It’s missing a description of gravity, for one, and it says nothing about the mysterious dark matter that seems to be strewn throughout the cosmos.
But scientists have long known that the model is incomplete. The Standard Model is arguably the most successful scientific theory, capable of stunningly accurate predictions of how the universe’s fundamental particles behave.
#Law of physics free#
If this disagreement with the Standard Model persists, then the work “is Nobel Prize-worthy, without question,” says Free University of Brussels physicist Freya Blekman, who wasn’t involved with the research. “The attitude to take is sort of cautious optimism,” says Nima Arkani-Hamed, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who wasn’t involved with the research.Īlready, Fermilab’s results amount to the biggest clue in decades that physical particles or properties exist beyond the Standard Model. If Fermilab’s results stay consistent, reaching five sigma could take a couple of years. The new results-which will be published in the scientific journals Physical Review Letters, Physical Review A&B, Physical Review A, and Physical Review D-are based on just 6 percent of the total data the experiment is expected to collect. That threshold won’t be reached until the results achieve a statistical certainty of five sigma, or a 1-in-3.5 million chance that a random fluctuation caused the gap between theory and observation, rather than a true difference. "This is really our equivalent of a Mars rover landing," added Fermilab scientist Chris Polly, who worked on the Muon g-2 experiment as well as the earlier Brookhaven experiment.īy the strict standards of particle physics, the results aren’t a “discovery” just yet. “Many of us have been working on it for decades.” “This has been a long time coming,” says University of Manchester physicist Mark Lancaster, a member of the Muon g-2 collaboration, a team of more than 200 scientists from seven countries. When researchers combined the two experiments’ data, they found that the odds of this discrepancy simply being a fluke are roughly 1 in 40,000, a sign that extra particles and forces could be affecting the muon’s behavior. Now, two decades later, Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment has done its own version of the Brookhaven experiment-and it has seen the same anomaly. But in 2001, the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, found that muons seem to wobble slightly faster than the Standard Model predicts. The Standard Model, developed in the 1970s, is humankind’s best mathematical explanation for how all the particles in the universe behave and predicts the frequency of a muon’s wobbling with extreme precision. The stronger the magnetic field, the faster a muon wobbles. Like electrons, muons have a negative electric charge and a quantum property called spin, which causes the particles to act like tiny, wobbling tops when placed in a magnetic field. In a seminar on Wednesday, researchers with Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, announced the first results of the Muon g-2 experiment, which since 2018 has measured a particle called the muon, a heavier sibling of the electron that was discovered in the 1930s. The gap between the model’s predictions and the particle’s newly measured behavior hints that the universe may contain unseen particles and forces beyond our current grasp. The direction of the drag force is still opposite that of the motion.įrictional forces are due to two surfaces sliding past each other.In a landmark experiment, scientists have found fresh evidence that a subatomic particle is disobeying one of science’s most watertight theories, the Standard Model of particle physics. Typical values for the drag coefficient are 1.0 for a cyclist, 1.2 for a running person, 0.48 for a Volkswagen Beetle, and 0.19 for a modern aerodynamic car. \( \newcommand\) its dimensionless drag coefficient, which depends on the object’s shape and surface properties.