Using cosmic rays to calibrate the detector is really cool!
> Knowing the exact position of each wire is crucial to getting an accurate trajectory. For the new analysis, Kotwal and his colleagues took advantage of muons that rain down from the sky as cosmic rays. These bulletlike particles constantly rip through the detector in almost perfectly straight lines, letting the researchers detect any wonky wires and pin down the wires’ positions to within 1 micrometer.
Just to let people knows: actually it is the common way to calibrate detectors and especially cylindrical detector system with a solenoid magnet.
So nothing special in this.
Since the two experiments have already conflicting results, this likely will/should be replicated, before we can believe this result. As an example, this experiment on neutrinos traveling faster than light was later proved wrong. https://www.nature.com/articles/news.2011.554.
I'm increasingly moving towards first introspection, "am I feeling surprised or upset at this?" and if true, I skip reading it. It's a trick that can't always be applied of course, but in situations like this one, it's a pretty good one.
Also, all the "will surprise you", "happens next", etc are instant ctrl+w (close tab).
The result, published in the journal Science, could be related to hints from other experiments at Fermilab and the Large Hadron Collider at the Swiss-French border. These, as yet unconfirmed results, also suggest deviations from the Standard Model, possibly as a result of an as yet undiscovered fifth force of nature at play.
But the excitement in the physics community is tempered with a loud note of caution. Although the Fermilab result is the most accurate measurement of the mass of the W boson to date, it is at odds with two of the next most accurate measurements from two separate experiments which are in line with the Standard Model.
The is a similar problem with the moment of the muon: theory and measurement differ greater than error limits of either. That hints that theory is missing some additional physics or particle interactions.
The muon was the first particle discovered from the 2nd & 3rd tier of particles, since muons are readily generated by cosmic ray impacts. Only the first tier of particles is necessary for the physics of everyday life: atoms, chemistry, fission and fusion. The unnecessary muon strikes again.
> theory and measurement differ greater than error limits of either
Here, though, it isn't just theory and measurement that differ. This new measurement differs from multiple previous measurements of the W boson mass, by an amount greater than the error limits of either. The Science article linked to downthread shows this.
Sort of but I think you are confusing concepts. Here we have a number spat out of an experiment that is compared to a number from theory. In that case it is fair to use a percentage as a comparison: "My best guess from my experiment is x and theory says y ... x compared to y is z%" "I've used a percentage because it is ubiquitous and easily understood".
However, the experiment should have some uncertainty in it that might be quantised unless it is being performed by $DEITY. We'll also note here that percentages, whilst great for simple number magnitude comparisons are easily the most abused "statistic tool".
What we really want is an estimate of error for x (your measure by experiment). You might be able to quantify your errors in such a way that you can write it down in terms of stand deviations about a mean or perhaps not.
Let's look at an example: Using a steel rule, mark a point. The rule is about 1mm thick. Most people will pin the rule with their dominant hand and sight the mark with their dominant eye. What could possibly go wrong?
Your hand naturally works about 30cm/1' laterally from your head. You probably don't know which is your dominant eye which adds or takes around 15cm/6". So when you naively mark a point with a steel rule you are probably at least 45 degrees out on a 1mm thick rule which is something like 0.5mm. So you soon learn to position your eye over the work but which eye? Most people do have a dominant eye for sighting. Point at something. Close one eye and sight at that thing, then close the other eye and sight at the thing with the other eye. The eye that does not make your finger apparently move is your dominant eye - it is the one that you naturally use to aim/sight with.
That 0.5mm doesn't sound much but that is enough to make a woodwork joint look crap. Once you combine it with the thickness of a pencil strike and other factors, you start to appreciate that carpentry can be tricky.
Now let's do some physics where the measures are really minute and you can't simply move your head 6" to limit your errors. Now we are really going to have to do some science.
The principles are the same though: understand your limitations as best you can and then compensate.
The mass estimate in this isn’t story isn’t from a single event, it’s “based on an analysis of about 4 million W bosons produced at the Tevatron between 2002 and 2011”.
So the "measured" mass is not a single value but a set of samples with varying masses? And those samples have a standard deviation from the theoretical value?
As I understand it, the mean of those values is seven standard deviations away from the theoretical value, and you should only expect a result that extreme to occur by chance roughly once per 3.9e11 reruns of the entire experiment.
But I would caution that precision is so important to both physics and statistics that what I think I understand may be quite different from what’s actually going on.
No, it's the average value taken from (naturally) slightly varying measurements of (hopefully) the exact same mass. In the standard model, all particles of a given type are assumed to share the same properties, including the same mass, and so far we have no reason to believe otherwise.
In the context where your measurements allow you to measure discrepancies a seventh of that error, that’s a huge error (for the purpose of THIS experiment). There might be some experiments where the difference doesn’t matter at all, or other experiments where the dependence is linear, so the answer also shifts by 0.1%. But the dependence could just as easily be some complicated nonlinear function which leads to a large discrepancy compared to the measurement precision.
> Nearly a decade after that last analysis, the collaboration has finally come up for air. In a November 2020 meeting over Zoom, Kotwal decrypted the team’s result (they had worked with encrypted data so that the numbers wouldn’t influence their analysis) with the press of a button.
What does it mean that they worked with encrypted data?
I've seen other instances where physicists working at CERN would blind themselves to the results of their computations while developing their algorithms, making sure the code was bug-free and physically accurate without running it "in production" as it were on the actual experimental results. This is to blind themselves to the actual statistics of the experiment so that "p-hacking" or manipulation of the results to fit a preconceived agenda is not a temptation.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abk1781 says "The MW fit values are blinded during analysis with an unknown additive offset in the range of −50 to 50 MeV". So they added a random number so they didn't game the analysis to be near the known value. It's nothing as complicated as homomorphic encryption.
They used homomorphic encryption to blind themselves. Utilized correctly, it would have no impact on the result, only on the team's knowledge of the substance of the data.
That's completely incorrect according to the actual study. [1] They used random data blinding until analysis procedures were established. The word encrypted was used informally (in the article) not as a reference to homomorphism.
It was a literary device that made no sense in practice. Spoiler: How could extremely powerful civilisations spread massive star killing guns around in the universe every ~50 light years but not have the ability to detect intelligent life in each star system?
It's one of those "yes, but no" situations. We now have a particle that is ~126 GeV, behaves like what the Higgs boson was predicted to be.
However, if the Higgs field is exactly what we think it is, it seems to imply energy densities several magnitudes bigger than the currently observed vacuum energy density of the universe. This leads to either the cosmological constant is wrong and/or there was no Big Bang, or the Grand Unified Theory is missing another major component instead of merely missing the discovery of the Higgs boson and an accurate measurement of the Higgs field.
We discovered one Higgs boson that has a mass of ~126GeV, but no one is sure that it's the only one. There are plenty of alternative models that have more Higgs bosons yet to be discovered. More details in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Alternative_models It's a very obscure paragraph so if you (GP) don't understand the details don't worry, me neither. But the important part is that there are many models and each one has a different number of Higgs bosons with different properties. Until other(s) Higgs bosons are discovered it's very difficult to know which model is correct.
For example there is a recent preprint about another Higgs boson with ~95GeV https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30807022 (88 points | 12 days ago | 26 comments) The idea is that there are two weird results in CMS and Atlas that "show" something with ~95GeV, but they only have 3 sigmas. So it may be a fluke, but it's unusual enough to keep an eye in those experiments. In the post I linked they interpret this as a family of 3 Higgs bosons, the old ~126GeV, the new dubious ~95GeV one, and a third one yet to be discovered. (Just to be super clear, the ~95GeV and the proposed family are unconfirmed.)
We will discover some new "dark quantum thingy" energy source which some scientist will want to use to create super cheap energy. Unfortunately because of the third world war someone will first build a bomb. Handheld sized enough to destroy any major city. Someone will than say: I have become death... and after we have destroyed half of the world we will rise from the ashes and fly to the stars. Afterwards we create an organization called The Federation!
> The meeting between Oppenheimer and Truman did not go well. It was then that Oppenheimer famously told Truman that "I feel I have blood on my hands", which was unacceptable to Truman, who immediately replied that that was no concern of Oppenheimer's, and that if anyone had bloody hands, it was the president. ...
> Truman had very little use for Oppenheimer then--little use for his "hand wringing", for his high moral acceptance of question in the use of the bomb, for his second-guessing the decision. Cold must have descended in the meeting, as Truman later told David Lillenthal of Oppenheimer that he "never wanted to see that son of a bitch in this office again". Truman would retell the story in different ways, but with generally the same result, waxing about how he dismissed the "cry-baby scientist".
It's probably fair to assume that Truman had more immediate and frequent casualty reports and projections than Oppenheimer.
So the former was weighing against alternatives, and the latter was weighing against inaction.
In Oppenheimer's defense though, at the time he couldn't have known that (a) the US would refrain from using nuclear weapons in subsequent wars, (b) other countries would rapidly acquire nuclear weapons, (c) MAD would become normalized as the only acceptable use of nuclear arms.
None of which were guaranteed to pass, meaning a very different perspective in 1945.
The documentary "the fog of war" is a nice view (via the study of Robert S. McNamara) of just how brutal the war in the Pacific was in terms of civilian casualties.
The US was using (in modern parlance, however ugly it is) data science to optimize bombing missions to the point that the nuclear weapons were merely a large blip rather than a sudden burst of killing sandwiched by silence.
Le May (whose group dropped the bomb IIRC) and McNamara both agreed they'd have been tried as war criminals.
For Truman at least I can see why he'd be annoyed. Maybe not as annoyed as he claimed to be, but in terms of decision making I think anyone who claims to have an easy answer to whether to drop the bomb or not is either a fantasist or an idiot.
After reading, I am: I gave it a charitable reading, and either I missed it (probable) or you're staking out an extreme position unsupported by facts (less probable, I trust you)
"The Truman Show: The Fraudulent Origins of the Former Presidents Act"
> Using recently released and until now unexamined archival evidence, this Article demonstrates that, in a complete contravention of the existing standard historical record, Harry Truman was, as a direct result of being president, a very wealthy man on the day he left the White House, with an estimated net worth, in relative economic terms, of approximately $58 million in 2021 dollars. The Article reveals that this wealth was a result of both Truman’s enormous presidential salary — several times larger, in real terms, than the current salary for the office — and, more problematically, of the evident fact that Truman misappropriated essentially all of the multi-million dollar — in 2021 terms — presidential expense account that was set up for him by Congress at the beginning of his second term.
> The Article also reveals that, again contrary to the current historical understanding, Truman made another fortune after he left the presidency, by doing precisely what he claimed he was not doing, that is, exploiting his status as a former president to maximum economic advantage. Indeed, by the time Congress passed the FPA in response to Truman’s various claims that he was at least teetering on the brink of potential financial distress, Truman’s net worth was, in relative economic terms, approximately $72 million in 2021 dollars.
Some of the information comes from Bess Truman's files, which were only recently released, for example:
> “The cash in the box at the Columbia has been for emergency use,” he wrote. “I kept it in the little safe in the White House as long as I was there. It came out of the $50,000 expense account that was not accountable for taxes. It should be put into bonds except what you need for immediate use.”
This is money from the White House expense account that he did not need to report as taxable income - about $550,000 per year in Y2021 dollars when adjusted for inflation.
See also the section on how much he made from his publication in Life.
> a perusal of the Schedule C attachments to Truman’s tax returns during the years when the installment payments on the memoirs were made (1955 through 1960) reveals that Truman enjoyed a net profit of at least $299,186 on the memoirs
> Converted to 2021 dollars, this means Truman enjoyed, in inflation-adjusted terms, a post-tax and expenses profit from the memoirs of $2,866,000.136 But again, in terms of relative income, this is a radical underestimate: a writer today, to earn a comparable post-tax profit on a book, would need to make approximately $7,600,000–after taxes and expenses
None of that backs the claim that Harry Truman lied.
I still think you have good intentions and believe this, I certainly cannot falsify your claim just because I can't prove it.
TL;DR for following section: a good reset point when you start getting challenge would be stating your claim in a sentence, paragraph max, then providing a sentence, paragraph, max two paragraphs, that back it up, and a link or two out to the source.
Breaking the onboarding flow for this idea into discrete, easy to follow steps that lure the interlocutor along always keeps the temperature low
If I had to hazard a guess why people reacted strongly to the claim:
A) it's much more likely the popular narrative, especially as history progressed, exaggerated the situation than an ex-president made claims about his finances that are falsifiable
B) when arguing an extreme position, especially after the initial round of reactions noting it's extreme, it's better to take due care to link a one sentence claim you have to a paragraph that backs up the claim. Making people weed through a dense Wikipedia article section, then a long comment, neither providing anything that helps put ground under the claim, would reinforce the idea the claimant is mistaken
How does Campos's paper not back the claim? Which of his evidence was insufficient?
Again, this time with Truman's lies highlighted: "Truman made another fortune after he left the presidency, by doing precisely what he claimed he was not doing, that is, exploiting his status as a former president to maximum economic advantage. Indeed, by the time Congress passed the FPA in response to Truman’s various claims that he was at least teetering on the brink of potential financial distress, Truman’s net worth was, in relative economic terms, approximately $72 million in 2021 dollars."
> Making people weed through a dense Wikipedia article section, then a long comment, neither providing anything that helps put ground under the claim, would reinforce the idea the claimant is mistaken
All you've done is be dismissive, using meta-argument rather than presenting counter-evidence.
My comment highlighted parts from Campos's paper showing A) Truman lied about his finances, B) how the popular conception came to be, and C) mentioning how some of the evidence was only recently open to researchers.
An interesting thought:
A superweapon more powerful than nuclear weapons might with a single use cause the end of life as we know it. As such, you would not test or demonstrate it, therefore the weapon might not be useful.
Nobody needs a bigger bomb though, it wouldn't be any more of a threat. We can already destroy a whole city with a single weapon or trigger a mass extinction event in somewhere between an hour and a day, being better than that isn't really any more scary.
No, the "better" superweapon would be about precision and speed of destruction... like the ability to resolve the whole surface of the planet at sub cm resolution and pick out and destroy any target in moments... imagine a starlink-type constellation but spy satellites with space lasers instead backed by enormous AI facial-and-other recognition to identify where anybody or anything was. Or maybe something like being able to read thoughts at a distance or even influence them.
A bigger bomb though is just about doing something we can already do slightly more quickly. We can also already build bigger bombs than we have but there's no strategic advantage.
> Or maybe something like being able to read thoughts at a distance or even influence them.
We have that, it just doesn't work quite the way you think. One of its many manifestations is called "Twitter".
This isn't a joke. Consider the conventional notion of a mind control device, a magical mind-laser that can target one person at a time from a distance and modify their thoughts or even beliefs. Compare to what a motivated billionaire could accomplish, today, using paid botnets and content farms.
Today's version is wildly more influential, can not only change beliefs but also inoculate the targets against future influences in the other direction(s), and operates at a mass scale. It is so successful and effective that it doesn't even need to be kept secret like the usual scifi version.
The only thing exaggerated in my description is that it doesn't require the resources of a billionaire. You can operate it for far less.
We need an adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's "sufficiently advanced technology" quote.
> the "better" superweapon would be about precision and speed of destruction...
Taking that idea to its extreme (and while we're discussing an article about potentially exotic physics) a superweapon (or superpower) could be simply "teleportation".
If you could trigger the creation of two ends of a wormhole to appear at arbitrary points in space (without needing any equipment at either point), you could teleport remote photons from your enemy's territory into your research station, which would effectively give you an invisible spy camera that can view anywhere on Earth in real time, allowing you to track all the military hardware and personnel that the enemy has.
An attack would involve (re)moving a few grams of electronics or neurons from the target, and would be almost invisible and unstoppable.
Even if the wormhole had to be "sent" using something like a portal gun, that would still dramatically change the dynamics of the battlefield.
We're quite close to the moment where we'll be able to release 1000 drones/robot dogs in a city with the mission to blow up all the tanks or white/blue arm-band soldiers.
Possibly with a human in the loop for final confirmation, which receives a target image on the screen for engagement approval. One human could approve hundred of hits per hour if you don't want to go fully autonomous.
Of course, the ability to automatically defend against drones/robot dogs will be next.
But to the main point, a nuke-like powerful bomb without radiation fallout would be quite valuable.
hypothesis: the Great Filter is that every sufficiently long-lived society eventually invents and uses the Deplorable Word from C.S. Lewis's "Narnia" universe.
hypothesis: the great filter is simply an adequate understanding of physics. The galaxy (and beyond?) is happily chattering away using physics we do not understand. We are a pre-contact tribe in the jungle completely unaware of the "radio" signals passing all around us. Once we understand the principles, we can build such a radio and participate.
We don't need to; nuclear weapons in the giga tonne range are practical. Anything over about 200 kilo tonnes just isn't that useful because cities aren't so big, and aren't circular.
"Surpass" is a tricky concept. Nuclear weapons won't become less devastating, so they won't stop mattering, even if something more devastating comes along. Maybe being easier to build than nukes would do it, where suddenly everyone had the new superweapon including the old nuclear powers, since even they might as well use the new easier thing if they use anything.
How about some hypothetical technology that can scan space for nuclear weapons and destroy them from a distance even if stored within thick walls of lead and without leaving a trace?
That would be delightful, but as I read it the question was about a weapon singlehandedly rendering nukes irrelevant by its own destructive potential, not in tandem with an otherwise pretty low-damage nuke-nullifier that happens to be invented around the same time. Unless your idea of "destroy them" is to actually detonate your enemy's own nukes in their bunkers... well, that's still a hard sell for "surpassing", since you're either using the nukes after all or just convincing your enemy to take them off the table.
Surpass in destructive power doesn’t mean much since we can already destroy all life on the planet with nukes. That’s what makes the doomsday weapon in Dr. Strangelove so ironic and funny. But if a new weapon type that at least approximates nukes in destructive power while also surpassing them in ease of proliferation, cost of production, or detectability? Those are much scarier propositions.
It’s a distinction without a difference. For human purposes, nukes can effectively destroy us completely. We don’t need to also physically rip the planet apart and destroy all the single celled organisms to ruin the planet for ourselves.
The nukes that actually exist today would reduce us to a medieval or early industrial existence, except with a lot of information about how to rebuild faster — Hiroshima and Nagasaki both got rebuilt and are now thriving, and while modern weapons are higher yield and much of the industry to rebuild with would be destroyed, not all of it would be, and roughly half the global population would still be alive to do it.
I wouldn’t count that as “effectively destroy us completely”, even though it would be really bad.
Keep in mind that all the easily-mined coal, oil, and gas deposits have been used.
We might be kinda screwed if something takes out civilization (e.g., the nukes fly).
I guess we can hope that nuclear winter is exaggerated or non-existent and the southern hemisphere pulls through with intact infrastructure after the exchange.
Sure, everything would suck for a while[0]. But we had wind and hydro for a long time before electricity and steam, so those that survive could rebuild, analogously as to how we are presently weaning ourselves off fossil fuels without such destruction.
[0] I realise given the context of global thermonuclear war this may seem like understatement. Well, I’m British and I have a stereotype to uphold.
(Incidentally, I highly recommend that author's book _ The Knowledge_, which is a more extended meditation on industrial civilisation and what it would take to reinvent it if we lost it.)
Lasers and other energy weapons may become practical in this century as an answer to artillery and hypersonic missiles. They will change the balance dramatically.
In addition to that we will see more robotic warfare and probably more information warfare.
I predict the next super weapon will be an AI that generates content so captivating, that it acquires everyone’s attention, and/or induces unhealthy biological response.
I always thought it seemed logical that POSSIBLY at the large, macro scale of galaxys and black holes and whatnot interacting there could be a force equivalent to the Strong Nuclear Force we see in Chemistry.
Of course I have no evidence to support this - just seemed plausible. Maybe this is involved?
We don’t really work with the strong force in chemistry, mostly in nuclear and high energy physics. Chemistry is mostly about electron transfer and bonding.
the strong nuclear force doesn't really deal with chemistry all that much - you need to crack the nuclei of atoms to release it...like, ya know, nuclear tech. You're gonna have a tough time separating something's protons using a hot plate and some chemicals, and its not really chemistry.
> Knowing the exact position of each wire is crucial to getting an accurate trajectory. For the new analysis, Kotwal and his colleagues took advantage of muons that rain down from the sky as cosmic rays. These bulletlike particles constantly rip through the detector in almost perfectly straight lines, letting the researchers detect any wonky wires and pin down the wires’ positions to within 1 micrometer.