WHY are fundamental physicists so keen聽to undermine the very theories that聽are the bedrock of their success? It is a聽reasonable question to ask confronted with the excitement bubbling around anomalies that seem to be firming up at CERN鈥檚 LHCb experiment.
At stake is a particle that might 鈥� the 鈥渕ight鈥� bears emphasising 鈥� break open the standard model of particle physics, the聽framework that successfully explains three of the four forces of nature.
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The answer lies in what the standard model doesn鈥檛 explain: the fourth force, gravity; the dark matter and dark energy that seem to dominate the cosmos; and the fact that our matter-dominated universe exists at all. In indicating 鈥� perhaps 鈥� the existence of a fifth force that could unite previously disparate aspects of the standard model, the new particle provides a hint of a way forward.
Good on it, but what do the rest of us get out of it? In short, we don鈥檛 know 鈥� yet. No one was thinking of powered space flight in the 17th century when Isaac Newton unified heavenly and earthly motions with his laws of motion and gravity. When James Clerk Maxwell unified electricity and magnetism in the 1860s, televisions, lasers or smartphones weren鈥檛 on anyone鈥檚 radar (and nor was radar).
True, any unification that LHCb might聽or might not have seen is likely to聽kick in聽at聽energies far beyond any everyday technology we can envisage now (although one implication could be that those energies are lower than we thought).
But immediate technological or material gain isn鈥檛 the point. To formulate his physics, Newton had to invent calculus, the mathematics that today underlies scientific models of everything from climate change聽to pandemic spread. In devising his laws for electromagnetism, Maxwell asserted that light always travels at constant speed 鈥� paving the way for Albert聽Einstein鈥檚 theories of relativity that, besides explaining gravity and the wider cosmos, enabled innovations such as GPS.
Science begets science and, along the聽way, technology of universal benefit drops聽out. That progress may be stuttering and聽is聽rarely linear 鈥� but we should never doubt it is worth going along for the ride.
