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from the now-you-don't-see-them-and-now-you-don't dept.
Some physicists are surprised that two relatively recent discoveries in their field have captured so much widespread attention: cosmic inflation, the ballooning expansion of the baby universe, and the Higgs boson, which endows other particles with mass. These are heady and interesting concepts, but, in one sense, what's new about them is downright boring. These discoveries suggest that so far, our prevailing theories governing large and small the Big Bang and the Standard Model of subatomic particles and forces are accurate, good to go.
But both cosmic inflation and the Higgs boson fall short of unifying these phenomena and explaining the deepest cosmic questions. "The Standard Model, as it stands, has no good explanation for why the Universe has anything in it at all," says Mark Messier, physics professor at Indiana University and spokesman for an under-construction particle detector.
(Score: 2) by stormwyrm on Friday May 02 2014, @12:35AM
So what's new? Doesn't science thrive on new discoveries? What's the point of science if we're so fixated on what we do know at the expense of what we don't know and need to discover?
The point is that the Standard Model, elegant as it is, is incomplete. If that's all there is, then it predicts that there should be nothing in the universe (matter and antimatter exactly cancelling each other out), which is obviously false. And to go back on topic, the Standard Model also predicts that neutrinos should have no mass at all, and yet they do have mass, and in a way that is impossible to explain with the Standard Model's Higgs mechanism.
Neutrinos are perhaps the easiest within reach physics beyond the Standard Model. The energies at which hypothesized Grand Unification occurs (perhaps illustrating symmetry violations that would result in more matter being produced in the early universe than antimatter) would require us to build an accelerator the size of the Solar System, and quantum gravity is in a whole other ballpark beyond that.
Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate.
(Score: 1) by islisis on Saturday May 03 2014, @12:11AM
so, forget the SM and forget updating it and forget tests for Majorana particles, and forget funding when your once new research has been cited for too long when applying for your next grant as the public has been played to a catchier tune