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Asked by anon-254680 to Joel on 15 May 2020.
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Joel Goldstein answered on 15 May 2020:
I have found lots of crazy-looking things, but most of them turned out to be due to mistakes or miscalibrations (or just plain computer bugs) when studied carefully.
The most unusual thing I have found in particle collisions that could well be real, are LHC collisions which seem to produce four top quarks that then decay in the blink of an eye, producing large numbers of other particles (other quarks, electrons, muons, neutrinos….). This is remarkable, since the mass of a single top quark is about 200 times the mass of one of the protons that collided, so to produce four top quarks at the same time requires the creation (out of pure energy) of 800 times the mass of the proton!
There is a prediction that this could happen, but we do not yet have enough evidence to be sure that this is really what is going on – stay tuned!
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Comments
John commented on :
In 1983 I was working on data returned by the IRAS satellite. I was looking for asteroids, but what I found was comets. However, although exciting, comets were not really new. What I did find one week was bunch of strange signals that I puzzled over for several days. Then I realised that they all lay in a straight line but were moving across the sky every day. What I had found was a trail of dust, millions of km long, in the orbit of comet Tempel-2. This was a complete surprise, It was not what I was looking for, I just stumbled on a mystery signal and plugged away until I figured out what it was. That’s how science is supposed to work. Find something strange and keep puzzling until it makes sense. I could easily have ignored these weak signals as ‘noise’ or ‘bad data’ (the signal to noise ratio was 3 or less which any scientist will tell you is pretty unreliable) . I was SO glad that I did not just give up.