{"id":25726,"date":"2010-07-09T08:11:01","date_gmt":"2010-07-09T08:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2010\/07\/09\/wait-i-thought-the-universe-wa\/"},"modified":"2010-07-09T08:11:01","modified_gmt":"2010-07-09T08:11:01","slug":"wait-i-thought-the-universe-wa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2010\/07\/09\/wait-i-thought-the-universe-wa\/","title":{"rendered":"Wait, I thought the Universe was expanding, not shrinking!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, it is. But the Proton “got smaller” just now. And, by “got smaller” I mean that the accepted measurement of the proton has been adjusted slightly. The new measurement for the proton’s diameter is about 0.00000000000003 mm (0.03 femtometers<\/a> less than it was before. This is important:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

“It’s a very serious discrepancy,” says Ingo Sick, a physicist at the University of Basel in Switzerland, who has tried to reconcile the finding with four decades of previous measurements. “There is really something seriously wrong someplace.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The difference between the old and new measurement is actually a whopping 4 percent or so. The old measurement was based on the behavior of an electron associated with a single proton. The electron “orbits” the proton in a specific way, and observation of this behavior accurately predict the proton’s weight.<\/p>\n

The new measurement uses a muon, ticked into orbiting the proton by firing muons at high speed at a cloud of hydrogen. Hydrogen, as you know, has one proton and one electron. Sometimes the muon fired at the hydrogen associated, electron-like, with a proton.<\/p>\n

Muons are way bigger than electrons, which apparently matters, making muons more accurate than electrons. So, although the proton size measurement has been done several times with the electron, this new measurement carries some extra cred because it is a measurement made with muons.<\/p>\n

“Something is missing, this is very clear,” agrees Carl Carlson, a theoretical physicist at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. The most intriguing possibility is that previously undetected particles are changing the interaction of the muon and the proton. Such particles could be the ‘superpartners’ of existing particles, as predicted by a theory known as supersymmetry, which seeks to unite all of the fundamental forces of physics, except gravity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The possibility that an error was made has not been ruled out.<\/p>\n

Original paper: Pohl, R. et al. Nature 466, 213-217<\/p>\n

Write up that you can legally read even if you are not special: The proton shrinks in size<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, it is. But the Proton “got smaller” just now. And, by “got smaller” I mean that the accepted measurement of the proton has been adjusted slightly. The new measurement for the proton’s diameter is about 0.00000000000003 mm (0.03 femtometers less than it was before. This is important:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[191],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-6GW","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25726"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}