I still think ’smelling’ is bogus, and borders on insulting, given the careful work that has gone into the alpha and mu results. Some types of new physics are more fashionable than others, that’s surely true, and the majority has the dubious privilege of saying that the 3.5 sigma deviations that the minority sometimes work on ’smell wrong’. And the majority sometimes ends up working on the LEP so-called ‘Higgs’, or the muon magnetic moment, or CP asymmetries in B physics, all of which are (so far) not new physics either, by any sane definition.

Now most particle physicists are indeed looking towards LHC, which is a quite rational thing to do, but that doesn’t mean Nature must be generous enough to give us a nice new discovery there. The thing is to be as prepared as possible for whatever is going to be thrown at us, which may come in the LHC, or somewhere completely different. Since the LHC will throw out a lotttt of data, simply by power of numbers it requires the most preparation.

There is simply no reason why anyone should place weight on a theorist’s ‘intuition’ about debatable experimental results. The only way to find out if such a result is right or wrong is – do more experiments.

‘Smelling’ and ‘intuition’ about what are experimentally determinable facts are simply exhibitions of the theorist’s prejudices. Naturally the theorist is sometimes right and sometimes wrong… then he can repeat the story of when he was right, and forget the times he was wrong.

Remember the muon – ‘Who ordered that?’ The existence of three families is an awkward and messy fact that doesn’t explain anything nicely, and caused a lot of theoretical problems, most of which are still unsolved. Three families smells terrible from almost every angle – but it is an experimental fact.

The cosmological constant also smells awful theoretically, with our current level of (lack of) understanding, unless you are prepared to accept some rather shaky anthropic type reasoning.

Now, it is not so much work to read up about how the alpha and mu results were obtained and what the possible problems with them actually are, then you might come to some sort of informed opinion, using the brain rather than the nose.

E.g. http://www.physik.uni-bielefeld.de/igs/schools/cosmology/cosmo-schedule.html for an elementary start.

Now to work.

Comparison of alpha and mu variations is very model dependent. The mu data are only at two redshifts and don’t allow the drawing of any trend line. The alpha data don’t show a clear trend although their average is significantly different from null. There is no pattern given present data. A linear variation with time (assuming that the value is spatially homogeneous) doesn’t fit both Oklo and varying alpha. Neither does a linear variation with redshift. Anyway Oklo should be redone to take into account variation in nuclear physics parameters (not just alpha) but that is a mess because of nuclear physics being generally messy.

Thomas

Ah….that’s what happens when there is DATA!! Counting down desperately to the LHC….

if i understand this discussion at all, it may be the case that the universe has an inherent “handedness.”

what the cause may be is poorly understood (if at all), but this handedness exists, nonetheless.

is this the essence of the discussion?

Joshua, I haven’t been following the debates closely, although I have talked a bit with Jacobson about this. I also tend to worry about superluminal propagation, but someone needs to sit down and show what would actually go wrong. I think Eugene is working on this, actually.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9812088