Researchers at Fermilab, who run the Tevatron particle accelerator, say they’ve discovered a new particle “anomaly”, leading people to think they may have uncovered a new elementary particle or new force of nature. But those working on the project are playing it safe, merely stating that the data is interesting.
While it’s definitely not the mythical Higgs boson particle, which is often referred to in physics circles as the “God particle” because of its predicted ability to resolve inconsistencies between different theories, researchers are holding out the possibility it could be some bizarro variation of that concept.
Some researchers are sceptical of the data, and believe we don’t yet fully understand the behaviour of boson particles. And while it only has a 0.076 per cent chance of being false evidence, that’s too wide a margin of error for most scientists. In the meantime, we’ll have to wait for scientists to conduct more experiements to verify the results. [Science]