Sunday, September 6, 2015

RECENT CERN FINDINGS COULD CHALLENGE THE STANDARD MODEL

This was one of those stories that was on everyone's - well, almost everyone's - radar this past week, for there is news coming out of the world's Cosmology Cartel, CERN, that may be opening the door to alternative physics models other than the standard model.
New Large Hadron Collider study may overturn Standard Model of physics
Now, what interests me (for our high octane speculation purposes) are these curious statements.
"The Standard Model says the world interacts with all leptons in the same way. There is a democracy there. But there is no guarantee that this will hold true if we discover new particles or new forces," said Maryland professor Hassan Jawahery, ahead of the publication of his study in Physical Review Letters. "Lepton universality is truly enshrined in the Standard Model. If this universality is broken, we can say that we've found evidence for non-standard physics."
The research is particularly important, as it indirectly builds on another experiment, the Stanford University-based BaBar study, which has been in progress since the 1990s, and also appears to contradict the Standard Model.
When we seach for the recent explanations from Stanford's Babar experiment (which, incidentally, is called BaBar because B mesons are written with a big capital B, and their anti-particle "equivalent" is written with a big B with a bar over it, hence, "BaBar"), we find this intriguing reference:
BaBar Experiment Confirms Time Asymmetry Time's quantum arrow has a preferred direction, new analysis shows
And in this, we find these statements:
Time marches relentlessly forward for you and me; watch a movie in reverse, and you’ll quickly see something is amiss. But from the point of view of a single, isolated particle, the passage of time looks the same in either direction. For instance, a movie of two particles scattering off of each other would look just as sensible in reverse – a concept known as time reversal symmetry.
Now the BaBar experiment at the Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has made the first direct observation of a long-theorized exception to this rule.
Digging through nearly 10 years of data from billions of particle collisions, researchers found that certain particle types change into one another much more often in one way than they do in the other, a violation of time reversal symmetry and confirmation that some subatomic processes have a preferred direction of time.
Reported this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, the results are impressively robust, with a 1 in 10 tredecillion (1043) or 14-sigma level of certainty – far more than needed to declare a discovery.
Now, for those of you who know the name of Dr. Nikolai Kozyrev, the famous Russian astrophysicist, this will be sounding awfully familiar, for Kozyrev, as a result of a rather different chain of reasoning concerning the fusion process in stars, came to a very similar conclusion, namely, that time was, in effect, its own form of energy and that it had a preferred spin orientation. One of the chief differences (as far as this hack from South Dakota can tell), is that the Stanford experiments are obviously concerned with things on the quantum (very small) scale, and Kozyrev was talking about things on the macro(very large) scale. Not surprisingly, Kozyrev related his thoughts to the phonemonenon of torsion.
Reading a little further into the Stanford article, we find this arrestings series of statements:
“This is a fresh way to understand data we had already used to measure CP violation,” said BaBar physics coordinator Abner Soffer, associate professor at Tel Aviv University. “By looking at it slightly differently we were able to undeniably see time violation as well. What’s nice is that the effect was there the whole time, but nobody had thought about it the right way before.”
Time violation had previously been seen in particles called neutral kaons by the CPLEAR experiment at CERN, but that measurement was not direct because of the inability to distinguish T violation from CP violation, and the interpretation of those results drew some criticism. It’s hard to set up laboratory conditions that can see time reversal violation, Martínez-Vidal explained. But BaBar provided just the right conditions for a clear, direct measurement.
In other words, CERN appeared to have very loosely confirmed similar results, and while it is certainly stretching things a great deal, it can be said that perhaps CERN, like Stanford, was looking for such events, above and beyond Higgs bosons and quark-gluon stangelets and all the other weird deities in the quantum mechanical pantheon.
All of which leads us to our high octane speculation of the day. You'll note that the RT article about CERN finding things that could either significantly modify, or perhaps even overturn, the Standard Model of particle physics appeared on August 30, just a few days ago. Then, a day later, this article appeared at RT, also about CERN, but with a completely different focus:
10 mind-blowing facts about the CERN Large Collider you need to know
Now, there are the usual pro forma disclaimers at the bottom of the article about the contents not representing the official views of RT (or the Russian government), which raises all sorts of thorny questions. Why would one of the mouthpieces of the Russian government choose to run such an article about CERN(a day after the previous one, remember), under the heading that these are things you need to know about the Large Hadron Collider? The question to my mind is intensified when one considers the contents of the article itself, which, by picturing Shiva and the so-called "666" corporate logo (which, in my opinion, could equally be just a stylization of the five accelerators that comprise the machine, or just as easily be a "999" reference for Hermetica-Egypt fans), seems to be raising en passant all the conspiracy theories out there concerning the machine.But more important than pictures of CERN's logo or Shiva, there is this extremely odd set of paragraphs that follow an even odder section header:
9. Massive gravitational pull
The CERN collider is composed of some 9,600 super magnets – which are 100,000 times more powerful than the gravitational pull of Earth - that fire protons around a circular track at mindboggling speeds. A beam might rotate for up to 10 hours, travelling a distance of more than 10 billion kilometers, enough to make it to the far reaches of our Solar System and back again. Travelling just below light-speed, a proton in the LHC will make 11,245 circuits every second.
No less amazing are the magnet’s coils, which are made up of 36 twisted 15mm strands, each strand comprised in turn of 6000-9000 single filaments, each filament possessing a diameter as small as 7 micrometers. The 27km length of the LHC demands some 7,600 km (4,100 miles) of cable, which amounts to about 270,000 km (145,000 miles) of strand — more than enough to circle the Earth six times at the Equator. According to the CERN website, if the filaments were unraveled, they would “stretch to the Sun and back five times with enough left over for a few trips to the Moon.”
This is followed by a review of the warnings from Hawking, and a review of the court case attempt in Germany to prevent the collider from being fired up at all. It's that little mention of "massive gravitational pull" as a section header along with details about the magnetic strength of the LHC itself that suggests to this layman hack from South Dakota that someone, somewhere in Russia, has made a connection between magnetism and gravity, and, moreover, to possible magneto-gravitational effects that might be induced by the collider, altogether apart from any public references to quantum mechanical experiments. In short, what RT seems to be suggesting is that the machine is about much more than quantum mechanics; that it is, in fact and reality, a machine able to manipulate effects in the large and even planetary scales, and that the particle physics is the "cover story" for a much grander, and very different type of physics experiment. We don't find many scientists talking about such possibilities - or even willing to admit them - but nonetheless they would seem to this layman to follow inevitably from the structure of the machine itself: a strong local magnetic field, sheathed in a (potentially piezo-electric?) molasse of rock, all within the greater context of the Earth's magnetic field, which in turn forms a much larger macro-system coupled with that of the Sun... I even suggested that the stacked character of the Proton Sychrotron in relation to the Collider plus the counter-rotation in the Collider itself, might under certain circumstances induce a kind of magnetic field precessional wobble... well, you get the idea. The bottom line, at least for this hack, is that it still appears that CERN may be about far more than just slamming packets of mathematical information together, and the RT article may thus be a little reminder that the incomplete theories of yesteryear - I'm thinking Kron, Kaluza-Klein, and so on - may be incomplete, but that does not make them un-engineerable...

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