The Pioneer Anomaly & Other Breaking Physics News

David Harris, editor-in-chief at Symmetrymagazine.org (a joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC), sends us to his blog covering the American Physical Society meeting now going on in St. Louis. Among the breaking physics news relating to topics we have discussed in the past: results that explain about 1/3 of the Pioneer anomaly by differential heat flow in the spacecraft; an analysis of the Fermilab Tevatron's chances of spotting the Higgs "God particle"; and a hint that an Italian team has replicated their results from the year 2000 pointing to a detection of dark matter.

Sloppy editing

We have three separate subjects crammed together in one article. So some of the briliant, insightful comments by my fellow shashdotters may get buried. How about three separate articles?
Or is this a new trend? Are we going to see twenty subjects crammed into the one daily article tommorow?

Re:Sloppy editing

So some of the briliant, insightful comments by my fellow shashdotters may get buried.

On the other hand, we may get somebody posting a fantastic Theory of Everything that shows that the other two-thirds of the reason why Pioneer is off-course is because it is being bombarded with Higgs particles while bumping into dark matter.

But yes, I suppose that your prediction of stupid comments is also possible. It's 50/50 really.

Re:Sloppy editing

Electric universe is stupid singularity evil. 4 Day Time Cube disproves 1 Day Electric Universe.

Electric Universe is as evil as God singularity evil.

I have $10,000.000 that I will wager that Cubicism transcends and disproves Electric Universism.

You must be new here.

So some of the briliant, insightful comments by my fellow shashdotters may get buried.

When's the last time you've read the comments section on any science article on Slashdot, particularly over discoveries in physics?

Insightful comments are *always* buried under senseless meme-tossing and political (or other off-topic) ranting.

On the Pioneer anomaly

I read a discussion somewhere that many spacecraft pick up a sizable electric charge and keep it (they are after all in a vacuum), and that electrostatic forces from the Sun and the solar wind are enough to account for course deviations. It's certainly true that gravity is not the only force operating out there.

Re:On the Pioneer anomaly

Right, radiation pressure, gas leaks, drag, electric charge are all suspects, as are changes in the way data was collected. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly [wikipedia.org] The issue is that the current best guesses for these effects do not yet account for the anomaly.

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When's the last time you've read the comments section on any science article on Slashdot, particularly over discoveries in physics?

Quite regularly thank you.

I happen to believe Slashdot, even with minuscule expense of a subscription, is an excellent barg

Before LHC though?

The article states that Fermilab can begin exploring to 160GeV in the summer. LHC is due to be switched on before that. From all I've read, LHC has a MUCH better chance of being sure of what it finds at around those energies. I think any article on this subject can't even pretend to be balanced without discussing LHC.

Re:Before LHC though?

The LHC will probably switch on this year, but it won't generate very much luminosity at first. Perhaps by the end of 2009 it will have made a couple of inverse femtobarns which would be enough, but it will be another year or so after that before the data are processed and analyzed. It takes quite a bit of time to understand and interpret the detector readout. The Tevatron does have a chance if the Higgs is around 160 GeV, but only with about one-in-a-thousand level statistical significance, and so far we are not seeing any excess of events there, but in fact somewhat fewer events than expected.

Re:Before LHC though?

It's going to be a race, really, to see what happens first - the Tevatron squeaking out enough events to confirm detection, or the LHC operating smoothly enough to get all the calibration and background processes established, then finding the Higgs.

It's going to be a close race. On one hand, the LHC will ramp up to have a huge advantage over the Tevatron. On the other hand, the Tevatron folks are at the top of their game.

Enough of the "God Particle" please

Who first used the name "The God Particle" for the Higgs? It certainly wasn't a high energy physicist!

The Higgs field is supposedly responsible for mass generation -- and that's it. Nothing else. Maybe something about "spontaneous symmetry breaking...mumble... big bang.. mumble... inflationary expansion... mumble", but hardly anything "God-like".

This nickname comes across as something dumb invented by the popular press in a half-assed attempt to communicate to regular folk how exciting the LHC is to us physicists.

Maybe /. could lead the charge to kill this nickname?

Re:Enough of the "God Particle" please

I think it was Leon Lederman who coined it in his book. He is definitely a high-energy physicist, he was director of Fermilab for years and won a Nobel Prize for discovering the bottom quark. I agree with the sentiment, though, if I never heard it again it would be fine with me. I read the book some years ago but can't remember why he called it that.

Re:Enough of the "God Particle" please

Its from the book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? [wikipedia.org]. It's a joke, son, laugh.

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Unfortunately, "regular folk" who are interested in celebrity affairs, plasitc surgery and drug abuse ,pay for physics experiments.

It's impossible to convince them how important such experiments are, so we need to patronise them.

Re:

Maybe /. could lead the charge to kill this nickname

That would be nice. It's correct name is the Higgs boson. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson [wikipedia.org]

I'm amazed that currently no comment on this article contains the word "boson". I've heard it called the Higgs boson more times than I have the "god partic

Fermi and the Higgs

Sadly, 10% of Fermi's staff is being laid off, and the rest must take a mandatory week off of unpaid leave every two months due to the funding SNAFU at the DOE.

Pioneer Anomaly

I was a bit put off by the tone of TFA with respect to the Pioneer anomaly. While it is unlikely that the anomaly will disprove our models of gravity, it is an excellent example of a gap in our understanding of physics.

Re:

Well, let's be fair. the Pioneer anomoly is just that, anomalous. We don't see the impact in other situations, we don't have a good explanation for it and it isn't very large. It is entirely possible that this could be the same sort of anomaly as the or

Something doesn't fit...like....

....the god particle????

Is god that small?

Re:Rumor/conjector

I read the article on Higgs, and it is entirely conjecture based on specified rumor after rumor. Is this TMZ.com?

It's a summary of a physics conference. This is news of physicists describing to each other the state of the art and what they're busy conjecturing, considering, and hoping to prove. Perhaps you were looking for Nature?

Re:Rumor/conjector

The bump in the CDF two-tau decay channel went away with more data, which wasn't too surprising. I'm not sure how all that got so blown up in the science press, the original blog post that started it at Cosmic Variance surely didn't make any discovery claim. Having said that, the other half of the story, the rumored huge excess in the D0 three-b-quark channel, is still unresolved as they have not released any results for over a year. We'll probably see something within a few weeks I guess, I have heard that it is close to ready.

Re:Rumor/conjector

I know right? And what about that sensationalist headline: "Breaking Physics News"??? If they had actually broken physics, I probably would have heard it on the news...

Re:Rumor/conjector

I read the article on Higgs, and it is entirely conjecture based on specified rumor after rumor. Is this TMZ.com?

Rumors? About me? *sigh* I'm always the last to hear of them.

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> Is it so hard to see that they're just dealing with the (luminiferous) (a)ether?!?

Oh course. History doesn't repeat exactly but it does tend to rhyme. Is it any wonder that science falls prey to the same human failings since it IS just another human

Re:Dark Matter...

I would post that sort of nonsense as an AC, too. For those that are unaware, the theory of a luminiferous aether posits that there exists some sort of medium in interstellar space which conducts light. It was completely superseded around the beginning of the last century, mostly by the theories of a man named Einstein. Which explain quite well our observations of the universe on a large scale. Dark matter is an entirely unrelated question related to the amount of matter in the universe. Dark energy, zero-point field...you're just throwing around terms. What we know about the forces in the universe is not exhaustive, but to invent a completely new one just to account for a minor anomaly is not good science. What you are doing here is the equivalent of fighting for the Flat Earth theory, and it disturbs me to see that modded informative here...