Then again it could be another false alarm. Sometime about the W boson being too heavy. I'll try and give a bit of background.
The best model of the universe - everything but gravity - is called the Standard Model. It unifies electro-magnetism, the weak force and the strong force - three of the four fundamental forces of Nature.1 There are 17 fundamental particles (a physicist would say fields, but I'll use particles here). The matter we see every day is built of a class of particles known as fermions. Six quarks and six leptons. Protons and neutrons are made of two kinds of quarks and the electron is one of the leptons. The remaining five are in a category known as bosons and are responsible for three of the four fundamental forces. Gluons are associated with the strong force and bind quarks. The weak force is carried by W and Z bosons and is responsible for radioactive decay and the process that makes the Sun shine. The electromagnetic force is carried by the photon. Electricity, magnetism and the reason you don't fall through the floor. And the Higgs boson gives the other particles mass (crudely speaking).
All of this came together in the mid 70s with experiments confirming the Standard Model to higher and higher levels of confidence. There were a few suspicious corners, but none were showstoppers. Until now. (maybe)
So what's not to love?
It's incomplete. The matter I've described - the stuff we're all made of and all of the exotic particles we're found - all of that represents a bit less than five percent of the mass-energy of the Universe. Next to nothing is known about the remaining 95 percent! That's a bit of a problem. And no one has been found cleanly addresses all four forces.
What scientists love to do is discover something. Something completely new and out of the blue or perhaps overturning an accepted theory.2 That's what may have happened. The W boson - a particle responsible for the weak force - is a very heavy and short-lived particle. It's been carefully studied and a very careful experimental work at CERN gave us its mass. This week the results of another very careful measurement using a different approach at FermiLab were announced. Fermilab finds the mass is about a tenth of a percent higher. Both measurements are so careful that the chance that that they're really the same is less than one part in thirty million..
It may be the CERN results are wrong and/or the Fermilab results are wrong. Hundreds of people will be spending a lot of time reanalyzing data and checking that all of the steps along the way. But maybe, just maybe there's new physics!
Soon CERN will be taking data again after a three year long upgrade. New measurements will be made that could settle the matter. One of the explanations could be a fifth force of nature that is so subtle that it is only showing up here.
There is real excitement although it will be several years before anything conclusive is known. I have to add that my gut tells me there's probably a subtle bias, but my heart is hoping Fermilab is right.
But why? I think there's something to fundamental curiosity. The track record for generating useful spinoff is remarkable. A few estimates place medical spinoff from high energy and nuclear physics in excess of twenty dollars for every dollar spent. Of course there are issues with how long it takes, but some of you may owe your lives to these developments.
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1 So far no one has been able to cleanly add gravitation, but for calculations you usually consider it separately. Something informally called Core Theory is the Standard Model with Gravitation tacked on separately.
2 In physics theory takes on a special meaning. It's a hypothesis that has been rigorously tested to the point where it's accepted as the best description by the community. It's a very high bar.
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