{"id":9700,"date":"2017-10-26T12:18:06","date_gmt":"2017-10-26T16:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=9700"},"modified":"2017-10-26T12:18:06","modified_gmt":"2017-10-26T16:18:06","slug":"this-weeks-hype-51","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=9700","title":{"rendered":"This Week&#8217;s Hype"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yet another entry in the long line of nonsensical hype about fundamental physics driven by misleading university press releases is today&#8217;s news that <a href=\"https:\/\/science.slashdot.org\/story\/17\/10\/26\/149201\/cern-scientists-conclude-that-the-universe-should-not-exist\">CERN Scientists Conclude that the Universe Should Not Exist<\/a>.  Tracking this back through various press stories (see <a href=\"https:\/\/cosmosmagazine.com\/physics\/universe-shouldn-t-exist-cern-physicists-conclude\">here<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ign.com\/articles\/2017\/10\/24\/cern-scientists-conclude-that-the-universe-should-not-exist\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.independent.co.uk\/news\/science\/universe-exist-cern-universe-matter-bizarre-behaviour-scientists-a8015216.html\">here<\/a>), one finds that the original source, as always, is a university press release designed to mislead journalists.  In this case it&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.research-in-germany.org\/en\/research-landscape\/news\/2017\/10\/2017-10-19-riddle-of-matter-remains-unsolved--proton-and-antiproton-share-fundamental-properties.html\">Riddle of matter remains unsolved<\/a> from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, a press release designed to promote <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v550\/n7676\/full\/nature24048.html\">this paper in Nature<\/a>.  <\/p>\n<p>The paper reports a nice experimental result, a measurement of the antiproton magnetic moment showing no measurable difference with the proton magnetic moment.  This is a test of CPT invariance, which everyone expects to be a fundamental property of any quantum field theory.  The hype in the press release confuses CPT invariance with CP invariance.  We know that physics is not CP invariant, with an open problem that of whether the currently known sources of CP non-invariance are large enough to produce in cosmological models the observed excess of baryons over antibaryons.  An accurate version of the press release would be: &#8220;experiment finds expected CPT invariance, says nothing about the CP problem.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>If this experiment had found CPT non-invariance, the implications for early universe baryon-antibaryon asymmetry would have been of minor interest compared to the revolutionary discovery that a fundamental theorem of quantum field theory was violated, shattering our understanding of fundamental physics in terms of quantum field theory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yet another entry in the long line of nonsensical hype about fundamental physics driven by misleading university press releases is today&#8217;s news that CERN Scientists Conclude that the Universe Should Not Exist. Tracking this back through various press stories (see &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=9700\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-this-weeks-hype"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9700"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9702,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9700\/revisions\/9702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}