Three other important points: 1) CP violation is oddly absent from the strong interaction. Now that is weird, and were the absence of CP violation in QCD our only experience with CP violation, we’d never postulate the Sakharov mechanism for the matter/antimatter asymmetry. 2)What D0 did was look for new large types of CP violation… if they are right (and I think they are wrong) then their CP violation would be much more likely tied to the baryon asymmetry than the Standard Model types. 3)Ramsey and Purcell used the baryon asymmetry back in the early 1950′s to seek the neutron electron dipole moment, which would have been a hint of CP violation (really T violation). So the connection is way older and more distinguished than you might know, Sean.

CDF and DZero have differently designed detectors. CDF is not capable at the moment of testing the validity of the DZero result. CDF collaborators are attempting to find a way to test the result indirectly, but because of detector design they can not test it directly. The LHC, however, will be able to validate or invalidate the result in the future.

I think it is naïve to think that you can hope to draw young minds to the field without giving them approachable content that does not require they already have a physics degree. Capturing their imagination about how physics affects the world around them is what will make them want to study physics in the first place.

The New York Times does not write the way it does solely to sell newspapers. The job of the general audience, mainstream science media is also to engage the public that does NOT have a deep science background. That is good for the field and for democracy. You can not expect the general public to support research funding or make intelligent votes on policy that involves science if you do not explain the science to them in a way that will interest them and be understandable. Expecting them to be interested in an article about CP violation without first telling them why they personally should care about CP violation in a way that does not require a physics degree — ie. how it could have affected the development of the universe – is unrealistic and exactly the attitude that has made people shy away from learning about physics and given physicists a reputation as elitists.

Writing blogs and newspaper articles to “preach to the choir” of the already science literate population will not expand science literacy and funding any further than their current states.

No amount of blogging will make science journalists change their ways because their number one priority is to sell articles and newspapers and to keep their jobs.

Full circle for me here, as starting commenting on this blog before it went to Discover Magazine – which cf course is a super magazine. Am now dissapointed in quoted comment. Has been made – unsure if it’s means ruling out contributary laymans and amateur input.

Thanks.

“This result may provide an important input for explaining the matter dominance in our universe.”

That’s a completely true statement. If anybody chooses to misread or mishear the words “may provide” as “definitely does provide”, then that’s their own problem. Since some non-Standard-Model CP violation is necessary to explain baryogenesis, it would be foolish to not consider any previously unknown or unobserved source of CP violation as possibly relevant to the baryogenesis issue.

I think a more fair representation of the logic being used is:

1. Baryogenesis requires a new, previously unknown source of CP violation.

2. We may be seeing (or looking for) a new, previously unknown source of CP violation.

3. Therefore, what we are seeing (or looking for) may be related to baryogenesis.

If you catch somebody substituting the word “is” for “may be” in the last part, then that’s not fair.
But otherwise this logic is not only fallacy-free, but good science. As far as I can tell, the NYTimes article and the Dzero paper seem to be saying things the right way.

Maybe Sean had some other particular marketing offense in mind. But in any case, more generally, it is worth noting that what journalists claim a physicist told them is sometimes a barely recognizable distortion of what the physicist actually said. Journalists also have motive to make the story more interesting. When confronted with what appears to be hype or unfair marketing or false scientific statements in the media, it is a very good idea to entertain the hypothesis that the journalism is at fault, not the scientist.

Also, the matter-antimatter asymmetry doesn’t really require CP violation. It’s the T violation that matters, really. If CPT is a good symmetry, the two are equivalent, but as Sean says, we can be more flexible. Sakharov’s necessary conditions for baryon asymmetry were B (baryon number) nonconservation, C violation, CP violation, and non-equilibrium behavior. This is correct, assuming CPT. More generally, B nonconservation, C violation, and T violation are really necessary; you also need either CPT or non-equilibrium evolution.

If I may ask, how exactly is this defined for a modern physicist? In biology, machine learning, and other statistically dependent programs, there may be orders of difference between the accepted ‘confidence’ value, from one study to the next.

Sure, so would I. But a new CP violation on its own will not reach the front page of the New York Times. I think some pragmatism is appropriate.

YMMV

Personally I have become so overly inundated with barely significant exploratory analysis being blown up to overly important inferential conclusions that I have stopped reading my peers research. Their mathematics is generally 200 years behind the state of the art, and their conclusions so badly over stated that it is pointless to even try to argue with them. So I just stopped reading health science statistical literature… its completely pointless.

And when was a press article about physics ever completely accurate?

Facts are best without embellishment.