A team of theoretical physicists at the University of California at Irvine have announced that they may have discovered a fifth force of nature that has been hidden inside of a particular particle and has gone unnoticed by physicists until now. Their findings were recently published and, if can be supported by peer review and the current experiments of other researchers, just may shake up and change the world of particle physics.
Timothy Tait, a co-author in the research findings said that, “If this is true, it would be a really big guide as to what the future would hold as far as the ultimate theory of particle physics.”
For science in general, and for physics in particular, they declare that there are four forces in nature that affect the universe and its make up. Those current four forces are a strong and a weak nuclear force, electromagnetism and gravity. For science, and physics, these four forces control and affect every action that happens in the entire universe.
This possibly new fifth force acts in a similar manner to electromagnetism. For electromagnetism, it acts upon and affects the movement of protons and electrons and ignores neutrons altogether. For this new fifth force, that the researchers have dubbed, Boson X, it ignores the protons and just acts upon the electrons and the neutrons.
The UC Irvine team had been going over the work of a Hungarian team that was looking for a force that affects and moves dark matter when they noticed something out of place. After painstakingly going over their data, as well as the data from the Hungarians and others, the UC Irvine team ruled out that it was a dark force situation and realized that it just may be an undiscovered boson.
The standard model for the universe has been giving scientists in general, and physicists in particular, a tough time. For now, that model is not a complete one for them. It leaves too many things, such as dark matter, unexplained. For science, dark matter and dark energy compose 95% of the the universe with normal matter only making up a tiny 5% of this universe model.
Tait, and many others, believe that this possible new boson could help lead to a more complete understanding of the universe for them so that they may discard their current standard model. Others have agreed that this may be a huge leap forward but more work and experimentation still needs to be done.
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