"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."
Re:Invisible unicorns in a garage (Score:1, Insightful)
Because string theory isn't science!
Re: Has Anything Ever Validated Supersymmetry? (Score:1, Insightful)
As long as it still puts out
Re:Wait, it has a shape? (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Invisible unicorns in a garage (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Re:Invisible unicorns in a garage (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
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.
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.
Re:Invisible unicorns in a garage (Score:2, Insightful)
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 cannot measure or determine the all underlying phenomena).
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.