Scientifical Sunday In The Soup

Other Forces At Work?

DO WE EVEN HAVE TO GO BACK TO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF HOW THE UNIVERSE BEGAN?

Absolutely. This particle, if it has these properties, should be produced in the early universe and that means after the Big Bang, when the universe was a hot soup, it's part of the soup! So that could change the things we would expect to see today.

SO HOW DID THIS PARTICLE GO ALL THIS TIME WITHOUT BEING NOTICED?

That was actually part of our motivation. We saw this claim and we thought, "well, shouldn't somebody else have seen that already?" Then, by looking into all the details of the experiment, you realize, "no, actually, there is a particle that would have escaped notice until now and been discovered by this experiment." Mostly though, the answer is because: first, it's short-range ... if you're looking at macroscopic distances, it just doesn't act far enough for you to see it; and also because it's pretty weak. It's much weaker than the strong nuclear or the electromagnetic or even the weak nuclear force. It's still stronger than gravity though.

But is it as wicked?Further New Yorker commentary, performed in Baghdad-by-the-Bay: