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As I’ve written before, one of the big differences between THE SCIENCE and actual science, is that the babbling ninnies of THE SCIENCE are so absolutely certain on so little evidence. THE SCIENCE of climate change, for instance, is very different from the science of climate change.
Ditto, the Covid pandemic: THE SCIENCE was absolutely certain, on no evidence at all, in fact, contrary to years of established evidence, that lockdowns and vaccine mandates would ‘stop the spread’. Even when, as early April 2020, the evidence was quite clear that lockdowns were not just not working but making things worse, THE SCIENCE refused to back down. Even now, they still won’t admit they were wrong.
By contrast, physics is the hardest of hard sciences. Any time a physicist makes a bold claim, colleagues will break into a chorus of It Ain’t Necessarily So. Take the claim, a few years ago, of faster-than-light neutrinos. The physics community was rigorously sceptical: and rightly so, as the claim soon collapsed. If it had been a similarly extraordinary claim about ‘climate change’, there’d be lobby groups, idiots glued to roads and few trillion in government spending already.
So, when it comes to the Large Hadron Collider’s recent apparent exposure of a “charming penguin glitch” which threatens to upend the Standard Model, I’m not getting excited just yet.
But wait, I hear you ask: “charming penguin glitch”? “Standard Model”? What are they on about. Buckle up for a physics lesson, kids.
To understand why this matters, let’s start with some basic physics explained without jargon. As I’m sure you all know already, everything you see – your body, this screen, the stars – is built from atoms. Atoms, in turn, are made of smaller bits: protons, neutrons and electrons. Protons and neutrons, in their turn, are made of still smaller particles called quarks. By this time, having exhausted descriptions like ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, physicists started getting whimsical: they described quarks in terms of ‘flavour’. There are six flavours of quarks: up, down, charm, strange, top and bottom (also called beauty).
All up, there are 12 particles of matter, including quarks, electrons, muons and neutrinos, and four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. All of these most basic ‘bits of nature’ make up what is called the Standard Model.
The Standard Model is an astonishingly successful rulebook. It explains how the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force work at the tiniest scales. It predicted the existence of particles like the Higgs boson long before we found them. But, it’s incomplete: it says nothing about gravity or the invisible ‘dark matter’ that seems to hold galaxies together, and it can’t explain why the universe contains far more matter than antimatter.
To try and test it, scientists use particle accelerators like the LHC to smash particles into one another and see what falls out. This is how quarks were first discovered in 1968. These collisions involve almost unimaginable energy, approaching the conditions in the first microseconds after the Big Bang. These ultra-high-energy collisions smash the tiniest bits of matter into even smaller bits, spitting out short-lived exotic particles that the detectors then study.
One detector, LHCb, is specially designed to catch particles containing heavy “beauty” quarks. These form B mesons: unstable particles that live for a tiny fraction of a second before decaying into lighter particles. Most decays follow well-understood paths, but a few are extraordinarily rare. The process in question is called an ‘electroweak penguin decay’. This is part serious science, part physicists’ idea of wacky humour.
‘Penguin’ is a nickname from the 1970s, when theorists drew Feynman diagrams (pictures showing how particles interact) and one rare decay path looked vaguely like a penguin with its wings out. In these decays, a beauty quark inside the B meson changes into a strange quark through a loop involving virtual (fleeting) particles and the weak force. Without mystifying you (or me) any further by talking about B mesons decaying into kaons, pions and muons (I’m already lost), the important bit is that the Standard Model says that this should happen only about once in every million such collisions.
Using data from roughly 650 billion B-meson decays collected between 2011 and 2018, the team at the LHCb found something very different.
Possibly.
These measurements disagree with the Standard Model’s predictions at a level called ‘four sigma’. ‘Sigma’ is a statistical measure of how likely something is or isn’t purely random chance. In physics, ‘five sigma’ is the level at which physicists start to grudgingly admit an effect might be significant, which is a one in 1.7 million chance of being wrong.
Picture it like this: Imagine rolling a die and getting the same number six times in a row. That’s unusual, but not impossible. Now imagine rolling the same number 20 times in a row. That would make you seriously question whether the die is fair. That’s the difference between four sigma and five sigma.
So, what the LHCb has found is interesting – but physicists aren’t quite ready to accept that the dice are loaded.
Still, it’s the first little tremors that may – may – shake up the Standard Model.
But, wait: what about the charming penguins?
These are Standard Model processes involving charm quarks that are very hard to calculate precisely. They could explain the observed anomaly. The problem is that it involves such unimaginably small particles that even the LHC struggles to measure their interactions. It’s like trying to measure the thickness of a hair with an old-school wooden ruler.
More data and better calculations could still bring the results back into line with the Standard Model. But, if further experiments confirm the mismatch, it would point toward genuinely new physics. It wouldn’t sweep away everything we currently know, but it would certainly extend it. Much as the discovery of radioactivity in the 1890s hinted at unseen particles that were only directly observed decades later.
The good news is that LHCb has already collected three times more data since 2018, and upgrades planned for the 2030s will multiply the dataset by another factor of 15. That flood of new collisions, plus improved calculations of the charming penguins, should let physicists settle the question within the next few years.
For now the Standard Model is still standing, but it is wobbling in a place where it has never wobbled before. Whether this is the beginning of a revolution or simply a statistical mirage, the next round of results will be one of the most eagerly awaited in particle physics.
