New Fundamental Force of Nature discovered at the Tevatron yesterday?

As I understand it, each of the three fundamental "forces" has a particle that carries that force from one place to another. Gravity is the odd one out, but a lot of people think that there is a gravity particle. Each force has it own force law, different from the rest. The new Tevatron particle seems to be a force particle, with a new force law.

But ... the 0.1% chance of random data is actually very big. For one thing, it assumes that the calculations were done correctly, accounting for all the funny ways the equipment operates. There have been plenty of times in the past where a 0.1% chance of random data turned out to be 50%. As in, "oh oh, so that voltage was really 119 volts, not 120!". Or "I thought we were using 10-30W oil?"

News organizations and grant applications have one thing in common. They succeed only if they get attention. Every group or organization that wants more money in the form of sales or government grants has to get in front of as many people (the RIGHT people) as possible. This has been true of "cold fusion", the Hubble telescope, heart attack victims/researchers, cancer organizations, etc. The bigger the claim, or the bigger the "possible" claim, the more likely it is to be seen by many and to "attract" money.

There are no news organizations reporting that I put on my shoes this morning. It's not a story. No one cares. It wouldn't sell any cars or dish detergent. News organizations do report nuclear meltdowns in Japan, radiation leaks, winds pushing fallout to the US, into fish, onto farm products.

Had anyone from the news organization merely said "Physicists at the Tevatron accelerator are a bit puzzled", no one would have bothered reading the second sentence. After all, the tevatron is not the (here play grand, swelling, majestic music) "LHC!!!!!!! which EVERYone knows is the newest, biggest, most powerful collider on the planet!!!!. What is the tevatron? Yesterday's news....Unless, suddenly MAYBE we've found a new, completely unexpected 5TH FORCE OF NATURE!!!! EAT YOUR HEART OUT EINSTEIN!!!! Now, Congress, could you spare a few billion bucks so we can figure out what we've got here?

You will note that the words in the article are far from confirming the title.

--The find must be more fully confirmed

-- after posting an as-yet unreviewed account

-- potentially representing a particle

-- If it's a real effect

-- Tony Weidberg, a physicist from Oxford University [...] told BBC News that he did not "find this evidence very convincing"

----

There are more than enough "wiggle words" that I would not be able to use this article in any kind of research project. In other words, it does not prove anything AND it is still very open to interpretation.

Therefore, I have to agree with you: "This is a bold claim. [...] I don't understand how this constitutes a new fundamental force of nature, as opposed to just the discovery of a new particle."

The second I saw it I thought - "Didn't they say the place is closing down soon? How would you try to convince people to give you more money?".

Not saying the timing is to say the least rather coincidental.

Anyway, Cern is almost certainly the future. If THEY don't confirm what Fermi think they have found, and if they don't go on to find more, I think that's the end of it. Far too expensive (even the energy bill) to carry on along a path that may simply lead to nowhere of any use, apart from the realisation that however far we go, there will always be an even smaller particle.

Your question would have been more sensibly asked at the Physics forum, because this question is more about (High Energy) Physics than it is about Astronomy.

As such, don't look at it as a final announcement but as a call for confirmation by other laboratories. If Fermilab found it, then CERN will certainly look into it on the next data taking runs or look it up on their own dataset.

Here's the original article (click on the PDF link on the right of the page): http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.0699

in accordance to Stephen Hawking in a short historic previous of Time, "the cost of the grand unification power isn't ok wide-unfold, whether it would probable must be a minimum of one thousand million million (10^15) GeV." the main useful colliders ever designed can pass as much as three thousand GeV. the size 10^15 GeV is barely some orders of value under the Planck scale at which gravitational outcomes substitute into significant.

First comes review. BTW let us not forget that Dark Force is still out there waiting for someone to acknowledge it as the fifth force.

Kuma