Everything we know about the universe is wrong, new study says

A breakthrough study could potentially change our perception and understanding of the universe.

Fresh findings from the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) suggest that scientists initially underestimated the size of a particle called W boson, which they have now claimed has a much greater mass than anticipated.

From taking detailed measurements, they found that collisions take place at much more rapid speeds by smashing W bosons. In fact, the study says that the measurement of the fundamental particle doesn't match the standard model of physics – also considered one of the golden rules in science.

Over 400 researchers studied over four million W bosons out of the “dataset of around 450 trillion collisions” in 10 years. Author and physicist from Duke University, Ashutosh Kotwal, said the Tevatron collider in Illinois was initially used. They later used the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) for collecting data.

“In this framework of clues that there are missing pieces to the standard model, we have contributed one more, very interesting, and somewhat large clue,” said Kotwal. The new theory is “probably the most successful scientific theory that has ever been written down."

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“It can make fantastically precise predictions. It’s like a house of cards, you pull on one bit of it too much, and the whole thing comes crashing down,” Harry Cliff, a particle physicist from Cambridge University working at the Large Hadron Collider, added.

There's no need to rewrite physics textbooks just yet, but the discovery has left scientists around the globe scratching their heads over the new measurements.

”This is either a major discovery or a problem in the analysis of data,” stated Jan Stark, physicist and the director of CNRS, France. He added that there would be “quite heated discussions in the years to come”.

“The chances of getting a five sigma result by dumb luck is one in three and a half million. If this is real, and not some systematic bias or misunderstanding of how to do the calculations, then it’s a huge deal because it would mean there’s a new fundamental ingredient to our universe that we haven’t discovered before,” Cliff added.

“But if you’re going to say something as big as we’ve broken the standard model of particle physics, and there are new particles out there to discover, to convince people of that, you probably need more than one measurement from more than one experiment,” he added.

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