These paywalls around scientific journal articles were infuriating when I was a physics grad student, and they're even worse now that I don't have a university account through which to view them.<p>In that spirit, here is the authors' rather fabulous website:<p><a href="https://muhy.web.psi.ch/wiki/index.php" rel="nofollow">https://muhy.web.psi.ch/wiki/index.php</a>
A better writeup, a little more technical than the Discover Magazine version but far more comprehensible than the actual paper:<p><a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7303/full/466195a.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7303/full/466195a...</a>
What would be the consequences if this is accurate? What assumptions are based on the size of a proton? What kind of technology was previously thought impossible because protons were just too darn big? Because (as a non-physicist) I can't think of anything.
The greatest thing a physicist (or any scientist) can say is, "Hmm, that's funny...". It's when we find out that we were wrong that a panoply of new discoveries open up before us. Exciting times.
This is hard to believe. I'll wait until the experiment has been repeated using muonic helium. Most likely, the researchers made a mistake in how they applied QED in their calculation.
So, either a) the proton is a different, size, b) the muon is a different weight, c) the 'electron shell' relationship to the proton size is not what they think, d)...
Why can't humans be a little more self aware? We know almost nothing. We're still in the stone age and we need to work really hard, invest a lot more money in education and research. It's not how far we've come, it's how far we have to go.