A SMALL discrepancy has sparked a big 鈥渋f鈥�. Physicists who spent 10 years weighing the W boson, one of the fundamental particles that make up our universe, say it is 0.1 per cent heavier than expected (see Particle physics could be rewritten after shock W boson measurement). What might be a rounding error in other fields of study could blow open the standard model of particle physics, one of our major theories for understanding, well, everything. If the measurement is correct, that is.
We have been here many times before. One of the most memorable cases saw a group of physicists working on the OPERA experiment announce in 2011 that they appeared to have discovered that particles called neutrinos could travel faster than light, breaking one of the seemingly immutable laws of the cosmos. They had spent months checking and rechecking their work and, unable to find an error, released it to the world with the scientific equivalent of 鈥渂eats me, guv鈥�.
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Physicists around the globe exploded with their own 鈥渋fs鈥�, dreaming up theories attempting to explain the anomaly, and, for a short while, everyone got very, very excited. Alas, six months later, the OPERA team made another announcement: the source of the puzzling data had been traced to a loose cable, which had slightly altered the calculations and produced the erroneous superluminality. The ifsters went back to the drawing board, theories relegated to mere fan fiction of reality.
The W boson collaboration has spent even longer trying to poke holes in its own findings, and has come up short. Now, its members are asking for other physicists to help tear the work to shreds. Everyone wants the measurement to be right, because if it 鈥� or any of a handful of other anomalous measurements currently exciting particle physicists 鈥� is, it would spark a revolution in a field that has been somewhat languishing since the celebrated discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. But realistically, the odds are in favour of some equivalent to OPERA鈥檚 loose cable. Fresh eyes should help solve the thorny puzzle.
Still, if. A universe of possibility hangs in the balance as physicists digest and dissect the findings, which may well turn out to be the biggest result in decades. If.
