Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

9 years of philosophy and I'm over platonic realism and reading contemporary philosophy of science.

The thing is, we are wrong, but this stuff is useful to make predictions. Everyone knows about the copernican revolution. But when it first happened, the old models(earth at the center of the solar system) were more accurate at predicting where the plenets would be.

Scientists pragmatically spend their time doing best fits. (Typically)

But then the paradigm shifts and we are closer to reality than the current local minimum/maximum.

Before reading philosophy of science, I was into m theory and string theory. Now I'm nearly sure it's bunk that might be replaced in our lifetime.

I thank scientists, but I do not envy them.

Glad I didn’t spend the last ten years on that problem! As my CERN advisor suggested :)

I bet you that old results still add up in the parallel universe in which the muon mystery has not yet been solved!

Hmm... The Reality changed itself when guys in Siberia changed the sensor? Some years ago I was playing with the idea that the Reality might invent new laws when people look for them, and doesn't bother with laws when no one observes them. It would be in the style of Copenhagen interpretation, though even with regard to it, the idea seems too weird to be true. But now we have an experimental evidence.

In any case it gives me ideas how to check the hypothesis. If the Reality has a limited horizon for planning for new laws, scientists can trick it into inventing new laws that eventually (after some more research and even more laws observed) would start contradicting to each other, and at that point the Reality would snap into a different set of rules.

If it is true, then the plan is like this: we need to wipe all the scientific knowledge from this world and start again, and trick the the Reality into devising better laws of nature. Ah, wait, we have no evidence that the Reality can abandon laws that were introduced already. Pity, the plan is brilliant, but how to check if the Reality can abandon its laws? If laws are local... we can do something like Stephenson described in his Anathem: establish maths doing independent research and comparing their results once in 1000 years.

Worst Feynman diagrams ever.

That's the best part about science.

I really dislike the writing style of being so "friendly" for people who don't know anything about the space that you obscure what the topic of the article is at all.

It's a third of the way through the article when "g-2", the problem at hand, is mentioned. Information that should have been shared in the title took a third of the article to figure out.