Recent content by ChrisVer

I really liked seeing the historical examples in her videos. I find it interesting that these are not talked about much, while most of the public discussion weight goes on the "holy grail" of 5σ... But these examples are a proof that what shines is not necessarily gold... So, it made me...

What does a negative mass-squared value mean as a "best-fit" result (which is unphysical as they also claim in the same paper for the upper limit calculation)?

Saying that it could be 2, 0.5, 3 or any other number is equivalent to saying it is R\ne 1. For rejecting the null you don't need to know the value of R, just the incompatibility of your measurement with the value "1". In particular the measurement outcome is a boolean: LFU or LFUV. So, can you...

There is the null hypothesis, which is the SM, and which is lepton universal. The "alternative" hypothesis is that there is lepton universality violation ("breaking of LFU"). The abstract states that the alternative hypothesis comes with a significance of 3.1 std.

So, if it is clear, does the alternative hypothesis come with some measurable significance by the collab (which happens to be 3.1σ)? Let's hope the journal will correct it.

What they saw is a result that is consistent with the standard model which is lepton universal. It should not be "we saw evidence that the standard model is incorrect (=breaking of LFU in b-quark decays), with a significance of 3.1 std", but something different and precise. When the 3.1 std is...

I agree up to the last parenthesis. However, I think they could have phrased the abstract better to not give any false impression.

That is why I am somewhat hesitant of calling them " 3\sigma signals "... The probability distribution out of which those numbers appear is calculated given the null hypothesis, p( x>x^* | !M) , and doesn't correspond to the probability of the signal hypothesis , P(M). In that respect I am not...

Do you know the true value of your parameter u (e.g. with what value of the parameter your x was generated)? Otherwise I don't understand the question about accuracy ... How would you know if the MLE or the Bayesian posterior is more accurate if you don't know the actual value that you try to...

Hi, Several times I encounter the argument that there is a "problem" with the masses in the Standard Model that we try to "understand". From the one side, you have people who ask why the neutrino masses are so small, and from the other side they ask why the top quark mass is so large. The...

Well maybe you are right. I spoke like that because, out of my head, I don't have a "feeling" about the magnitudes, with the cross-section dropping as r^{-2} and the actual number of neutrinos that are produced in an SN explosion. If you had told me to take the solid angle surface area into...

And for some hadron resonances X, in case you can't find their lifetime, t_X, you can use their width, \Gamma_X: t_X = \frac{\hbar}{\Gamma_X} ------------- e.g. such is the case of \Delta(1232) from what I saw... pdgLive (lbl.gov) with \Gamma_\Delta \approx 117 \text{ MeV} (from pdg) and \hbar...

Well yes. Would be fun to take a couple of minutes and try to figure out at which distance of a SN the time difference would be ~X (=60?) seconds for neutrinos in the range of \Delta m^2 \approx 0.0025\text{ eV}^2 or so. However with the distance the flux would also drop, I'm not sure if that...

The purpose of physics is for us to understand better the world we live in. It so has happened that we can represent this knowledge through mathematical and logical relations in an elegant way. That's why maths are used in physical theories. Of course, I wouldn't just say that physics models are...

so for example in a Supernova, you'd probably have the creation of many electron neutrinos \nu_e (OK basically it'd be antineutrinos but nevermind)... however from those neutrinos, the mass eigenstates, \nu_i, would propagate in space and be detected on Earth. Wouldn't that give us an indication...