sub-atomic controversy

Recently some scientist announced their finding of the weight of a sub-atomic particle called W boson. Apparently it is more massive than the theories predicted. If the experiment could be verified by other experiments then the so-called standard model of particle physics - which has predicted the behaviour and properties of sub-atomic particles with no discrepancies whatsoever for fifty years- has to be revised. The standard model was “probably the most successful theory and scientific theory that has ever been written down – it can make fantastically precise predictions”. But if those predictions were proved wrong, it could not merely be tweaked. It’s a like a house of cards, you pull on one bit of it too much, the whole thing comes crashing down. The W boson is considered a key building block of the Standard Model,

But the standard model is not without its problems. For example, it doesn’t account for dark matter, which is thought to make up 95% of the universe. Of course extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  All eyes are now on the Large Hadron Collider which is due to restart its experiments after a three-year upgrade. The hope is that these will provide the results which will lay the foundations for a new more complete theory of physics. Physicists have been here before: tantalized by hints of exciting new physics only to have their hopes dashed as more evidence came in.

Just a note about the measurement that lead to this claim. The scientists said they had determined the W boson’s mass with a precision of 0.01% – twice as precise as previous efforts. They compared it to measuring the weight of a 350kg (800 pound) gorilla to within 40 grams (1.5 ounces). They found it was different than the standard model’s prediction by seven standard deviations, which are also called sigma. If you were flipping a coin, “the chances of getting a five sigma result by dumb luck is one in three-and-a-half million”.

If this is real, and not some systematic bias or misunderstanding of how to do the calculations, then it’s a huge deal because it would mean there’s a new fundamental ingredient to our universe that we haven’t discovered before. The most obvious candidates would be the exotic particles predicted by supersymmetry theory (SUSY), which calls for supersymmetric partners of all existing known particles in the Standard Model. The catch is that no particle accelerator to date, including the LHC, has yet uncovered any hint of SUSY particles in the data.