Editorial: Fermilab's challenge to the laws of physics
We as a people spend a lot of time focusing on things that 100 or 1,000 years from now really aren't going to matter much, things that may end up being answers to trivia questions, if even that.
How much vitriol and ugliness we spew, for example, in the name of politics. We don't mean by that, discussions of problems and solutions; that actually would be constructive if only we could engage in more of it. Rather, we mean the daily insults and caricatures that try to pass as today's politics and that cable TV tries to pass as addictive news.
Imagine all the wars that have taken place with all their blood and pain and heartache. And how many of them have been disputes over land that should belong to all of us or contests for the sake one way or another of self-centered despots?
In saying this, we know we simplify. These things all are more complex than that, but at the same time, no less silly.
A wondrous story broke the other day down the street just outside Batavia.
Fermilab's physicists, who work in shadows that deserve so much more light, think they may have uncovered, via some misbehaving elementary particles called muons, fundamental flaws in the way science has for half a century thought the universe works.
Those rules of physics had seemed to work for all this time, and in doing so, had seemed to help further not just our understanding of the universe, but also how we as humans have been able to manipulate and respond to it.
It's not that some of those old ideas would not still apply. It's that they would not explain everything. If Fermilab's experiments are corroborated, it would mean there's more.
"We think we might be swimming in a sea of background particles all the time that just haven't been directly discovered," said Chris Polly, Fermilab experiment co-chief scientist. "There might be monsters we haven't yet imagined that are emerging from the vacuum."
What a humbling thought.
And what an exhilarating one.
If Fermilab's assessment holds true, it is something that will matter 100 and 1,000 years from now, something that will matter for as long as human civilization exists.
It would be another building block in humanity's ongoing quest to understand the environment around us. And added progress in our ability to manage that environment in our best interest. It would be something that may even help to extend human civilization. Yeah, it matters.
Since the earliest days of our species, we have looked to the stars in wonder. But the universe, and the physics that shapes and defines it, are home not just to our imagination but also to our destiny.
Fermilab's news serves as a reminder that there is more ahead than the trifling concerns that preoccupy us. The frontiers of our understanding, as the wobbling muons on the laboratory's supercollider underscore, are ever expanding.