An international team of physicists is about to test a "sacrilegious" hypothesis about protons - one of the basic building blocks of the Universe - and the results could force a literal rewrite of nuclear physics textbooks. The experiments, which are now underway in the US, aim to demonstrate that the structure of protons can change inside the nucleus of an atom under certain conditions. If that's found to be the case, a whole lot of experiments are going to have to be reassessed. http://www.sciencealert.com/physici...a-hypothesis-that-could-rewrite-the-textbooks
They might be on to something. My impression is that there is a lot we don't yet know about the proton, and particles in general. There may be many advancements as the rate of discovery accelerates. Maybe they should just issue supplements to stick in the back of the books for the time being, lol.
"Hypotheses non fingo" is in the Principia because Newton was clear that we can't accept or reject established scientific results on the basis of hypotheses; we require results. It is not the hypothesis that would necessitate the changing of textbooks, it is the results that support including a specific conclusion.
An article by Hannah Osborne in the International Business Times provided multiple counterpoints to the article referenced: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/would-sacr...ewrite-physics-textbooks-probably-not-1540434 "Tony Weidberg, Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Oxford, said our current understanding of the strong nuclear force is based on the theory of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). This has been successfully tested in high energy experiments, including those taking place at Cern's Large Hadron Collider. "While the theory has been used very successfully at high energy it turns out to be very difficult to use the theory to make predictions at low energy, such as the nuclear physics experiments discussed in this paper," he said. "This doesn't imply that there is a fundamental problem with the theory, just that the calculations at low energy are much more difficult than at low energy." "David Sloan, also from the University of Oxford's Department of Physics, added: "We should hold off on rewriting any textbooks until the experiment is run. This behaviour would certainly change our understanding of the nature of protons and the theoretic work is valuable, but it remains unverified until the data comes in.""
I'm trying of figure how the empirical confirmation of a theoretical prediction made using quantum chromodynamics signals new physics? Guess I'll need to read the paper to find out why.
from : http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reporters/hannah-osborne " - Hannah Osborne is the science editor at the International Business Times UK. Hannah manages the Science and Health desk and is responsible for reporting on all the innovations and advances in both fields. She attained her Bachelor's Degree from Kings College London in 2007 and went on to receive an MA in Journalism from Goldsmiths in 2012. -" So...'proofreading' "Pop-Science" pablum prior to publication proves problematic...possibly... At any rate, the .pdf of the ArXiv Paper : "Relativistic and Nuclear Medium Effects on the Coulomb Sum Rule", by Ian C. Clo¨et, Wolfgang Bentz and Anthony W. Thomas can be Viewed and Read FOR FREE at this Link : http://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.05875v1.pdf
Liked the alliteration! Pop-science pre-publication proton pablum. So, the charges might not add up at low energy. I didn't understand the strong force in the nucleus to be low energy, but if some mechanism is there (especially related to the Coulomb electric charge counterbalancing that of electrons), that would explain a lot. Thanks for the link to the arxiv article, which was more detailed about what may be subject to revision about our models of protons inside vs. outside the nucleus. Possibly also a clue about the long standing riddle as to why protons within a nucleus do not decay the way string theory predicts.
