New discovery could revolutionise physics

Have scientists glimpsed something completely new in nature? A recent discovery in Switzerland could transform physics and upend everything we think we know about the universe. “We may be on the road to a new era of physics”. This is how physicist Professor Chris Parkes described a new scientific discovery that promises to revolutionise our understanding of the universe. If his team is right, then they might have discovered a whole new force in nature, comparable to gravity or magnetism. And yet this discovery took place at a level so tiny that even the most powerful microscope would be unable to see it. This is the level of a type of subatomic particle called a quark. Quarks are the very smallest form of existence that we have been able to detect, and physicists have long believed that they might hold the key to understanding the laws of the universe. There are six types, or flavours, of quark: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom (or beauty). All of these decay: they break down into different kinds of particles. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, we expect beauty quarks to decay into an equal number of two different subatomic particles: electrons and muons. But scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva observed beauty quarks producing a greater number of muons than electrons. This suggests a flaw in the Standard Model, which has defined our understanding of physics for the last five decades. The Model explains three of the four fundamental forces in the universe: electromagnetism, the weak force that causes radioactivity, and the strong force that binds atoms together (but not the fourth force, gravitational pull). However, scientists have long been aware that the Standard Model cannot explain everything. As well as gravity, it is unable to account for the existence of dark matter, which makes up around 85% of the mass of the universe, or dark energy, which is believed to be responsible for the expansion of the universe. The new findings might be the first step in discovering a fifth force of nature, one that dictates how particles break down. That would bring us closer to a “theory of everything”, a model that could explain everything that happens in the universe. But scientists warn that the results are not yet certain. For that, they would need to have a significance of 5 sigma, meaning that the chance they came about through a computer error is just 1 in 3.5 million. These results have a significance of just 3.1 sigma, meaning the chance of a computer error is 1 in 1,000 – small, but not entirely implausible. Quarks are not easy to study, and not just because of their size. Quarks are held together by an extremely powerful forcefield. Separating them takes a vast amount of energy, and results in the creation of an antiquark, which is impossible to measure and bonds to the quark before we can see it. Of the six types of quark, only two, up and down, appear naturally: the rest have to be created. In fact, quarks are so complex, some scientists have suggested that they do not actually exist at all: they are an illusion that we invented to explain the unexplainable. Have scientists glimpsed something completely new in nature? The Force Awakens Yes, say some. This new discovery could be as significant as Newton’s explanation of gravity or Einstein’s theory of general relativity. We can use it to develop a new model of particle physics that could ultimately explain everything we do not know about gravitational pull, the make-up of the universe, and the causes of the Big Bang. We have peeked into a whole new dimension of our reality. Not so fast, say others. The scientists who made the discovery have been eager to play down its significance. They point out that they cannot even be completely certain that the discovery was not a computer error. And even if the effect they observed was real, this is only the first step down a long road of scientific research, likely to throw up as many new questions as it answers. KeywordsElectrons - Negatively charged subatomic particles. They are found in the nucleus of an atom.