DailyDirt: Measurements That Make You Go Hmmmm...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, Dec 12th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Replicating experiments is an important part of science. If you can't repeat an experiment, then whatever you observed could just be a fluke. But even if measurements can be repeated reliably, it doesn't mean that they can be explained easily. Here are just a few examples of some weird measurements that physicists are still trying to explain.

Neutrinos have been observed to travel faster than the speed of light -- twice, in two different experiments. But the two experiments were done by the same group of physicists at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland, so independent verification is still pending and these weird measurements could just be an error of some kind. [url]
There are many unsolved mysteries in the field of physics. Here's a list of just ten. Nice job security in waiting for a proton to decay in a billion trillion trillion years.... [url]
The Large Hadron Collider could get a glimpse of the 'God Particle' after searching through the remnants of hundreds of particle collisions. Physicists expect to find the Higgs boson at around 120 to 125 GeV.... [url]
To discover more interesting science-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Filed Under: experiments, god particle, higgs boson, large hadron collider, physics, protons, science, speed of light

7 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 12 Dec 2011 @ 7:04pm

But what happens if they hadn't found the God Particle?
Looks like they should announce something soon about finding the Higgs boson, and I just guessing that if they "announced their announcement" that it's not going to be "nope, we didn't find it. We'll have to keep looking, folks."
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Dec 2011 @ 12:53am

Your link is broken
The second [url] link is broken (it is missing the http:// part).
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- A Guy (profile), 13 Dec 2011 @ 1:27am
  
  Re: Your link is broken
  works for me
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Pixelation, 13 Dec 2011 @ 7:47am

Awesome date night
"Dr. Preskill speculates that the information doesn't really vanish: it may be displayed somehow on the surface of the black hole, as on a cosmic movie screen."

Hey Honey, fire up the popcorn maker we're goin' out!
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Hephaestus (profile), 13 Dec 2011 @ 7:57am

"Physicists expect to find the Higgs boson at around 120 to 125 GeV"

In that range the universe would be unstable. Its got to be higher. Either that or the theories need to be reworked.
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- Michael Ho (profile), 13 Dec 2011 @ 11:48am
  
  Re:
  [citation needed], Hephaestus.... :P
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Jose_X, 15 Dec 2011 @ 1:48pm

neutrinos too fast
When all is said and done, this will probably serve as a way to tune the instrumentation. The instruments were upgraded recently (2008) to enable this experiment, and there are many sources of possible errors, including things like software timing assumptions that may have gone under the radar.
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