Yahoo!: Physicists Just Measured One of the Four Fundamental Forces of Nature. Now They’re Bummed.
Chalk up another win for the Standard Model, the remarkably successful theory that describes how all the known fundamental particles interact.
Physicists have made the most precise measurement yet of how strongly the weak force— one of nature’s four fundamental forces — acts on the proton….
“This is the smallest and most precise asymmetry ever measured in the scattering of polarized electrons from protons,” said Peter Blunden, a physicist at the University of Manitoba in Canada who was not involved in the study. The measurement, he added, is an impressive achievement. Plus, it shows that, in the hunt for new physics, these relatively low-energy experiments can compete with powerful particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Blunden said.
