Fermilab test throws off more matter than antimatter — and this matters

[n2doc]

By Ron Grossman, Tribune reporter
May 29, 2010


By the logic of science, things simply shouldn't exist. The best scientific minds of several generations have reasoned that shortly after the Big Bang created the universe, matter and antimatter should have wiped each other out.

So that explains the global chain reaction of excited e-mails among physicists this month, after scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory "opened the box" — their jargon for taking a peek at newly crunched data — and raised hopes of some day solving the riddle of existence.

"It's like looking back to the instant where everything began," said Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at the sprawling research facility near Batavia.

Simply put, the Fermi team sent protons and antiprotons around its underground Tevatron accelerator ring into a head-on collision, which produced slightly more tiny fragments called "muons" than tiny fragments called "antimuons."

more

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-fermi-existence-discovery-20100529,0,3299924.story

"It'll be written about in physics books a hundred years from now," said Zoltan Ligeti, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in the Fermilab experiment.

[dipsydoodle]

1. Does it explain

the existence of bacon which is regarded as absolute proof that there really is a God ?

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

5. The relationship between God and bacon has long been established

Morgan Freeman was God in "Bruce Almighty"

Morgan Freeman was in "Nurse Betty" with Rene Zellweger

Rene Zellweger was in "My One and Only" with Kevin Bacon

ipso facto there is a relationship between God and Bacon.

http://tinyurl.com/24mcyrw

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. Who is going to register www.muon.org? I can see it now. Ooops,

already taken.

www.muon.org

[Peace Patriot]

3. Yeah, but we're IN the Universe in which matter won. So what does that prove--

that, in this Universe, matter won again?

Now go look at the photo of "Theorist Joseph Lykken" and tell me that this guy is not pulling your leg.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-fermi-existence-discovery-20100529,0,3299924.story

Or maybe it's the reporter, who writes...

"Once their data and logic had been double-checked, the research team invited colleagues to a Friday evening wine-and-cheese party, a tell-tale method of tipping off colleagues."

Seriously, I think this research could be useful in the Gulf. They just need to figure out how to stuff PART of all that "matter" back into its black hole.

------------

(Don't get me wrong. I'm wild about physics, Hubble, colonizing the Moon, Mars, Europa and beyond, opening the doors to parallel universes and the whole mind-boggling magnificence of the Cosmos. This article just struck me as funny. And the look on Lykken's face is funny. And the whole thing--why is there matter?--is really very funny when you think about it.)

[Ultraviolet Cat]

4. Good for Fermilab!

This is a big discovery for them. If their data holds up under the scrutiny of peer review, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see a Nobel Prize come out of this research. The matter-antimatter asymmetry has obviously been a feature in the Standard Model for a long time (for obvious reasons), but the possibility of now having actual data to match to the theoretical models is tremendous. They may not have discovered the Higgs boson, but this is definitely one for the history books.

On a side note, my usual complaint about news reports based on scientific discoveries is that they almost always overstate the discovery. I think in this case the reporter from the Tribune didn't really get how important this is!