"Perfect" Electron Roundness Bruises Supersymmetry 150
astroengine writes "New measurements of the electron have confirmed, to the smallest precision attainable, that it has a perfect roundness. This may sounds nice for the little electron, but to one of the big physics theories beyond the standard model, it's very bad news. 'We know the Standard Model does not encompass everything,' said physicist David DeMille, of Yale University and the ACME collaboration, in a press release. 'Like our LHC colleagues, we're trying to see something in the lab that's different from what the Standard Model predicts.' Should supersymmetrical particles exist, they should have a measurable effect on the electron's dipole moment. But as ACME's precise measurements show, the electron still has zero dipole moment (as predicted by the standard model) and is likely very close to being perfectly round. Unfortunately for the theory of supersymmetry, this is yet another blow."
ACME (Score:5, Funny)
"ACME collaboration"?
Then just bang the electron on the head with an ACME anvil, and it will grow lumps.
It's a heisenberg moment (Score:4, Funny)
If you measure it, an electron is perfectly round. The rest of the time it's kind of oval.
Time for some really new physics (Score:5, Interesting)
So what wonderful physics is hiding out there waiting to be discovered and open up a whole new world to us?
Personally my biggest recent letdown were the FTL neutrinos that turned out to be bogus. I was genuinely hoping that something cool revealing itself. But alas. My favorite today is that entanglement and wormholes might have some relationship. Minimally that will result in some cool sci-fi if not actual science.
Personally I don't mind if ultraspherical electrons shut down a bunch of pet theories. They didn't seem to be making much progress and thus the door has been opened to explore something new. Maybe there is some guy trying to get his doctorate showing that supersymmetry is a load of rubbish but hasn't been able to get much traction because the entire panel got their doctorates in supersymmetrical related ideas and in order to defend his thesis he has to first set fire to theirs.
Re:Time for some really new physics (Score:5, Informative)
Although there has long been a connection between math and physics, as people dig further into the math they are finding some unexpected things, and ways to better understand, simplify, or extend the equations.
Mathematicians Link Knot Theory to Physics [nytimes.com]
A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics [simonsfoundation.org]
There are a number of seemingly promising developments out there that are sharpening the investigative tools as well as providing interesting new lines of investigation, as well as new data to chew on.
Spooky Connection: Wormholes and the Quantum World [discovery.com]
Physicists Create Quantum Link Between Photons That Don't Exist at the Same Time [sciencemag.org]
Schrodinger’s ‘Kitten’? Large-Scale Quantum Entanglement Achieved By Two Physics Labs [planetsave.com]
String theorists squeeze nine dimensions into three [sciencenews.org]
New work gives credence to theory of universe as a hologram [phys.org]
Now we are developing a growing understanding of the interplay between biology and physics.
Quantum biology: Do weird physics effects abound in nature? [bbc.co.uk]
Who knows where things may lead next? Of course people should be careful in performing experiments.
Collapse of the universe is closer than ever before [phys.org]
Re:Time for some really new physics (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to nitpick, but isn't the collapse of the universe *always* closer than ever before?
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Depends on made of tachyons. whether your brain is organic, a positronic net, or
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Not really. Right now it looks as if the "collapse of the universe" is a "never" thing that never gets any closer. The value of the cosmological constant seems to be greater than 1.
This paper isn't about that, but about an even more obscure idea involving the false vacuum that gives rise to the Higgs field. It's a wildly speculative theory to succeed the Standard Model. That theory has a different kind of collapse involving a radical change to the Higgs field, greatly increasing the mass. This paper doesn't
you forgot (Score:2)
you forgot Polan... ahem, the axis of evil. The related article [wikipedia.org] cites coincidence as a possible interpretation, which seems a "Galileo" moment to me.
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The standard model does not explain why particles have the particular masses they do, so obviously a genuinely new underlying theory is waiting to be discovered even without breaking any rules or postulating new fundamental particles. Exciting enough?
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My simple dream is that with my extensive computer programming knowledge I might be able to put that together with what I learn to generate something genuinely new.
Perfectly spherical? (Score:5, Funny)
Science is going to be really screwed when they discover frictionless planes also exist.
Re:Perfectly spherical? (Score:5, Funny)
On the contrary, they'll all stand up and say this is what they've trained for all those years of assuming spherical cows and frictionless surfaces.
Re:Perfectly spherical? (Score:4, Funny)
If the surface is frictionless I doubt very much that they will be doing any standing.
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It doesn't work if it is an electron. It has to be perfectly spherical cows, and rigid too, otherwise undergraduate physics professors are still going to be wrong.
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What about size? (Score:1)
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radius: 2.8179403267e-15 m
surface: 9.9786881e-29 m^2
volume: 9.3731159e-44 m^3
above in fuzzy logic: very tiny
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radius: 2.8179403267e-15 m
That is the classical answer. It is generally considered to be a point particle today.
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It has forces whose effects are spherical? Just no body (e.g. smaller particles tied together). They keep slamming electrons together with ever greater energy and only see electrical force curve deflection but never collision deflection. So they are either hideously tiny or a point.
If a point, are they in some way the same class of thing as quarks?
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The summary and articles are a little vague about what the "shape" of an electron is supposed to be. As are as we know, an electron is a point particle, meaning it has zero size. What these scientists mean by "spherical" is that the electron's electric field is perfectly spherically symmetric (measured to a higher degree of accuracy than any previous measurement). This means that if you imagine a sphere with an electron at the center, then the electric field of the electron is exactly the same magnitude
Has Anything Ever Validated Supersymmetry? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The more we learn about the reality of the universe, the more we'll come to respect its true elegance and to see how inelegant our prior theories (like supersymmetry) were.
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Is that a religious statement? What if the universe is ugly, way deep down?
Re: Has Anything Ever Validated Supersymmetry? (Score:1, Insightful)
As long as it still puts out
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Fat universes need lovin' too.
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In all serious, I've always wondered what discoveries might not be made because of so many scientists insisting on theories that are "elegant". The universe does not appear to give a damn about what humans think is or is not elegant.
Re:Has Anything Ever Validated Supersymmetry? (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you ever seen a Nima Arkani-Hamed talk? (there are some on youtube and elsewhere). Most annoying is that not only does he rant and rave about how wonderfully simple and elegant his supersymmetry is, but he decorates those claims with embellishments like "they must be true".
Even more annoying is when a big potentially-confirming experiment is concluding, he's proud to say what result he expect that will confirm this theories, add that if he doesn't get them he'll scrap his theories, and then when the results don't confirm his theories, he shuts the fuck up briefly, and then resumes pushing the same old theories.
If you want good science. Don't look in the direction of that branch of physics, you'll have more luck in psychotherapy, economics, or astrology.
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But the proponents of SuSy claim that their theories are elegant!
Yeah, it's elegant except for all the magical unbroken superpartners that are too energetic to exist.
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...he shuts the fuck up briefly, and then resumes pushing the same old theories...
Oh, he'll come a"round" eventually!
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Well it's been suggested that some of the Supersymmetric particles might be an explanation for Dark Matter which does appear to exist. Other than that, I'm not sure that Supersymmetry has much going for it these days.
Re:Has Anything Ever Validated Supersymmetry? (Score:5, Informative)
It's a little more involved. We know that the standard model is unable to explain a few important observations (such as gravity) so it *can't* be the whole story. Any theory that accounts for gravity and dark matter/energy will be more elegant by virtue of not having holes in it.
Supersymmetry could explain those things and fortunately makes a few predictions that we are now capable of testing. However, those aren't panning out so it must be revised and tested again. At least until someone comes up with something better to test.
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Supersymmetry could explain those things and fortunately makes a few predictions that we are now capable of testing. However, those aren't panning out so it must be revised and tested again.
Isn't that how people dealt with the theory that planets move on perfect circles? Instead of throwing the theory out once it was shown that there was no evidence for it and a lot of evidence against it they adapted it until it became impossible to describe (planets move on circles that move on circles - circles all the way down). How much money do you invest into a failed and disproven theory before resources are moved to research a different explanation?
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Sometimes visualising something in the wrong way is the first step to figuring out what the right way is.
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More importantly, there's no requirement in physics that the universe be elegant for it's theories easy to understand. It's perfectly plausible that planets could move on circles and on other circles and so on and so forth. Of course all this was being done in the Roman times and was an effort in keeping the Earth at the center of the universe, but if the OP notes he thinks money should be moved elsewhere then I ask where - we need better theories of the universe, and the other candidates are at the exact s
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Keep in mind that Copernicus was working with epicycles when he developed the heliocentric model. I would call that worthwhile. I would argue that had he not "invested money into a failed and disproven theory", he would not have had his important insight. In turn, Kepler couldn't have discovered the laws of planetary motion had he been stuck in a geocentric model.
Can anyone explain what supersymmetry is? (Score:1)
Re:Can anyone explain what supersymmetry is? (Score:4, Funny)
Must have some rough edges.
After over a hundred years... (Score:4, Interesting)
... of models involving perfectly spherical atoms, nanoparticles, cows, planets, stars, etc, there is something ironic about an electron being too round.
Wait, it has a shape? (Score:2)
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Isn't a point a perfect sphere? In fact the most perfect sphere possible?
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Isn't that a rather pointless conjecture?
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Yes, but isn't it a well rounded explanation?
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Isn't a point a perfect sphere? In fact the most perfect sphere possible?
A point has no dimension at all.
When scientists say that the electron ia a point like particle they mean that the dimensions of the electron are negligeable with respect to the other characteristic lengths in play. But of course an electron as every other physical object is 3 dimensional in nature.
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A sphere has to have dimensions?
I would have thought being 0 in all dimensions made for a perfect sphere, I mean, hey, its not a cube is it?
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no, its 0 in every direction which makes a sphere not a cube. If it was a cube then it would have corners and since its a dimensionless point how can it have corners? It has to be a sphere!
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No, it does not have negligible dimensions, and they are not just smaller than Planck length, they are exactly zero, according to this theory. I.e. each elementary particle (incl. electrons and quarks of which all matter is made) is a tiny force field originating from an invisible (so to speak, or maybe better said immaterial) point in space. Mass is a property of that field given by the Higgs Boson.
It kind of makes sense, b/c if it were solid i.e. had some volume and was made of "stuff" then it wouldn't be
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Re:Wait, it has a shape? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes in a way you are correct.
"Thus, at non-relativistic energies the EDM [electric dipole moment] corresponds to a shift of energy levels of the electron in an external electric field E that depends on the direction of electron's spin Se. "
More details:
http://resonaances.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/electric-dipole-moments-and-new-physics.html [blogspot.com.au]
Shape? (Score:3)
How can anything have a shape that turns into an electromagnetic wave when you're not watching...
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I think we call them quantum states....
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How can anything have a shape that turns into an electromagnetic wave when you're not watching...
The Doctor: Don't blink. Blink and you're dead. They are fast. Faster than you can believe. Don't turn your back. Don't look away. And don't blink. Good Luck.
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They don't. Would violate conservation of charge and spin. You're probably confusing electrons and photons.
In fact, quantum theory was invented when it was realized that Maxwell's equations required electrons in orbits to emit electro-magnetic waves as they spiral towards the nucleus. They of course don't do either.
perfect sphere = super-symmetrical (Score:1)
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You can't leap into meap until you've super-sized that happy meal baby.
Bad news for string theory (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supersymmetry [wikipedia.org]
A whole lot of PhD dissertations, physics publications, and academic careers are on the line over this. String theory is the current favorite and loop quantum gravity the underdog. The direction of theoretical particle physics could be radically altered if the LHC doesn't find evidence of supersymmetry.
Re:Bad news for string theory (Score:4, Funny)
A whole lot of PhD dissertations, physics publications, and academic careers are on the line over this.
All those (dipole) moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain...
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Thank you!
Finally someone took the time to provide a concise explanation of WTF it means for supersymmetry to be disproven.
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A hypothosis does not require any theory or fact to define it. It is postulated so that it can be tested. If it fails the tests it needs to be revised or disarded. If it explains many observations then it may become a theory.
Oddly supersymettry is not one concept. There are many flavours. They may all be wrong. Some may be less wrong than others.
If you don't have people comming up with the concepts then you have little to design an experiment to test.
Poor reporting. (Score:2)
smallest precision attainable (Score:2)
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smallest precision attainable does not mean what you think it does. You meant highest precision attainable
Hmm. Many existing laws are based on assumption that lower precision is correlated with highness... If you're right, it could spell trouble for prohibition.
Point Particles (Score:2)
Electrons are point particles - modelled as zero-volume and massless. They might have no physical form. I am not surprised that our measures of them indicate perfect symmetry.
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Because since protons prefer round, smooth booties, they won't date neutrons, which then fly off into space to shop. Didn't you learn anything in science class?
Re:Invisible unicorns in a garage (Score:5, Informative)
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Because since protons prefer round, smooth booties, they won't date neutrons, which then fly off into space to shop. Didn't you learn anything in science class?
Neutrons just don't want to get involved.
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Because string theory isn't science!
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Because string theory isn't science!
Sure it is. It's abstract mathematics.
Re:Invisible unicorns in a garage (Score:4, Insightful)
An aspect of science is applied math as the AC below mentioned. More particularly, we should be somewhat cautious in treating math as physics. Physics is describable in math, but it isn't math. And the mathematics of a physical situation functions more like an analogy. It says "that works like this"...and usually it does that to some epsilon because we can only measure up to a certain energy. One can think of a physical theory described in mathematics as an idealization. The math is very precise, the real world is not necessarily.
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You seem to be implying that somehow mathematics are not sufficient for describing the "real" world, and that is simply not the case.
Mathematics are the language of the universe, as far as we can tell.
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You seem to be implying that somehow mathematics are not sufficient for describing the "real" world, and that is simply not the case.
Mathematics are the language of the universe, as far as we can tell.
I agree. A better statement might be that our understanding of mathematics is not sufficient for describing the "real" world. The problem is not math itself.
Re:Invisible unicorns in a garage (Score:5, Insightful)
Math is great at describing perfect theories that fail to pan out in real life, but that are perfectly self consistent in the theory and equations. Just look at all of the great, and completely wrong, models offered in super-symmetry, string, and all the other Grand Unified Theories that mathematically are perfectly sound, but are disproved by actual experiment.
This is why Physics, e.g. "science" > Math.
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To defend Mathematics a bit, it does tend to advance much more quickly than Physics since it isn't hampered by the restrictions of the real world.
Just think of General Relativity and non-Euclidean Geometry. Often times when a new scientific concept is created/discovered and a model is required to flesh it out, all you need to do is look around existing mathematics and, oh look, there's an app for that.
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This is why Physics, e.g. "science" > Math.
Your logic is wrong (as well as your use of e.g., which means "for example"). The only thing you've concluded is that physics != math. By your own words, math can describe any universe. In that case, only one math describes ours. We haven't quite worked out what that math is, but that's why all these competing physics theories exist.
There are no competing math theories, because mathematics isn't trying to describe reality.
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You seem to be implying that somehow mathematics are not sufficient for describing the "real" world, and that is simply not the case.
Mathematics are the language of the universe, as far as we can tell.
Speaking as a person who does mathematical modeling for a living, I can tell you that a mathematical model is definitely only an approximation for the real world. There is no such thing as a perfect model due to the limitations of our knowledge and our inherent inability to model every single detail in the world. There are huge stochastic effects that we can only approximate statistically (a deterministic model would require a near infinite number of parameters, and even it would be an overfit because we ca
Re:Invisible unicorns in a garage (Score:4, Insightful)
Mathematics cannot be the language of the universe as the vast majority of the universe does not communicate any ideas. The parts of it that do is an insignificant, tiny portion that includes us and whatever other self-aware/reasoning beings that may be out there.
What mathematics is are a set of insanely great tools that we use to create models helping us to describe the universe. One thing we've learned from math is that self-referential systems tend to have issues that can crop up in spots. And it's hard to get more self-referential than a subset of the universe trying to understand the whole thing.
Saying that mathematics is sufficient to describe the real world, no matter how successful it has been at it so far, is awfully presumptuous.
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Godel's Incompleteness Theorem basically proved otherwise.
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My point was that mathematics is a science. That it is a formal science instead of a natural science is a different matter all together.
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Because string theory isn't science!
A more accurate statement is that string theory is math not physics.
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From TFA
The standard model predicts that the electron has exactly zero dipole moment, meaning it is perfectly symmetrical. However, should supersymmetry exist, the dipole moment of the electron should be greater than zero, pushing the negatively-charged particle into a a more and more elongated shape.
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So basically.... evidence supports the standard model and someone's pet theory that they are hoping will make them the next Einstein has evidence that is contrary to it?
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More accurately, The Standard Model is the best theory we have right now but it's incomplete since it doesn't account for gravity and has a lot of parameters that are just there without a good explanation for them. Supersymmetry is an idea that is the basis for a lot of people's pet theories because it helps explain a lot of what the Standard Model does not by bringing in a lot of extra particles.
Those particles, if they exist, make other particles like the electron behave just a little differently than the
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Unfortunately for the theory of supersymmetry, this is yet another blow.
Ok, but why? Anyone care to explain this for me?
In simple terms (that I hope are accurate), supersymmetry is one of the predictions made by string theory (although the concept of supersymmetry pre-dates string theory). I believe there are other theories that incorporate supersymmetry as well. So, if the predictions made by supersymmetry don't hold up, any theory that is based on it will need to be revised or abandoned.
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Yeah, but the summary nor the article explain why supersymmetry is a question or an issue in the first place, just that the evidence doesn't support the theory. What does the theory it disproves mean/change?
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What I'm not interested in is smug assholes claiming "it's in the summary" when it's not.
Re:Invisible unicorns in a garage (Score:5, Informative)
This is a good question. There are a number of theoretical and empirical motivations for supersymmetry, including the existence of dark matter, the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe, and the hierarchy problem in particle physics. I don't fully understand all of these myself. However, this short video released by my collaboration tries to explain some of them at a basic level: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIflReRmynk.
Re:Invisible unicorns in a garage (Score:4, Funny)
Supersymmetry solves an enormous number of problems in particle physics, except for experimental facts.
Re:Invisible unicorns in a garage (Score:5, Informative)
It says that supersymmertry predicts a larger dipole moment, that's why it would be in question.
If you want to know why supersymmetry makes that prediction then you aren't going to get that in a new article or a slashdot post. There are lots of resources available for learning SUSY, or jump in the deep end with something random like http://www.springer.com/physics/particle+and+nuclear+physics/book/978-4-431-54543-9 [springer.com]
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It's a bit complex to squeeze into a slashdot summary. Here's what [wikipedia.org] has to say about it. This article [profmattstrassler.com], written by Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler, does a better job of explaining it in layman's terms, I found it to be an excellent article. I'd had only the vaguest idea what it was about before reading it.
Now I have a much less vague idea, but reading an article by a physicist doesn't magically turn you into one.
Re:Once again way over my head, but... (Score:5, Informative)
The deviations they are talking about aren't things like mountains or bumps, but a systematic non-spherical bias.
For example, the earth isn't spherical either, it's basically a bit fatter around the equator pretty close to an oblate spheroid (e.g., an M&M is a more exaggerated oblate spheroid). Like a baseball, if the electron isn't totally spherical, you can detect a systematic bias as it's being thrown around (you can think of the LHC as throwing an electron spit-ball or a knuckle-ball).
Although even in the standard model, the electron at some energy level probably has a detectable dipole moment (e.g., the charge wouldn't be uniformly spherically distributed in the electron), it is my understanding that it is predicted to be too small to be validated by current experiments. However, some versions of super-symmetry apparently would predict that the electron at some energy levels would have a larger detectable dipole moment . I guess these super-symmetry predictions didn't pan out.
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if it had bumps that didn't really effect the charge distribution...
... and this is exactly where the headline implies it wrong. If you actually read beyond the headline (merely the slashdot summary is already enough), you'd notice that this is indeed about non-roundness that does affect charge distribution. Non-uniform charge distribution would result in a dipole moment, whose absent has been noticed.
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Perfectly round. Isn't that the definition of super symmetry?
Depends. Is the inside the same as the outside?
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Perfectly round. Isn't that the definition of super symmetry?
Depends. Is the inside the same as the outside?
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