Speaker 1: You know, you've likely read those historical anecdotes about how
Speaker 1: scientific revolutions start.
Speaker 2: Right, the whole apple falling on the head thing.
Speaker 1: Exactly, And they rarely actually begin with a profound Eureka
Speaker 1: moment echoing through some pristine laboratory.
Speaker 2: No, it's usually much messier than that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. More often they start with a joke or like
Speaker 1: a mistake, a stray thought in a really mundane setting,
Speaker 1: which is exactly what happened here, right, So the specific
Speaker 1: scientific reality we're tearing apart today, this massive, stubborn, mathematically
Speaker 1: terrifying anomaly currently unfolding it stern. It actually begins in
Speaker 1: a puzz a.
Speaker 2: Pub on the outskirts at Geneva.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. The year is nineteen seventy seven, it's summer,
Speaker 1: and a young theoretical physicist named John Ellis is just
Speaker 1: playing a game of darts.
Speaker 2: Darts. You can't make this stuff up.
Speaker 1: I know, right. He's playing against a visiting student named
Speaker 1: Melissa Franklin, and they make a bet. Okay, the stakes
Speaker 1: are beautifully trivial. Basically, whoever loses has to insert the
Speaker 1: word penguin into their next published scientific paper.
Speaker 2: Which I mean in the rigid hyperformal world of late
Speaker 2: seventies theoretical physics that was basically academic.
Speaker 1: Vandalism, totally just completely absurd. But Ellis loses the.
Speaker 2: Game, of course he does.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And being a man of his word, he goes
Speaker 1: back to his desk to look at the paper he's writing.
Speaker 2: And this wasn't just some throwaway.
Speaker 1: Paper, right, No, not at all. It's a dense, mathematically
Speaker 1: brutal analysis of Quirk decay. I mean he's sketching out
Speaker 1: Feynman diagram.
Speaker 3: Right, those topological maps physicists use, yeah, the ones they
Speaker 3: used to calculate the probability of sub atomic processes, you know,
Speaker 3: expanding the S matrix into a perturbative series, all that
Speaker 3: heavy mass, really dense stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So he draws this very specific loop induced topology
Speaker 1: and he just steers at the lines and vertices which
Speaker 1: represent these virtual particles popping out of the vacuum.
Speaker 2: And he realizes something.
Speaker 1: He realizes the shape vaguely resembles a flightless bird. So
Speaker 1: he officially coins it up Penguin diagram.
Speaker 2: I love that so much. It was literally just a
Speaker 2: bar bet, a bar beck. But you know, the profound
Speaker 2: irony here is that nobody in that pub could have
Speaker 2: known that half a century later this exact thing would happen, right,
Speaker 2: that the exact quantum topology Ellis jokingly named after a penguin,
Speaker 2: would become like the most consequential battleground in modern.
Speaker 1: Physics, because today the mathematics governing that specific loop are
Speaker 1: quietly refusing to align with the laws of nature as
Speaker 1: we understand them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're just breaking down.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. Today we are dissecting a crack
Speaker 1: in the Standard Model of physics.
Speaker 2: And it's a big one.
Speaker 1: It is. And you know, because you our listeners follow
Speaker 1: the literature, you know that cracks in the Standard Model
Speaker 1: are announced practically every other fiscal quarter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, usually by someone looking for tenure.
Speaker 1: To be honest, exactly, But this one is different, very different.
Speaker 1: It has survived for over a decade. It involves the
Speaker 1: decay of b messins in side the large Hadron collider.
Speaker 2: So what's the plan for today, right.
Speaker 1: So our objective for this Thrilling Threads discussion is to
Speaker 1: isolate exactly what this anomaly is mathematically. We want to
Speaker 1: walk through the rather brutal graveyard of similar anomalies that
Speaker 1: have collapsed over the last twenty years.
Speaker 2: Oh, the graveyard is fascinating, it really is.
Speaker 1: And finally we're going to analyze the specific mind bending
Speaker 1: theoretical frameworks, things like lepto quarks and anomally free gauge symmetries.
Speaker 2: The stuff that's currently sitting on the table, if this
Speaker 2: data actually.
Speaker 1: Holds up, right, But to properly contextualize the threat this
Speaker 1: anomaly poses, we really have to talk about the rigidity
Speaker 1: of the wall that's sitting in the standard model. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's casually referred to as the most successful
Speaker 1: theory in the history of science.
Speaker 2: That we need to quantify that success.
Speaker 1: Right, Yes, exactly, because when we look at.
Speaker 2: Something like the anomaloust magnetic dipole moment of the electron,
Speaker 2: the famous G minus two calculation, we are looking at
Speaker 2: a theoretical prediction that requires calculating the QED perturbation series
Speaker 2: out to the.
Speaker 1: Tenth the word which is just I mean that involves
Speaker 1: evaluating over twelve thousand individual Feynman diagrams.
Speaker 2: Twelve six hundred and seventy two diagrams to be precise.
Speaker 2: That's just wild, it is. And when you calculate all
Speaker 2: those radiative corrections and you measure the electrons magnetic moment
Speaker 2: in a Penning trap, the theory and the experiment agree
Speaker 2: to what extent to one part in a trillion.
Speaker 1: Okay, wait, let's just pause on that one part in
Speaker 1: a trillion. Yeah, that is essentially like predicting the distance
Speaker 1: between New York and Los Angeles and verifying it to
Speaker 1: within the width of a single bacterium.
Speaker 2: That's a great analogy. It's exactly like that. We have
Speaker 2: spent fifty years firing particles at this theoretical framework at
Speaker 2: increasingly absurd energy scales, and it just holds up. It
Speaker 2: has responded with impenetrable mathematical perfection every single time.
Speaker 1: But you know that perfection is exactly why theoretical physics
Speaker 1: is currently in a state of existential read absolutely, the
Speaker 1: source material we're looking at today highlights this paradox brilliantly.
Speaker 1: The relentless success of the standard model is actually a.
Speaker 2: Nightmare because we know deductively that it's fundamentally broken.
Speaker 1: Right, It's an incredibly precise map of a localized room,
Speaker 1: but it violently contradicts the architecture of the rest of
Speaker 1: the house, and.
Speaker 2: The list of its failures at the cosmological scale is well,
Speaker 2: it's almost comedic compared to its microscopic precision.
Speaker 1: Give us some examples.
Speaker 2: Well, for starters, it lacks a quantized theory of gravity.
Speaker 1: Right, pretty important thing gravity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it offers absolutely no way to reconcile general relativity
Speaker 2: with quantum mechanics at the Plank.
Speaker 1: Scale, just a total blank space exactly.
Speaker 2: It also completely ignores dark matter.
Speaker 1: Even though astronomical observations demand it exists, right.
Speaker 2: From glactic rotation curves to the cosmic microwave background power spectrum.
Speaker 2: Everything demands that non varionic dark matter constitutes eighty five
Speaker 2: percent of the mass in.
Speaker 1: The universe, and the standard model just says.
Speaker 2: Nothing, basically nothing. It also offers no explanation for dark energy. Wow,
Speaker 2: And it cannot explain the non zero mass of neutrinos.
Speaker 2: It requires these really ad hoc additions like the seesaw
Speaker 2: mechanism just to keep the mathematics from collapsing.
Speaker 1: So it's patched together with duct tape in some places, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: But the most glaring failure, I think, the one that
Speaker 1: directly intercepts the anomaly we're looking at today, is the
Speaker 1: baryon asymmetry of the universe.
Speaker 4: H the matter antimatter imbalance, right, because if you look
Speaker 4: at the sacker Off conditions required to generate our universe, specifically,
Speaker 4: the requirement for charge parity or CP violation.
Speaker 2: Standard model technically includes it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, technically the CKM matrix, which describes the mixing of
Speaker 1: quarks allows for CP violation, but when you actually crunch
Speaker 1: the numbers, the amount of CP violation it provides is
Speaker 1: off by about ten orders of magnitude.
Speaker 2: It is catastrophically insufficient. Yeah. According to the pure standard model,
Speaker 2: the Big Bang should have produced equal parts matter and antimatter.
Speaker 1: Which would mean total annihilation exactly.
Speaker 2: The universe should just be this remarkably boring homogeneous bath
Speaker 2: of cosmic microwave radiation.
Speaker 1: But clearly here we are right.
Speaker 2: Galaxies exist, You and I exist.
Speaker 1: Which means there must be undiscovered physics.
Speaker 2: There has to be new particles, new forces, new sources
Speaker 2: of CP violation that fundamentally altered the decay rates in the.
Speaker 1: Early universe, allowing one extra matter particle to survive for
Speaker 1: every billion that annihilated.
Speaker 2: Precisely, that single leftover particle is us, every galaxy, star
Speaker 2: and human being.
Speaker 1: So the missing physics has to be out there. We
Speaker 1: know it, we do. But every time we've built a
Speaker 1: larger collider to smash the wall, we just hit a
Speaker 1: smooth surface.
Speaker 2: It's incredibly frustrating for the experimentalists.
Speaker 1: I can imagine there are no obvious, easily producible super
Speaker 1: heavy particles sitting at the TV scale, where the hierarchy
Speaker 1: problem suggests that they should.
Speaker 2: Be Supersymmetry has a material at.
Speaker 1: All, right, brute force just hasn't worked.
Speaker 2: Which dictates a complete change in methodology.
Speaker 1: Okay, so what do we do instead?
Speaker 2: Well, if you can't shatter the wall with pure energy,
Speaker 2: you have to look for microscopic stress fractures in the
Speaker 2: existing masonry.
Speaker 1: I like that.
Speaker 2: You abandon the direct searches for new heavy particles and
Speaker 2: you pivot to indirect searches. You build a microscope.
Speaker 1: And in particle physics, the ultimate microscope is the study
Speaker 1: of flavor changing neutral currents exactly. And this brings us
Speaker 1: right to the architecture of the experiment that's catching these
Speaker 1: fractures LHCb LHCb. So while the ATLAS and CMS detectors
Speaker 1: at CERN are these enormous general purpose cylindrical.
Speaker 2: Behemoths right designed to catch the transverse spray of high
Speaker 2: energy collisions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, LHCb is designed entirely differently. It doesn't surround the
Speaker 1: collision point uniformly. It's a forward arm spectrometer.
Speaker 2: It basically looks like a series of doors left open
Speaker 2: in a hallway.
Speaker 1: That's a great visual.
Speaker 2: It's built that way because of the specific kinematic of
Speaker 2: the particles.
Speaker 1: It's hunting the beauty quarks.
Speaker 2: Right when protons collide at thirteen point six TV. The
Speaker 2: beauty quarks, the bea quarks are predominantly produced at very low.
Speaker 1: Angles, so they fly straight down the beamline exactly.
Speaker 2: And LAHCB is designed to catch them before they decay.
Speaker 1: And to do that it employs a piece of engineering
Speaker 1: that is frankly terrifying.
Speaker 2: You're talking about the vertex locator, the velow, the ve low.
Speaker 2: It is a silicon microstrip detector that operates in a
Speaker 2: secondary vacuum and it physically moves.
Speaker 1: It moves to within five millimeters of the proton beom.
Speaker 2: Just think about that, five millimeters away from a beam
Speaker 2: of protons carrying the kinetic energy of a high speed train.
Speaker 1: It's completely insane. If the beam control fails by even
Speaker 1: a fraction of a degree.
Speaker 2: What happens, it would instantly vaporize the detect vaporized. Wow,
Speaker 2: But they have to put it that close. They have
Speaker 2: to reconstruct the exact vertex where the collision happened, and.
Speaker 1: More importantly, the secondary vertex where the beam mess and
Speaker 1: actually decays.
Speaker 2: Right, because the b messin lives for roughly one point
Speaker 2: five pico.
Speaker 1: Seconds one point five trillions of a second.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in that time, traveling near the speed of light,
Speaker 2: it moves maybe a centimeter down the beam pipe before
Speaker 2: it decays.
Speaker 1: So you need the velo's crazy spatial resolution just to
Speaker 1: separate the primary collision from the secondary decay exactly.
Speaker 2: And what happens in that one point five pico seconds,
Speaker 2: that one centimeter of flight is the core of our
Speaker 2: whole discussion today.
Speaker 1: The bmssen essentially performs a highly sensitive quantum experiment on itself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is where we need to introduce the glass
Speaker 2: show Iliopolis Miyani.
Speaker 1: Mechanism, the gym mechanism.
Speaker 2: Right, So in the standard bottle, quarks are not allowed
Speaker 2: to change their flavor without also changing their electrical charge.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for us.
Speaker 2: Sure, a bottom quark which has a charge of minus
Speaker 2: one third can happily decay into a charm quark, which
Speaker 2: has a charge of plus two.
Speaker 1: Thirds because the charge changes, right.
Speaker 2: It does that by emitting a w boson. That's called
Speaker 2: a tree level decay. It happens all the time.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: But a bottom quark cannot directly transform into a strange quirk.
Speaker 1: Why not?
Speaker 2: Because they both have a charge of minus one third.
Speaker 2: That is a flavor changing neutral current.
Speaker 1: And the standard model explicitly forbids that transition at tree level.
Speaker 2: Exactly, it completely forces the decay to take the scenic.
Speaker 1: Route, the scenic rout I love that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. To turn a bottom cork into a strange quirk,
Speaker 2: the universe literally has to utilize a quantum loop.
Speaker 1: Okay, So what happens in the loop.
Speaker 2: The bottom quark has to temporarily emit a w boson
Speaker 2: and transform into a virtual top quark, which then reabsorbs
Speaker 2: the w boson to become a strange quark.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: And that virtual loop where the top quark and w
Speaker 2: boson exist only as fleeting intermediate states, that is our Penguin.
Speaker 1: Diagram, John Ellis's Penguin.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the barbet comes full circle.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. And the true beauty of quantum mechanics here
Speaker 1: is that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows anything to pop
Speaker 1: into that loop.
Speaker 2: Right, provided a pay back the energy debt fast enough.
Speaker 1: Right, So the loop isn't restricted to just standard model
Speaker 1: particles like top quarks and wpos, not at all.
Speaker 2: If there is an undiscovered super heavy particle sitting at
Speaker 2: say fifty TV.
Speaker 1: Which is far too massive for the LHC to ever
Speaker 1: create directly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, way too heavy, but it can still exist as
Speaker 2: a virtual particle inside that penguin loop.
Speaker 1: It can borrow the energy exists for a tiny fraction
Speaker 1: of a second and disappear exactly.
Speaker 2: And in doing so it alters the quantum mechanical transition.
Speaker 1: Amplitude, So it leaves a fingerprint.
Speaker 2: Yes, a new heavy particle running in the loop will
Speaker 2: interfere with the standard model particles. It will either constructively
Speaker 2: or destructively add to the mathematical probability of the decay.
Speaker 1: Which fundamentally alters the observable outcomes exactly.
Speaker 2: It acts exactly like a shadow passing across the water.
Speaker 2: We can't see the monster in the deep, but we
Speaker 2: can measure the ripple it leaves on the surface.
Speaker 1: That is such a profound way to think about it.
Speaker 1: So LXB is essentially watching these Specifically, it is analyzing
Speaker 1: the decay of a neutral B messon into an excited
Speaker 1: chaon and a pair of muons.
Speaker 2: And this specific decay is vanishingly rare.
Speaker 1: How rare are we talking?
Speaker 2: The branching fraction is something on the order of a
Speaker 2: few parts per million.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, out of a billion B messons produce, only a
Speaker 2: handful will choose this specific path.
Speaker 1: But the data density of the specific decay is what
Speaker 1: makes it an absolute gold mine.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: When this B messon decays, it results in a four
Speaker 1: body final state. You have the chaon and the pion
Speaker 1: from the excited chaon decay, and then the two muons.
Speaker 2: And because you have four particles flying apart, you don't
Speaker 2: just measure a simple rate, right, You measure an incredibly
Speaker 2: complex face based geometry. The kinematics are completely described by
Speaker 2: three specific angles and the invariant mass squared of the demuon.
Speaker 1: Pair, which they call q squared exactly qu square.
Speaker 2: Now, measuring angles sounds simple enough, but the theoretical side
Speaker 2: of this is a nightmare of strong force physics.
Speaker 1: Oh, an absolute nightmare.
Speaker 2: Because quirks are confined by the strong nuclear force. Right,
Speaker 2: the bottom quark isn't decaying in a vacuum.
Speaker 1: No, it's bound inside a messin, surrounded by this boiling
Speaker 1: sea of gluons and virtual quarks.
Speaker 2: That sounds so messy.
Speaker 1: It creates what we call hadronic uncertainties. If your theoretical
Speaker 1: map of this gluon sludge is slightly off, your prediction
Speaker 1: for the decay angles will be off.
Speaker 2: And this was the major bottleneck for years, wasn't it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The uncertainty in the form factors, basically the mathematical functions
Speaker 1: describing that strong force binding, was larger than any potential
Speaker 1: signal from new physics.
Speaker 2: You couldn't see the signal through the noise exactly. But
Speaker 2: around twenty thirteen, theorists like Joachim Mattias and his colleagues
Speaker 2: executed this brilliant mathematical maneuver.
Speaker 1: What did they do?
Speaker 2: They realized that if you took specific combinations of the
Speaker 2: angular observables and divided them by each other, the hadronic
Speaker 2: form factors would mathematically cancel out at leading order.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, they basically optimize the observable.
Speaker 2: Yes, they built a specific mathematical parameter called P five
Speaker 2: prime p fact crime. Right. It is an angular observable
Speaker 2: that is highly sensitive to the short distance quantum loops
Speaker 2: where the new physics would hide.
Speaker 1: But largely immune to the messy long distance strong forest physics.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It gave experimentalists a clean target.
Speaker 1: So if P five prime deviates from the standard model prediction,
Speaker 1: you can't easily blame it on a miscalculation of the
Speaker 1: glue on field.
Speaker 2: You really can't.
Speaker 1: And this brings us to the psychology of the measurement,
Speaker 1: which I find fascinating because analyzing P five prime requires
Speaker 1: navigating human bias.
Speaker 2: It's so crucial. When physicists at LEDTB sit down to
Speaker 2: measure this, they are sifting through petabytes of background noise, just.
Speaker 1: A mountain of data, partially reconstructed cascade decays, misidentified particles,
Speaker 1: combinatorial backgrounds.
Speaker 2: Right, So they have to build these incredibly complex machine
Speaker 2: learning algorithms like boosted decision trees just to isolate the
Speaker 2: pure signal.
Speaker 1: And if you are doing that while looking at the
Speaker 1: fire fin P five prime value, the temptation to tweak
Speaker 1: your algorithm just a tiny bit to make a potential
Speaker 1: discovery across the threshold.
Speaker 2: It must be overwhelming, Oh, absolutely. Subconscious bias is the
Speaker 2: enemy of precision physics.
Speaker 1: So what do they do.
Speaker 2: They employ a strict blinding provocol.
Speaker 1: Blinding like literally hiding the data from themselves.
Speaker 2: Exactly in the software pipeline, an encrypted random phase or
Speaker 2: offset is added to the angular data.
Speaker 1: So the data is basically scrambled.
Speaker 2: Yes, the analysts spend years refining their background models, validating
Speaker 2: their efficiencies, evaluating every conceivable systematic error.
Speaker 1: All while looking at fake scrambled results.
Speaker 2: Right, they are not allowed to know the real answer
Speaker 2: until the analysis is officially frozen and approved by the
Speaker 2: entire collaboration.
Speaker 1: And then comes the unblinding ritual.
Speaker 2: It's a very tense moment.
Speaker 1: I can imagine they hit a button, the encrypted offset
Speaker 1: is removed and the true distribution of P five prime
Speaker 1: finally appears on the screen.
Speaker 2: And when they unblinded this data, mapping it across different
Speaker 2: bins of Q squared, the demuant invariant mass. Yeah, the
Speaker 2: data did not land on the standard model line.
Speaker 1: It missed.
Speaker 2: It missed specifically in the Q squared region between four
Speaker 2: and eight GV squared. The data points persistently drifted away
Speaker 2: from the theoretical prediction.
Speaker 1: Well, so it wasn't just a wild erratic scatter.
Speaker 2: No, it was a coherent structural lean in the angular geometry, a.
Speaker 1: Lean that, when all the statistical and systematic uncertainties were tabulated,
Speaker 1: reached a local significance of around four standard deviations like sigma.
Speaker 1: Four sigma, which means the probability of the standard model
Speaker 1: being perfectly true and this result being nothing more than
Speaker 1: a statistical fluctuation is roughly one in sixteen.
Speaker 2: Thousand, one in sixteen thousand.
Speaker 1: No, wait, one in sixteen thousand sounds pretty decisive.
Speaker 2: In a lot of fields, it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean in normal science like medical research or psychology,
Speaker 1: a p value of one in sixteen thousand would have
Speaker 1: you booking tickets to collect your Nobel prize.
Speaker 2: Oh for sure.
Speaker 1: Why are particle physicists popping champagne?
Speaker 2: Because in particle physics, four sigma doesn't even buy you
Speaker 2: a press release. Seriously, it barely buys you a raised eyebrow.
Speaker 2: The threshold for claiming a definitive discovery is five sigma.
Speaker 1: Which equates to what probability.
Speaker 2: A probability of one and three point five million.
Speaker 1: That is an incredibly high bar it is.
Speaker 2: But the reason particle physics demands of five sigma threshold
Speaker 2: isn't just arbitrary pedantry. It's written in blood. The culture
Speaker 2: of this field is entirely built on the scarred tissue
Speaker 2: of false dawns.
Speaker 1: Which is such a dramatic way to put it, but
Speaker 1: so true it really is.
Speaker 2: To understand why theorists are currently sweating over P five
Speaker 2: prime but experimentalists are refusing to pop champagne, we have
Speaker 2: to take a walk through the graveyard of anomalies.
Speaker 1: We have to look at how discoveries die exactly.
Speaker 2: The graveyard is arguably the most important context for this
Speaker 2: entire discussion.
Speaker 1: Let's do it.
Speaker 2: The last twenty years of high energy physics is just
Speaker 2: littered with the corpses of four, five, and even six
Speaker 2: sigma anomalies that commanded global attention before collapsing under scrutiny.
Speaker 1: Let's start with the first ghost in the graveyard, the
Speaker 1: most infamous one, an anomaly that struck right at the
Speaker 1: heart of special relativity.
Speaker 2: The Opera neutrino anomaly.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: This was back in twenty eleven. Yeah, Opera was an
Speaker 1: experiment situated in the Grandsasso Laboratory, buried under a mountain
Speaker 1: in Italy.
Speaker 2: And they were measuring the time of flight of neuon
Speaker 2: neutrinos fired from.
Speaker 1: CERN a baseline distance of exactly seven hundred thirty kilometers.
Speaker 2: The premise was so straightforward. You know the distance, you
Speaker 2: know the speed of light, so you know exactly when
Speaker 2: the neutrinos should arrive.
Speaker 1: But Opera announced that the neutrinos were arriving roughly sixty
Speaker 1: nanoseconds too early.
Speaker 2: Which means they were moving faster than light, faster than light.
Speaker 1: And the statistical significance wasn't three or four sigma, it
Speaker 1: was six sigma.
Speaker 2: Six sigma.
Speaker 1: The data was crystal clear, but the implications were catastrophic.
Speaker 1: I mean, if neutrino's travel faster than light, Lorentz invariance is.
Speaker 2: Broken, causality is violated.
Speaker 1: Right, you can essentially transmit information back in time. The
Speaker 1: entire foun foundation of twentieth century physics collapses.
Speaker 2: It was huge news.
Speaker 1: So how did a six sigma anomaly die?
Speaker 2: It died because of a fiber optic.
Speaker 1: Connector a connector Are you serious?
Speaker 2: Dead serious? The time of flight measurement relied on this
Speaker 2: highly complex GPS common view time transfer system. Okay, the
Speaker 2: GPS receiver on the surface had to sync with the
Speaker 2: master clock underground via an optical fiber.
Speaker 1: And what happened.
Speaker 2: It turned out that a single connector on that optical
Speaker 2: fiber had not been completely screwed in. It was slightly loose,
Speaker 2: a loose cable. That tiny gap in the connector altered
Speaker 2: the propagation delay of the optical signal. It introduced a
Speaker 2: latency of exactly sixty nanoseconds into the timing calibration.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, so the neutrinos were obeying the universal
Speaker 1: speed limit perfectly.
Speaker 2: Yeahs the clocks that were hallucinating.
Speaker 1: That is brutal.
Speaker 2: The lesson there was clear a six SIGNA statistical certainty
Speaker 2: is utterly meaningless if there is an unmodeled systematic error
Speaker 2: in your hardware.
Speaker 1: Extraordinary claims require you to check your cables.
Speaker 2: Exactly, check your cables before you rewrite Einstein.
Speaker 1: But you know, systematic hardware failures are only one way
Speaker 1: to die. Let's look at the second ghost, the seven
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty gv diphoton excess from twenty fifteen.
Speaker 2: Right where the hardware worked flawlessly.
Speaker 1: This was the start of run two at the LHC,
Speaker 1: the energy had just been bumped up to thirteen tovy.
Speaker 2: And ATLAS and CMS, two completely independent detectors with different
Speaker 2: architectures and different collaborations, were analyzing the invariant mass spectrum
Speaker 2: of photon.
Speaker 1: Pairs looking for a bump.
Speaker 2: Right, because if a new heavy particle is created, it
Speaker 2: will decay almost instantly, sometimes into two photons.
Speaker 1: You measure the energy of those photons, trace them back,
Speaker 1: and if a particle exists, you see a localized excess
Speaker 1: of events at its specific mass, a bump. And in
Speaker 1: December twenty fifteen, both ATLS and CMS saw a bump
Speaker 1: at exactly seven fifty GV.
Speaker 2: Two independent machines. Seeing the identical signature.
Speaker 1: The theoretical community just explode up.
Speaker 2: Oh, they lost their minds. The Landau Yang theorem dicted
Speaker 2: it had to be a spin zero or spin two particle.
Speaker 1: Within eight months, over five hundred papers were published explaining
Speaker 1: what this particle was.
Speaker 2: A heavy Higgs boson, a graviton, as new trino, you name.
Speaker 1: It, and then what happened.
Speaker 2: In August twenty sixteen, they presented the data from the
Speaker 2: remainder of the year, tripling the integrated luminosity, and the
Speaker 2: bump completely dissolved. It just vanished into the background continuum.
Speaker 1: How does that even happen to two independent machines. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a loose cable this time.
Speaker 2: No, It happens because of the statistical nightmare known as
Speaker 2: the look elsewhere effect.
Speaker 1: Okay, explain the look elsewhere effect.
Speaker 2: Basically, when you scan a massive energy range looking for
Speaker 2: a bump, you are essentially conducting thousands of independent statistical trials.
Speaker 2: If you roll a twenty sided die a thousand times,
Speaker 2: you were guaranteed to roll a twenty eventually.
Speaker 1: Okay, I see it.
Speaker 2: The local significance of the seven hundred and fifty GV
Speaker 2: bump was high, around three point nine sigma for Atlas.
Speaker 2: But when you factor in the global significance the probability
Speaker 2: of a fluctual happening anywhere in the entire mass range
Speaker 2: they were scanning, the significance plummeted.
Speaker 1: So the universe simply rolled the dice, and by sheer
Speaker 1: malicious coincidence, both atla's and CMS caught a statistical fluctuation
Speaker 1: in the exact same mass bin exactly.
Speaker 2: The ghost of seven and fifty GV teaches us that
Speaker 2: even independent confirmation isn't enough if you don't properly penalize
Speaker 2: your statistics for trial factors.
Speaker 1: That is a tough lesson, which brings us to the
Speaker 1: third ghost, a much more insidious cause of death, the
Speaker 1: moving goalpost.
Speaker 2: Ah. Yes, the muon G minus two anomaly.
Speaker 1: For two decades, this was the crown jewel of physics anomalies.
Speaker 1: It started at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in two thousand
Speaker 1: and one and was later relocated to Fermilab.
Speaker 2: And they were measuring the anomalous magnetic moment of the
Speaker 2: muon injecting a beam of polarized muons into a fifteen
Speaker 2: meter superconducting magnetic storage ring.
Speaker 1: At a magic momentum of three point zero nine four GV.
Speaker 2: Right at that specific momentum, the electric field used to
Speaker 2: focus the beam doesn't affect the spin.
Speaker 1: Procession, so they could measure the exact difference between the
Speaker 1: muon's cycletarn frequency and its spin precession frequency.
Speaker 2: And what do they find?
Speaker 1: They found that the muon was wobbling slightly faster than
Speaker 1: the standard model predicted, and.
Speaker 2: The experimental measurement was an absolute tourtive force.
Speaker 1: Yeah. By twenty twenty one, the frmolab results confirmed the
Speaker 1: old Britaven data, pushing the discrepancy to four point two sigma,
Speaker 1: and by.
Speaker 2: Twenty twenty three, with more data, it crossed the five
Speaker 2: sigma threshold.
Speaker 1: The experimental measurement was essentially unassailable. The machine wasn't broken,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't a statistical fluke.
Speaker 2: But the anomaly collapsed anyway. Why not because the experiment
Speaker 2: was wrong, but because the theoretical map they were comparing
Speaker 2: it to had a flaw.
Speaker 1: The theoretical goalpost move exactly.
Speaker 2: The calculation of the muon's magnetic moment requires accounting for
Speaker 2: the hadronic vacuum polarization or HVP. The HDP right the
Speaker 2: muon emits a virtual photon which splits into a quark
Speaker 2: antiquork pair before recombining. Calculating the the effect of those
Speaker 2: quarks is incredibly difficult because perturbative QCD fails at low energies.
Speaker 1: So what did theorists do?
Speaker 2: For decades, they relied on a data driven dispersive method,
Speaker 2: using experimental cross sections from electron positron collisions to estimate
Speaker 2: the HVP.
Speaker 1: But then, while the experimentalists were running their massive magnet,
Speaker 1: a group of theorists known as the BMW Collaboration took
Speaker 1: a different approach.
Speaker 2: They used supercomputers to calculate the HVP from first principles using.
Speaker 1: Lattice qcd lattice qcd.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they discritized spacetime into a four dimensional grid and
Speaker 2: used Monte Carlo simulations to solve the strong force equations
Speaker 2: purely mathematically.
Speaker 1: And when the BMW Collaboration published their results in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, their calculation of the HVP actually shifted the
Speaker 1: standard model prediction.
Speaker 2: It moved the theoretical goalpost right on top of the
Speaker 2: experimental measurement.
Speaker 1: So the five sigma gap just evaporated completely.
Speaker 2: The anomaly died not because we discovered new physics, but
Speaker 2: because we finally learned how to do the math correctly.
Speaker 1: Wow, a loose cable, a statistical mirage, a miscalculated theory.
Speaker 1: We have one ghost left in the graveyard, and this
Speaker 1: one hits closest to home.
Speaker 2: Because it happened in the exact same sector of physics
Speaker 2: we are discussing today. B.
Speaker 1: Mason decays at LHCb. This was the RK anomaly.
Speaker 2: The RK anomaly was the most compelling evidence for leptin
Speaker 2: flavor universality violation we had ever seen.
Speaker 1: Okay, what does that mean?
Speaker 2: Well, the standard model guarantees that the weak force couples
Speaker 2: to electrons, muons, and tawl particles with the exact same.
Speaker 1: Strength, only differences their mass exactly.
Speaker 2: Therefore, a B masson should decay into a kon and
Speaker 2: two neuons at the exact same rate of decays into
Speaker 2: a kon and two electrons. Once you correct for the
Speaker 2: tiny phase based differences.
Speaker 1: The ratio ark should be exactly one.
Speaker 2: Right, But for eight years, LHCb reported that the ratio
Speaker 2: was round point eighty four.
Speaker 1: Meaning the B messins were producing fewer muons than electrons.
Speaker 2: Yes, the significance grew steadily, crossing three point one sigma
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty one. Theoretical physicists were drafted the eulogy
Speaker 2: for the standard model.
Speaker 1: Until December twenty twenty two, when the LHCb collaboration released
Speaker 1: a reanalysis and.
Speaker 2: The anomaly vanished. Our k snapped perfectly back to one.
Speaker 1: And the culprit this time was contamination.
Speaker 2: Specifically, the insidious difference between how electrons and muons interact
Speaker 2: with detector material.
Speaker 1: Explain that because it sounds really technical it is.
Speaker 2: But it's important. Neuons are heavy, minimum ionizing particles. They
Speaker 2: punch right through the detector, leaving clean, beautiful tracks. Electrons,
Speaker 2: on the other hand, are light. When they pass through
Speaker 2: the silicon trackers, they undergo Brimstrallen.
Speaker 1: Which means they radiate photons and lose energy.
Speaker 2: Right So to reconstruct the electrons true energy, you have
Speaker 2: to find those bremstrall On photons in the electromagnetic calorimeter
Speaker 2: and add their energy back to the electron track.
Speaker 1: Can I imagine? That process is incredibly messy.
Speaker 2: It's a nightmare if you mismodel the energy recovery, or
Speaker 2: if a background process like a cascade decay or a
Speaker 2: misidentified hadron masquerades as an electron, it bleeds into your
Speaker 2: signal region.
Speaker 1: The background was contaminating the signal exactly.
Speaker 2: The LCB team realized their background modeling for the electron
Speaker 2: channels in certain chematic regimes had subtly underestimated these effects, and.
Speaker 1: When they corrected the background models, the entire anomaly evaporated.
Speaker 2: They killed their own discovery.
Speaker 1: It was a brutal display of scientific integrity, honestly, but
Speaker 1: it reinforced the ironclad rule of the graveyard.
Speaker 2: You must survive the gauntlet.
Speaker 1: Every new anomaly. It must be aggressively interrogated for hardware failures,
Speaker 1: statistical flukes, theoretical miscalculations, and background contamination.
Speaker 2: Right, which finally brings us back to the present. We
Speaker 2: have this four sigma anomaly in the P five prime
Speaker 2: angular distribution, and.
Speaker 1: What makes it so terrifying to theorists is that it
Speaker 1: has been dragged through this exact execution gauntlet and it
Speaker 1: refuses to die.
Speaker 2: Let's run the checklist. Is it a hardware artifact like Opera.
Speaker 1: No, because CMS, which sits on the opposite side of
Speaker 1: the twenty seven kilometer ring, uses an entirely different tracker topology,
Speaker 1: different magnetic field mapping, and different trigger algorithms, analyze their
Speaker 1: own data.
Speaker 2: And they saw the exact same angular lean. It is
Speaker 2: not an LHCb machine error.
Speaker 1: Right Okay. Next, is it the look elsewhere effect like
Speaker 1: the seven to fifty GV bump.
Speaker 2: No, because we aren't scanning a blind mass range looking
Speaker 2: for a random bump. P five prime is a targeted observable.
Speaker 1: Furthermore, this anomaly hasn't dissolved with more data.
Speaker 2: No, it appeared in the twenty thirteen data set. It
Speaker 2: persisted in the twenty fifteen update. It held strong in
Speaker 2: the twenty twenty analysis.
Speaker 1: The statistical fluctuation does not hold its shape across independent
Speaker 1: data sets over a decade.
Speaker 2: It really doesn't.
Speaker 1: Okay, what about RK contamination? Could background particles be faking
Speaker 1: the signal?
Speaker 2: Highly unlikely. The P five prime analysis relies exclusively on muans,
Speaker 2: completely sidestepping the bremstrawling nightmare that plagued the electron channels
Speaker 2: in URK.
Speaker 1: So the dimuon backgrounds are incredibly well understood and the
Speaker 1: invariant mass peaks are pristinely clean, which leaves the final boss,
Speaker 1: the muon two death moving the goalposts is the theoretical
Speaker 1: prediction of P five prime simply won.
Speaker 2: Ah. This brings us to the most contentious debate in
Speaker 2: flavor physics today, the charming penguins.
Speaker 1: Charming penguins, I love that name.
Speaker 2: It's great, but scientifically, the charming penguins are the mundane
Speaker 2: explanation of last resort. How so well. We said earlier
Speaker 2: that new heavy particles could be running in the quantum loop,
Speaker 2: but the loop can also be populated by ordinary standard
Speaker 2: model particles, specifically charm and anti charm quarks.
Speaker 1: So the bottom quark decays, emitting a virtual photon that
Speaker 1: briefly turns into a charm anti charm pair before annihilating
Speaker 1: into the two muons.
Speaker 2: Exactly, But the charm quarks aren't free. They are operating
Speaker 2: in the non perturbative regime of.
Speaker 1: The strong force, meaning things get messy.
Speaker 2: Again very The charm anti charm loop can resonate, essentially
Speaker 2: forming virtual JPCA or cy two s particles that interfere
Speaker 2: with the short distance physics we are trying to measure.
Speaker 1: These are called non factorizable charm loop.
Speaker 2: Aff yes, and calculating them as a nightmare. Theorists use
Speaker 2: techniques like light cone sum rules to estimate their contribution,
Speaker 2: but the error bars are inherently fuzzy.
Speaker 1: So the critical question dividing the community is this, can
Speaker 1: a mathematically perverse fluctuation in the charm loop mimic the
Speaker 1: exact angular shifts we're seeing in P five prime?
Speaker 2: Right? Can the charm loop fake the signature of new physics?
Speaker 1: And what do the theorists say?
Speaker 2: The ones who build P five prime argue that while
Speaker 2: charm loops can shift, the overall rate of the decay
Speaker 2: their specific phase based geometry. How they depend on the
Speaker 2: dimuon mass q squared doesn't match the coherent shift seen
Speaker 2: across the bins.
Speaker 1: So to make the charm loop fit the data, you
Speaker 1: have to stretch the hadronic parameters far beyond what rigorous
Speaker 1: strong force mathematics normally allows.
Speaker 2: Exactly, But the door isn't closed. It is the final
Speaker 2: unresolved systematic.
Speaker 1: Either Nature is speaking to us through a new fundamental
Speaker 1: particle or the standard models accounting of non factorizable charm
Speaker 1: effects is far more chaotic than our current theoretical tools
Speaker 1: can compute.
Speaker 2: But there is a piece of evidence that makes the
Speaker 2: charm loop excuse feel insufficient. What's that The P five
Speaker 2: prime anomaly is not happening in a vacuum. It is
Speaker 2: part of a wider conspiracy of data that theorists call
Speaker 2: the flavor puzzle.
Speaker 1: Right, because while LHCb has been watching nuons, another set
Speaker 1: of anomalies has been quietly brewing, involving the tau leptin.
Speaker 2: We need to talk about our d and already star Okay,
Speaker 2: break those down. These are decays where a B missin
Speaker 2: transforms into a D messin accompanied by a tawe leptin
Speaker 2: and a towel neutrino Okay, Unlike the penguin loop, this
Speaker 2: is a tree level decay mediated by a w boson.
Speaker 2: The standard model prediction for this rate is highly robust.
Speaker 1: And the talleptin, just as a reminder, is the third
Speaker 1: generation's sibling of the electron and neuon.
Speaker 2: It is identical in its quantum numbers, but it is massive.
Speaker 2: It weighs almost twice as much as a proton.
Speaker 1: And experiments across the globe, not just LHCb but also
Speaker 1: Babar in California and Bell in Japan, have consistently measured
Speaker 1: in excess of talleptans in these decays.
Speaker 2: Right, the statistical significance when combined hovers around three to
Speaker 2: four sigma.
Speaker 1: The b missons are decaying into taois more often than
Speaker 1: leptin flavor universality.
Speaker 2: Allows exactly, and this is where the architecture of the
Speaker 2: anomaly comes into focus.
Speaker 1: You have an anomaly in the loop level decays involving nuons.
Speaker 2: You have a separate anomaly in the tree level decays
Speaker 2: involving taos.
Speaker 1: They occur in completely different kinematic regimes, with completely different
Speaker 1: experimental systematics, but.
Speaker 2: They both point to exactly the same structural pillar of
Speaker 2: the standard model leptin flavor universality.
Speaker 1: Which is the exact pillar that has lacked a theoretical
Speaker 1: foundation since nineteen thirty six.
Speaker 2: Yes, when they discovered the muon in cosmic rays, isad
Speaker 2: Or Robbie famously asked who ordered that?
Speaker 1: Because the standard model just dictates that matter comes in
Speaker 1: three identical generations, the electron, the muon, and the tao,
Speaker 1: with wildly escalating masses, but offers zero underlying mechanism for
Speaker 1: why there are three.
Speaker 2: Or why their masses are organized way. It's just a
Speaker 2: parameter plugged in by hand.
Speaker 1: But if these anomalies hold, they suggest that the different
Speaker 1: generations of leptin's actually experience different fundamental interactions.
Speaker 2: If the standard model is breaking, it is breaking exactly
Speaker 2: where the deepest unresolved mysteries of matter reside.
Speaker 1: So we have to perform the ultimate theoretical exercise. Okay,
Speaker 1: if we assume the charm loop calculations are correct and
Speaker 1: the statistics hold and P five prime actually hits five sigma,
Speaker 1: what is actually running in that quantum loop?
Speaker 2: We need to look at the mathematics of the effective
Speaker 2: field theory or EFT.
Speaker 1: Right when theorists look at P five prime. They don't
Speaker 1: guess particles right away. They use EFT to measure shifts
Speaker 1: in what they call Wilson coefficients.
Speaker 2: Specifically, the data points to a massive negative shift in
Speaker 2: a coefficient called C nine, which governs the vector coupling
Speaker 2: of the mues.
Speaker 1: And possibly a shift in C ten, which governs the
Speaker 1: axial vector coupling.
Speaker 2: The mathematical signature is incredibly specific a shift in C
Speaker 2: nine that applies to mules but not to electrons.
Speaker 1: So what kind of new physical particle generates that exact
Speaker 1: shift in the Wilson coefficients.
Speaker 2: The literature provides two primary candidates.
Speaker 1: The first is a particle that directly connects the two
Speaker 1: distinct halves of the standard model, the eleptoqork.
Speaker 2: To understand how radical ELLIPTICQ work is, you have to
Speaker 2: understand that the standard model treats quarks, which feel the
Speaker 2: strong force, and leptins, which don't, as completely segregated kingdoms.
Speaker 1: They do not mix. Elliptin cannot transform into a quark, but.
Speaker 2: ELLIPTICQ work is a hypothetical gauge boson that carries both
Speaker 2: color charge like a quark and leptin number.
Speaker 1: It would literally allow a bottom quark to emit ellipticquark
Speaker 1: and instantly transform into a muon.
Speaker 2: Yes, this particle would act as the exact bridge needed
Speaker 2: to explain the B messin anomalies, generating the exact required
Speaker 2: shift in the C nine Wilson coefficient.
Speaker 1: But the implications go way beyond B messins are beyond
Speaker 1: If leptoquarks exist, it proves that quarks and leptons are
Speaker 1: not fundamentally distinct. It points directly to grand unified theories
Speaker 1: like the Potty Salam model or SU five.
Speaker 2: Right in the Potty Salam model, leptin number is essentially
Speaker 2: treated as a fourth color of the strong force.
Speaker 1: At everyday energy scales, the symmetry is broken and leptins
Speaker 1: seem distinct.
Speaker 2: But at ultra high energies the energies present moments after
Speaker 2: the Big Bang, quarks and leptins unify into a single multiplate.
Speaker 1: So finding ellepticquork in the penguin loop would be the
Speaker 1: first empirical proof that the fundamental forces of nature unify
Speaker 1: at high energies.
Speaker 2: It would be the most profound discovery since the realization
Speaker 2: that electricity and magnetism were.
Speaker 1: The same force, which is just staggering to think about it.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: But there is a second candidate that fits the C
Speaker 1: nine shift perfectly, and it doesn't unify the forces, it adds.
Speaker 2: A new one, the Z prime Boson.
Speaker 1: The Z prime explain what that means well, The.
Speaker 2: Z prime represents a fifth fundamental force of nature. We
Speaker 2: know the z boson mediates the weak nuclear force. A
Speaker 2: Z prime would be a heavier, undiscovered cousin.
Speaker 1: But to fit our anomaly, this new force cannot couple
Speaker 1: to matter universally.
Speaker 2: No, it must be anominally free in the gauge structure,
Speaker 2: meaning it requires a very specific mathematical symmetry. The most
Speaker 2: popular model is the U one l mu minus Eltau
Speaker 2: gage symmetry.
Speaker 1: Which translates to a force that only interacts with muons
Speaker 1: in tau particles, completely ignoring electrons and quarks of the
Speaker 1: first generation.
Speaker 2: Precisely, it is a hidden fifth force of nature that
Speaker 2: has been acting invisibly since the dawn of time, exclusively
Speaker 2: shaping the interactions of the heavier generations of matter.
Speaker 1: So, because we are made of first generation matter up quarks,
Speaker 1: down quarks and electrons, we would never even feel it exactly.
Speaker 2: It only manifests its presence in the fleeting moments when
Speaker 2: heavy particles like b messens decay subtly, bending their trajectories
Speaker 2: in the LHCb detector.
Speaker 1: A unified root of all matter or a fifth fundamental force.
Speaker 1: These aren't science fiction concepts. These are the conservative, mathematically
Speaker 1: necessary models required to explain a localized drift in an
Speaker 1: angular distribution.
Speaker 2: And if you think it's absurd that a microscopic shift
Speaker 2: in a decay angle could rewrite the universe, you have
Speaker 2: to remember the historical.
Speaker 1: Precedent, the precession of the perihelion of Mercury.
Speaker 2: Exactly in the eighteen fifties, the French astronomer Urvan Leverrier
Speaker 2: analyzed the orbit of Mercury and found that its closest
Speaker 2: approach to the Sun was drifting.
Speaker 1: Newton's laws of gravitation, accounting for the tug of all
Speaker 1: other planets, predicted the drift perfectly, except for a microscopic
Speaker 1: discrepancy of forty three arc seconds per century.
Speaker 2: Forty three arcseconds an angle so vanishingly small it is
Speaker 2: almost incomprehensible, but it was statistically significant.
Speaker 1: The scientific establishment at the time did exactly what they should.
Speaker 1: They looked for a mundane explanation.
Speaker 2: They assumed Newton's laws were slawless, so they hypothesized a
Speaker 2: hidden planet interior to Mercury, which they named Vulcan, causing
Speaker 2: the perturbation.
Speaker 1: They spent half a century pointing telescopes at the Sun
Speaker 1: looking for Vulcan. It was their version of the charming penguins.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect comparison. But Vulcan didn't exist. The forty
Speaker 2: three arc seconds wasn't a missing planet, it was the
Speaker 2: mathematical breakdown of Newtonian gravity.
Speaker 1: Right in nineteen fifteen, Albert Einstein published the Field Equations
Speaker 1: of General Relativity, and.
Speaker 2: When he calculated the orbit of Mercury using curved space
Speaker 2: time rather than Newtonian attraction, the forty three arcseconds emerged
Speaker 2: perfectly from the math.
Speaker 1: That microscopic anomaly was the first visible edge of a
Speaker 1: paradigm shift that gave us black holes, the expanding universe,
Speaker 1: and the Big Bang.
Speaker 2: History demonstrates unequivocally that when a fundamental theory of nature
Speaker 2: is breaking, it does not shatter all at once. It
Speaker 2: announces its failure through small, stubborn numbers that refuse to
Speaker 2: align with the theoretical map.
Speaker 1: The four sigma drift in P five prime is our
Speaker 1: forty three arcseconds.
Speaker 2: It really is.
Speaker 1: And what makes this moment so exhilarating is that we
Speaker 1: are not trapped in a theoretical limbo. We do not
Speaker 1: have to wait fifty years for ein Einstein to solve this.
Speaker 1: The machinery of resolution is currently operating.
Speaker 2: The data required to push this anomaly over the five
Speaker 2: sigma discovery threshold or to bury it forever in the
Speaker 2: graveyard has already.
Speaker 1: Been collected right Because the LACB detector recently underwent a
Speaker 1: massive upgrade for Run three.
Speaker 2: They remove the hardware trigger entirely. They are now operating
Speaker 2: a fully software based trigger system, reading out collisions at
Speaker 2: thirty megahertz and using GPU farms to reconstruct tracks in
Speaker 2: real time.
Speaker 1: They have accumulated vast swaths of new data. Millions of
Speaker 1: new decays are sitting on server farms.
Speaker 2: But the data is currently locked inside blinded analysis frameworks.
Speaker 1: The experimentalists are scrutinizing their background models, validating their efficiencies,
Speaker 1: and fighting over systematic uncertainties.
Speaker 2: The universe has already cast its vote. We are just
Speaker 2: verifying the counting machines before we look at the tally.
Speaker 1: Within the next few years, the unblinding protocol will happen again.
Speaker 1: The encrypted offset will be removed, the distribution will populate
Speaker 1: the screen.
Speaker 2: If the lian is flattened out, the anomaly joins the
Speaker 2: difoton excess and the oper neutrinos in the graveyard.
Speaker 1: The Standard Model survives, and the nightmare of if its
Speaker 1: perfection continues.
Speaker 2: But if the lean sharkens, if the error bars shrink,
Speaker 2: and the deviation crosses five sigma, it.
Speaker 1: Will be the most profound moment in particle physics since
Speaker 1: the discovery of the W and Z bosons.
Speaker 2: It will empirically prove that the map of reality we
Speaker 2: have used for fifty years has an edge.
Speaker 1: It will launch a furious multi decade race to build
Speaker 1: higher energy machines like muon colliders or one hundred TV
Speaker 1: circular colliders to drag the leptoquork or the z prime
Speaker 1: out of the quantum loop and produce it as a real,
Speaker 1: measurable particle.
Speaker 2: It would mark the end of the Standard Model era
Speaker 2: and the beginning of whatever physics governs the true deeper
Speaker 2: reality of the universe.
Speaker 1: It is the exact threshold we have been waiting to
Speaker 1: cross since we realize the universe shouldn't exist in the
Speaker 1: first place, absolutely, from a dartboard in Geneva to the
Speaker 1: absolute limits of human knowledge. The air near the floorboards
Speaker 1: of the Standard Model is moving, and we are finally
Speaker 1: close enough to feel the draft. We really are, which
Speaker 1: brings us to the end of our discussion. Today. We've
Speaker 1: walked through the perturbative nightmares of the Standard Model, the
Speaker 1: brutal graveyard of statistical ghosts, the blinding protocols of LHCb,
Speaker 1: and the mind bending reality of leptoquarks and fifth forces
Speaker 1: hiding inside a Penguin diagram.
Speaker 2: The tension right now in the physics community is genuinely historic.
Speaker 2: We are standing on the precipice of a paradigm shift,
Speaker 2: armed only with the angular geometry of a particle that
Speaker 2: lives for a trillionth of a second.
Speaker 1: And this is where we turn the analysis over to you.
Speaker 1: We've laid out the theoretical frameworks and the experimental caveats.
Speaker 1: Where do you stand on the b Messin anomaly.
Speaker 2: Are we looking at a profound failure of how we
Speaker 2: calculate non factorizable charm loops destined to be another headstone
Speaker 2: in the graveyard, or is.
Speaker 1: This our forty three arc seconds. Are we feeling the
Speaker 1: gravitational pull of elliptic quark or a hidden U one
Speaker 1: gage symmetry operating just beyond our reach.
Speaker 2: We want to know what you think.
Speaker 1: Dive into the comments and let us know your verdict
Speaker 1: on the edge of the Standard Model.
Speaker 2: It is always a privilege to dissect these frontiers of
Speaker 2: physics with you.
Speaker 1: Keep your eyes on the data releases for the run three,
Speaker 1: unblinding until our next thrilling threads discussion. Remember that the
Speaker 1: most profound secrets of the universe rarely announce themselves loudly.
Speaker 1: They usually hide in the fifth decimal place of a joke.
Speaker 1: See you next time.