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Science is a wonderful discipline, a fascinating process by which we seek to understand what is happening throughout the creation of God. We have discovered and learned many things through science. We also learned new questions that we would not otherwise have been able to ask.
I am a fan.
But science is a discipline. This is not an authority. He is not a judge. It is as limited as the ability of humans to design models and apply their knowledge to them. We used it to gain considerable knowledge, but we also had to make adjustments over time because often what we thought was certain gave way to discoveries or events that we did not know. never thought possible.
The discipline of physics is currently experiencing a moment like this and it is being stimulated by the events unfolding in Antarctica. And in the space.
Scientific American reports that particles are flying off the ice in Antarctica. And they come from the space. In other words, they make their way into the Earth from space and come back to the other side without encountering anything during the journey.
Why is this a big problem? As previous hypotheses of particle physics suggested that particles could not do this, the behavior of these particles challenges everything scientists thought they knew about physics:
Physicists do not know exactly what it is. But they know it's a kind of cosmic ray – a high-energy particle that has traveled through space, headed for Earth, and gone. But particle physicists know the collection of particles that is what scientists call the Standard Model (MS) of particle physics, should not be able to do it. Of course, there are low-energy neutrinos that can cross miles and miles of uninjured rocks. But high energy neutrinos, as well as other high energy particles, have "large cross sections". This means that they will almost always come up against something shortly after entering the Earth without ever reaching the outside.
And yet, since March 2016, researchers have been intrigued by two events in Antarctica where cosmic rays have burst from the Earth and have been detected by NASA's Antarctic Impulsive Transten Antenna (ANITA).
ANITA is designed to chase cosmic rays out of space. The high-energy neutrino community was buzzing with enthusiasm when the instrument detected particles appearing to be projected from Earth instead of away from space. Because cosmic rays should not do that, scientists began to wonder if these mysterious beams were made up of particles never seen before.
Since then, physicists have offered all sorts of explanations for these "ascending" cosmic rays, sterile neutrinos (neutrinos rarely encountered in matter) to "atypical dark matter distributions inside the Earth". not interact with the light.
All the explanations intrigued and suggested that ANITA could have detected a particle not taken into account in the standard model. But none of the explanations conclusively proved that something more ordinary could not have caused the signal at ANITA.
A new document uploaded today (September 26th) on the pre-print server arXiv changes this. In this paper, a team of astrophysicists from Penn State University showed that there had been more particles of high energy than those detected at both ANITA events. Three times, they write, IceCube (another larger neutrino observatory in Antarctica) has detected similar particles, although no one has yet linked these events to the mystery of ANITA. And, by combining the IceCube and ANITA data sets, Penn State researchers have calculated that no matter how much of the Earth's exploding particle, it is much less likely to be part of the Earth. standard model. (In technical and statistical terms, their results had confidences of 5.8 and 7.0 sigma, depending on the calculation you are considering.)
The key detail here is that particles behave in ways impossible for physicists before all this begins. While it is not a "settled" issue, the standard model of particle physics generally considered that particles simply could not cross the Earth, emerge on the other side and return to space.
However, these particles act precisely in this direction, which puts into question everything that was thought to be understood in particle physics.
It's actually a very exciting moment. It's an opportunity to discover new possibilities and immerse yourself in the process of learning what they could mean. If this is possible where we previously thought it was not, what else? What is it calling into question? What other hypotheses could now be reconsidered?
Opening questions like this could lead to all kinds of new knowledge. It is at this moment that science is at its best.
But before that, you have to be open to the realization that what was once thought to be settled might not be right after all. This is why scientists who question orthodoxies play such an important role. Without those who are willing to challenge the conventions, we may never find new information that would lead to tremendous advances in knowledge and the human experience.
Provided, of course, that the "scientific community" do not tell those who ask such questions to shut up and queue.
But when would that happen?
Dan Calabrese – Bio and Archives | comments
Dan Calabrese's column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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