Breakthroughs in Physics It takes many years to get a doctorate in physics. This makes me wonder how these scientists feel when the results of an experiment disprove a long held rule? That might make them feel bad enough, but what if they discover something which changes what they believed in an entire field of physics? Recently, a particle named a muon may have changed physics entirely. The particle is actually a subatomic particle and you have to wonder how something so tiny might be able to change physics so drastically. It is being said this could be the biggest breakthrough in physics in over 50 years. I will try and keep this as simple as I can for my sake as well as yours. Most of us are not scientists and not all scientists are in the field of physics. What is at the core of all this excitement? It is the fact the particle wobbled far more than it was supposed to while it whizzed around a superconducting magnetic ring. To us this wouldn’t seem like anything to get excited about, but to a physics scientist it was an incredible fact. The scientists claim there is only a 1 in 3.5 million chance that this is an accident. Scientists have what would seem to us as a strange way to classify these things. An absolute score of 5 sigma would mean there is no chance of error. They gave this result a score of 4.2 sigma which is extremely high but not perfect. More tests will have to be run. So why are they so excited? The excitement comes from the fact when they calculate every known force there is no known way the particle could wobble like that. One scientists stated, This is strong evidence that the muon is sensitive to something that is not in our best theory." If the scientists are correct there exists another force in nature, we know nothing about. Not all the scientists agree however. A different group of scientists is claiming one of the numbers used in the calculation should have a larger value. If the original calculations are correct and the experiment gives the same results a second time and we do discover a new force in nature what does this mean? It is too early to tell, but for all we know this force could be useful in many ways. Perhaps it would give us the power to develop antigravity engines if we have not already, or transmit signals much more efficiently. Scientists had developed rules years ago for how particles should act under different circumstances, but the scientists at Fermilab have said the particles known as muons are behaving in a way which makes no sense. The four forces we know about are gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force and the weak force. We have to remember a new force could also affect the forces we know about and change the way they operate. When we first learned about Newtonian physics things seems pretty obvious. Gravity pulled things down to the earth for example. It was said Sir Isaac Newton was under a tree when an apple fell on him and the rest is history. Scientists are looking at a new type of power in the realm of quasiparticles. Quasiparticles were discovered about ten years ago. They were called magnetic skyrmions. They were an important discovery in physics because their spins could be studied. We civilians might think who cares about the way particles spin, but physicists would tell you in this case it is very important because it will eventually lead to a new power source and a new technology called Spintronics. Spintronics will lead to very low powered devices because new materials will ultimately be able to take advantage of the spins rather than the electrons. That is about as deep as I will go with this before I get out of my league. A lot of breakthroughs in physics have taken place lately and they mostly have gone unnoticed by most of us. One of the recent discoveries was a method which allows human thoughts to be translated into speech by a computer. A neuroprosthetic device which can reconstruct speech from neural activity will be very helpful for those who can not speak. Previous tests showed this was possible. Could there be other uses? One which comes to mind which sounds incredible is teaming the device with a dolphin. It probably wouldn’t do any good, but I would love to give it a shot anyway just in case. It seems physicists have created something which it wasn’t thought possible and it is called the Little Big Coil. When magnetic fields are created huge magnets are used and the former recorded holder for the most powerful magnetic field weighed 35 tons. What happened next was incredible. The record was broken by a device which weighed only a tiny fraction of that. This might make the magnets used in the Large Hadron Collider obsolete. They are some of the biggest magnets in the world. It seems breakthroughs in physics are coming faster all the time. In 2020 there were several interesting breakthroughs. One surprise for physicists was the discovery that Neutrinos hitting the earth also had come from the sun. We knew tiny objects named Neutrinos were hitting and passing through the earth all the time but we were unable to prove some were from the sun until 2020 when we traced some of them from there. The tiny almost massless objects pass through us in the millions. One of the smallest measurements of time has been made. A photon is a particle of light. The time it took for a photon to travel across a hydrogen molecule was just measured. The result was it took 247 zeptoseconds which is 247 trillionths of a billionth of a second. Now let’s see if we can make this information useful someday. Many of us are fascinated by the idea of teleportation. We remember the transporter in Star Trek and how the doctor on the enterprise known as Bones hated to go into it. I have always said it must have killed those going into it on one end and created their clones on the other side who thought they were the same people. After all, how could anyone survive being taken apart and put back together on the quantum level? Anyway, let’s get back to photons again. Scientists at Fermilab have successfully transported a photon a distance of 44 kilometers. That is a distance of 27.3 miles. Not bad for the first try. Let’s hope they will eventually be able to do this with non-living objects such as pallets of food and such.
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