Some comments from an ATLAS physicist doing W mass measurements at the LHC:<p><a href="https://non-trivial-solution.blogspot.com/2022/04/do-we-have-finally-found-new-physics.html" rel="nofollow">https://non-trivial-solution.blogspot.com/2022/04/do-we-have...</a>
Talking about particle/quantum physics, is there a book/youtube channel/whatnot that would describe (some/main) experiments and results that have convinced physicists that classical physics does not work when you go small. I mean, I know about double slit experiment, but I guess it is a long journey from that to the Standard Model.<p>So instead of the heavy theory, I'd like to see the stuff that made people scratch their heads in the first place.
I would guess that unless some other team replicates this result, it's probably a measurement error somewhere. Physics can be very delicate and tricky, and it's easy to make mistakes. But, even the mistakes are opportunities for learning, so it's not a waste.
Do we actually know how physicists define "mass" in this context? Because, in physics many words have technical meanings that only physicists can know. For instance, as a layman when I see the word "particle" I imagine a spherical thing with an extension in space. But a physicist would laugh at me because in physics a particle is not a particle, it can be a statistical bump in data, it can be a field, it can be a wave, anything but a spherical particle. But a physicist would call a wave a particle and see nothing wrong with it. The same goes for mass, what physicists call mass can be voltage for instance. So does anyone know what "mass" means in this context?
Unfortunately I missed the webinar this afternoon, but here is the orginal press release from Fermilab, it is fairly long:<p><a href="https://news.fnal.gov/2022/04/cdf-collaboration-at-fermilab-announces-most-precise-ever-measurement-of-w-boson-mass/" rel="nofollow">https://news.fnal.gov/2022/04/cdf-collaboration-at-fermilab-...</a>
how much tearing apart of everything and quintuple checking goes on before publishing a result like this?<p>do they stand by the result or is it more of a call for "hey, come have a look at this. we can't explain it."<p>it's got to be anxiety inducing! (and exciting, of course)
Does it make sense to even discuss the sigma of any deviation?<p>When you add in the "10% chance that some scientist messed up the maths or something in the experiment", then it's impossible to ever reach 7 sigma...