A new experimental result has shaken the world of particle physics. The W boson, it turns out, is a lot heavier than we thought. This poses a challenge to our most successful and tested theory about the fabric of the universe so far: the Standard Model. And while this one experimental result might not be enough on its own to overthrow the theory, it already points in the direction of a theory that could, writes Martin Bauer.
Recently the mass of the W boson has been measured by the Collider Detector at Fermilab with unprecedented precision and a surprising result. The recent result disagrees wildly with all previous measurements of the W boson's mass, but this result is no fluke. To give you an idea of the precision of this latest measurement and how unlikley it is that this result is a mistake, consider this: if you weigh yourself multiple times with different scales you would expect to see some discrepancy. But an equivalent discrapancy like the one between the most recent measurement and the previous measurements of the W boson's mass, would statistically occur only after you've weighed yourself 1 billion times.
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