Einstein Does It Again

It is often said that scientists are close minded, that they will do anything to uphold the status quo. Anyone who says this has clearly never met a scientist. I promise you, every researcher out there wants to be the one to upset the apple cart and come up with some kind of paradigm shift in thinking that will lead to the immediate recall of all the textbooks. Whilst doing an experiment that repeats or confirms a previous finding is an essential part of the scientific method and needs to be done, it won't set the world afire.

This is the stage many physicists are at when it comes to the Standard Model. The Standard Model of physics is our best guess so far about how the components of matter all come together. It deals with all the sub-atomic particles we know about, their corresponding anti-particles and the four fundamental forces of nature. It works supremely well and has been verified by multiple, converging lines of evidence from different fields of physics. Much of the testing at the Large Hadron Collider has reaffirmed the Standard Model and many there are genuinely disappointed to have not yet discovered any 'new physics' with the most complicated machine ever built by man. The Standard Model has been broadly in place for several decades now and ever since it's inception physicists around the world have been desperately trying to break it. This week another group failed.

In an open access letter to Nature researchers from Japan and Germany report that they have once again shown that protons and anti-protons are completely identical to each other in every way except their opposite charge. They used a device known as a Penning trap to carefully 'weigh' the protons and anti-protons in the most accurate experiment of its kind to date. They were hoping to find a slight difference that would be a deviation from the Model and open up new avenues of inquiry. Alas, after thousands of iterations they found that they were similar to 69 parts in a trillion. They then repeated the experiment but this time to see if gravity affected the matter and anti-matter in different ways. Again, no dice. Whilst it's lovely to, once again, show how much of a boffin Einstein was and how great relativity is, it would have been incredibly exciting to have shown a crack in the edifice and start hammering away at it.

The Standard Model of physics