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Scientists at the LHC find surprising particle behavior, defying our model of physics

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Stumpokapow

listen to the mad man
Exactly. I've seen a number of two sigmas (and even a three sigma!) not being valid in my relatively short career.

Sure, but they do a lot of experiments and collect huge amounts of data there. A 5% chance of it being wrong is a lot better odds than it sounds.

I mean, it's pretty logical. If you're a research lab, and you put out a result every week, and each result is 95% likely to be true, then you would expect 2 and a half false findings a year, and your probability of putting out nothing but true findings in a given year would be <10%.

This very famous PLoS paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" is super fun to read if you want to really shake your faith in the enterprise of scientific and academic publishing:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/
 

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
The LHC has two major "tasks". Finding the higgs boson and getting an evidence for the supersymmetry. The latter would be a real big and monstrous sensation like the quantum physics in the early 20th century.

I would say that the second task is actually finding anything that disagrees significantly with the predictions of the standard model. That includes SUSY but is also a lot broader in its remit.
 

gaugebozo

Member
I mean, it's pretty logical. If you're a research lab, and you put out a result every week, and each result is 95% likely to be true, then you would expect 2 and a half false findings a year, and your probability of putting out nothing but true findings in a given year would be <10%.

This very famous PLoS paper "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" is super fun to read if you want to really shake your faith in the enterprise of scientific and academic publishing:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/
I've seen this paper referenced a few times, finally going to read it. Thanks!

I think the most compelling result that doesn't fit with the Standard Model is still the muon g minus 2 measurement, which has a 3.4 sigma discrepency, and gives me some hope that Fermilab may again discover something new when they try to measure that more precisely starting next year.
 
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