Scientists at CERN spent the last decade waiting for a one-in-ten-billion chance event, and now they’ll spend the next few years figuring out whether it challenges the laws that (we think) govern the smallest building blocks of matter.
https://www.inverse.com/science/physicists-just-observed-1-in-10-billion-event-it-could-shake-up-modern-physics
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> University of Birmingham physicist Evgueni Goudzovski and his colleagues spent about a decade watching what happened when kaons decayed, and they found that about 1.3 times out of 10 billion, a decaying kaon splits into another subatomic particle called a pion, along with a pair of extremely small, elusive particles called a neutrino and an anti-neutrino. (The rest of the time, kaons decay into different products.)
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> That’s a staggeringly rare event. As such, it took physicists an extremely long time to see it in action. But the Standard Model predicts it should be even rarer: less than 1 in 10 billion. Figuring out the difference could reveal something fundamental about how the universe works — something we’ve been missing for decades.
Does the prediction of the Standard Model stand up to testing. If not we rethink our model.
(stupid clickbait headings)
The process of building something like CERN blows my mind. How they align all this material perfectly in a several mile loop, time the collisions to happen right at the sensors and gather data at the atomic level is an amazing feat.