The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will restart on Friday after a three-year hiatus and is expected to resolve a scientific cliffhanger on whether a mysterious anomaly could point to the existence of a fifth fundamental force of nature. Fingers crossed.”So far, everything discovered at the LHC – including the Higgs – has fallen in line with the so-called standard model. This has been the guiding theory of particle physics since the 1970s but is known to be incomplete because it fails to explain some of the deepest mysteries in physics, such as the nature of dark matter. But the gold standard for particle physics is a more stringent one in 3.5m level of confidence, meaning more data is needed before a discovery can be declared. “When you show this result to particle physicists, the first instinct is, ‘You guys have screwed up’ rather than it’s a new force of nature,” said Patel.

Source: The Guardian April 22, 2022 10:56 UTC