[Cheiron]

A team of scientists on the Swiss Paul Scherrer Institute have together with physicists from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics made measurement of the proton... and uh... oops it's too small.

Well the proton should be 35 attometers.. or put in another way, 35 billionths of a billionth of a meter. ... or 0.000000000000035 millimeters... in other words, not very big, but noneless experiment shows it's 4 % smaller than it should be, and that is not good, it's not good at all, it is in fact a royal pain in the butt.

The size of the proton and hence it's physical values as a nature constant has to be revised and that sadly means that the whole of quantum mechanics has to go through the big calculator again...

One thing that is sure... it will effect the socalled Rydberg constant, physicists use this constant when they make calculations on atoms and as it looks now, results from these calculations will not agree with experimental results.

And that is a big problem.

Randolf Pohl that is one of the guys working on project said that the Rydberg constant is so far the most exact basic constant, it stands rock solid, and that quantum electro dynamics is very consequent and has been strictly proven. He suspects it must be an error in calculations.

Meanwhile a lot of theoretisists world wide are now trying to recalculate predictions that quantumelectrodynamics make with the new proton radius... and the swiss team is making new experiments to measure the hydrogen atom again, I think in different ways etc... because they just can't find an error anywhere.

Here's a link to an article in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7303/abs/nature09250.html

And here's a video clip from the experiment lab that shows you how much machinery is needed just for this (science nerds... drewl over that gadget park, lol):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsHNNj6Dcls&feature=player_embedded
_________________
Cheiron
______________________________
"Any scientist with respect for himself should start
the day by rejecting his own pet hypotheses".
(Konrad Lorenz)

"Wir müssen wissen
Wir werden wissen"
(David Hilbert)

[Flexie]

scratches my head......pours myself a double expresso.



- Flexie -

[Jade]

ouch, the smoke from dying brain cells make it difficult to see the monitor.
Jade

[Cheiron]

well ladies... you may scratch your heads or fry braincells, but if I got in there, I would refuse to leave again, they would have to drag me out screaming... lollol
_________________
Cheiron
______________________________
"Any scientist with respect for himself should start
the day by rejecting his own pet hypotheses".
(Konrad Lorenz)

"Wir müssen wissen
Wir werden wissen"
(David Hilbert)