Courtesy of the Daily Grail, here's an article at Futurism about anomalous results from the Large Hadron Collider that suggest the Standard Model may need revision:
https://futurism.com/measurements-cern-new-physics/
It seems that there are things called Bottom mesons, which decay into Kaon mesons, muons and antimuons. But the measured rate of decay isn't quite as fast as the model predicts. Does that difference represent a real shortcoming of the model? It depends on how the statistics are interpreted. Apparently the measurements are associated with a p value of 0.0125. So some people think that given the amount of data that have been generated, and given the number of possible comparisons, it's only to be expected that low p values like that will occur. But another physicist links this anomaly to others, which were "less clean but more significant", and comes up with an overall p value more like 0.00006. Apparently more experiments are needed, and (surprise, surprise!) probably more money for better equipment.
It all sounds rather familiar - though these wildly differing estimates based on post hoc analysis of the data almost suggest that the physicists forgot to preregister their hypotheses in the way that all good scientists should. Also, strangely, there's no mention of Bayesian statistics, but then again, how would the prior probabilities be calculated, given that we're talking about fundamental physical laws, which everyday experience tells us nothing about?
One interesting thing in the article, given the claims of Sean Carroll and Brian Cox, is an unequivocal statement that the LHC has detected "ghosts". But from the context, that only means inconclusive indirect evidence of an anomaly. A ghost of a ghost, maybe.
https://futurism.com/measurements-cern-new-physics/
It seems that there are things called Bottom mesons, which decay into Kaon mesons, muons and antimuons. But the measured rate of decay isn't quite as fast as the model predicts. Does that difference represent a real shortcoming of the model? It depends on how the statistics are interpreted. Apparently the measurements are associated with a p value of 0.0125. So some people think that given the amount of data that have been generated, and given the number of possible comparisons, it's only to be expected that low p values like that will occur. But another physicist links this anomaly to others, which were "less clean but more significant", and comes up with an overall p value more like 0.00006. Apparently more experiments are needed, and (surprise, surprise!) probably more money for better equipment.
It all sounds rather familiar - though these wildly differing estimates based on post hoc analysis of the data almost suggest that the physicists forgot to preregister their hypotheses in the way that all good scientists should. Also, strangely, there's no mention of Bayesian statistics, but then again, how would the prior probabilities be calculated, given that we're talking about fundamental physical laws, which everyday experience tells us nothing about?
One interesting thing in the article, given the claims of Sean Carroll and Brian Cox, is an unequivocal statement that the LHC has detected "ghosts". But from the context, that only means inconclusive indirect evidence of an anomaly. A ghost of a ghost, maybe.
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