Mirror neutrons all over the science news

billa12

Sorry for sounding like a broken record. If the experiment turns out to be true and they cannot find any explaination to the experiment does that prove mirror particles?

Drakkith

Be careful with "what if" questions. IF there is no other explanation then it would be accepted that mirror neutrons exist and this mirror universe does as well. HOWEVER, this is a very unlikely scenario and one would have to have extremely good evidence that it is indeed what is happening. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence of course. (Or however the phrase goes) It is simply more likely that some other decay method or something else is happening in the experiment.

Reptillian

Nope, in order to be scientifically proven, the mirror universe hypothesis would not only have to explain the observation, but would also have to make unique testable predictions...the more the better. It's not good science to observe a phenomenon, realize that current theory hasn't yet been used to describe the phenomenon, come up with an alternative hypothesis, and say "Well, since nobody has yet described this phenomenon and tried to include it within the existing framework, my alternate hypothesis must be true...let's consider it confirmed and call it a day"

Instead the first step should be to try to encompass the observations using what we already know about how the universe works. If that fails, we grudgingly hypothesize, predict, and test with experiment. When hypothesizing, I prefer to follow the K.I.S.S. rule (Keep It Simple Stupid) ;) I can't think of anything more complicated then postulating the existence of a whole nother universe just to explain one observation.

twofish-quant

The explanation of "mirror particles" is sufficiently weird so that I wouldn't be satisified unless they do another experiment that involves completely different physics done by a different research group that ends up with the results expected from mirror particles.

The problem with experiments is that they are very noisy and complicated so even if you can't think of an alternative explanations, that doesn't mean that there isn't one.

One thing that would be an "easy" first step would be to have some other group do the same experiment. That way, we can get rid of "opps" explanations.