Research

“In order to conduct our studies into what was killing the subjects, we had to kill several of the subjects to study them closely. After thorough tests and investigations, we have concluded the primary cause of death of the subjects are scientists who kill the subjects in an attempt to discover what was killing the subjects. Studies will continue in an effort to substantiate those findings.”

Scientists don't understand everything

Lately I've been encountering a number of posts by theists claiming that evolution and cosmology are seriously flawed but that scientists will never concede that fact.

The theists claim that this is because those researching and experimenting physics and biology all toe the scientific line, that dissent and disagreement are not allowed. They claim that funding would be withheld from any scientist who presented conclusions or interpretations that differed from the mainstream dogma.

In other words theists want us to believe that scientists are just as "religious" in their adherence to doctrine as any god-believer.

To those theists I offer this in rebuttal.

Newly released observations of the top quark — the heaviest of all known fundamental particles — could topple the standard model of particle physics. Data from collisions at the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, hint that some of the top quark's interactions are governed by an as-yet unknown force, communicated by a hypothetical particle called the top gluon. The standard model does not allow for such a force or particle.

The results, presented¹ today at the Europhysics Conference on High-Energy Physics in Grenoble, France, could help researchers to understand the origins of mass. According to one theoretical interpretation, a top quark bound by to its anti-matter partner, the antitop, would act as a version of the elusive Higgs boson, conferring mass on other particles.

Regina Demina, a physicist at the University of Rochester in New York, and her colleagues sifted through eight years' worth of particle-collision data recorded by one of the Tevatron's two detectors, known as DZero. Top quarks produced during collisions can fly off in the direction of the accelerator's proton beam or its antiproton beam; Demina and her team discovered that more travel towards the proton beam than is predicted in the standard model of physics. A different model would seem to be needed to explain the discrepancy. 

Dan Hooper, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab, notes that the top-quark asymmetry is just one of many cracks in the standard model of particle physics. And although Schwartz agrees that it is unlikely that any one theory will explain all the defects, he says that accounting for the odd behaviour of the top quark would be a promising start. (Source)