Physics World reveals its top 10 breakthroughs for 2011
[A]fter much debate among the Physics World editorial team, this year’s honour goes to Aephraim Steinberg and colleagues from the University of Toronto in Canada for their experimental work on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. Using an emerging technique called “weak measurement”, the team is the first to track the average paths of single photons passing through a Young’s double-slit experiment – something that Steinberg says physicists had been “brainwashed” into thinking is impossible.
““Do neutrinos travel faster than light?” and “Has the Higgs boson been found?”. However, there have also been some fantastic bona fide research discoveries over the last 12 months,”
Yeah, “bona fide.”
http://www.atlas.ch/photos/atlas_photos/selected-photos/events/combo1.png
Look at the white bump!
http://cms.web.cern.ch/sites/cms.web.cern.ch/files/field/image/cls_comb_zoom.png
Look at the white bump!
http://www.quantumdiaries.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Combined-ATLAS-300×280.png
Look, look, look at the bump!
Look at the theoretical background line versus the observed background line in the first two graphs. Noise is almost 2 sigma of increased amplitude across most of both charts. Noise does not count as signal. The net signal above noise is a pimple not a big whoop. “More studies are needed.”
Let’s look at the third graph, 1) The big black trough, the sum of all colors, is one sigma net from its underlying sum of all noise line. 2) The red trough is one sigma net from its underlying noise line. 3) The blue trough is a half-sigma net from its underlying noise line. 4) The green line doesn’t show anything.
It’s all very nice that individual bumps are pretty much in the same place, but individually and summed, they do not rise high enough above noise to be statistically significant.