144 | Solo: Are We Moving Beyond the Standard Model?

<p>I’ve been a professional physicist since the 1980’s, and not once over the course of my career has a particle-physics experiment produced a completely surprising new result. We’ve discovered particles (top quark, Higgs boson) and even phenomena (neutrino masses), but nothing we hadn’t either predicted or could easily accommodate within the Standard Model of particle physics. That&nbsp;<em>might</em>&nbsp;have changed just this month, with possible confirmations of two “anomalies” in particle-physics measurements involving muons. They might be new physics, or they might just go away. I talk about what it might mean, and (more importantly) how we should feel about the likelihood that these results really do imply physics beyond the Standard Model.</p><p><em>Support Mindscape on&nbsp;</em><a href="https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><em>Patreon</em></a><em>.</em></p><p>Here are some relevant references for the first result, from&nbsp;<a href="http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">LHCb</a>&nbsp;at CERN, that&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_meson" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">B-mesons</a>&nbsp;are seemingly decaying at different rates into electrons and muons:</p><ul><li><a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.11769" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">arxiv paper</a></li><li><a href="https://cerncourier.com/a/new-data-strengthens-rk-flavour-anomaly/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CERN Courier</a></li><li><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/unexplained-results-intrigue-physicists-at-worlds-largest-particle-collider/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Scientific American</a></li><li><a href="http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2021/03/thoughts-on-rk.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Resonaances</a></li></ul><p>And here are some references for the other result, from the&nbsp;<a href="https://muon-g-2.fnal.gov/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Mu