime, they have tons of videos explaining all these things and more, it's a really neat channel.

I think Ive seen their videos before, with the long haired bearded guy with a strange accent? Funny enough when I watched the first video on the subject the PBS video was next up in my recommendations, might check it out man

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papercup posted...

Also if a vacuum decay does occur, it's also entirely possible that it happens so far away, that the natural expansion of the universe outruns the expansion of the bubble, so the Earth is never affected by it.

Pretty sure either phenomenon can only spread from the point it starts at the speed of light, so if it happens in a particle collider on or around Earth, yeah for all intents and purposes instantaneous poof for us. If something like the voids mentioned earlier are the result of something like that, not so instantaneous. Just a creeping existential dread since it's light years away.

Now if some damned fool advanced civilization went and entangled something, went to opposite ends of an inconceivable distance and flipped those entangled particles into strangelets...

On the other hand, the universe itself is really young and something like only .02% of the stars that will ever form have done so already so I wouldn't stay up at night worrying about it...

But I still wish they'd stop poking at reality tearing energy levels this close to where literally everyone lives. This is like building a munitions plant right between a hospital and a school, lol.

We're fucking around with particles that aren't stable at the temperatures and energies that stars and the event horizons of black holes achieve.

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