As a particle physicists (at least one in training) I find the questions about what the universe is made of and how it behaves to be some of the most compelling questions to be asked. Unfortunately these questions are also some of the most difficult to answer. They often involve teasing out difficult details and very precise measurements from a variable sea of uninteresting and mis-measured parameters.
On place this is going on is the Belle Collaboration at the KEK Electron/Positron Collider in Tsukuba, Japan. Here they want to examine one of the strangest aspects of physics known as CP Violation (explained elsewhere for brevity). They do this by looking at a weird object known as B-mesons and trying to figure out if things look the way they expect according to our current understanding of the world.
The good news is that they are good at what they do, although not so good at making it easy to get this information in English.
What they have most recently found is that by looking at the angular distribution of the B-mesons they are producing they have found hints of new physics that we can't account for using our present theories.
Now as the results are discussed on Interactions.org in more clarity and detail than I'd expect a random viewer of my blog to want to read here I'll just say that these results are intriguing to me because they are experimental observation of what we already think we know...that is, that we don't know everything about the particle world
More exactly, it is that there is more to the theory and the reality of the early universe, the fundamental nature of matter, and what happens when you bang together really energetic particles than we ever get quite right the first go around.
This result and it's understanding might be a good place for up and comers to launch of of to get a real flavor for how weird and hard the physics I want to do really is.
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