Kent Paul Dolan wrote:
"mhodgkin" wrote:

I looked into this a bit more and for example the electron mass they
predict (they dont quote an error so I assume the value is supposed to
be exact) is around 27 standard deviations from the measured value
(this calculation can be found on wikipedia). That means the theory is
inconsistent with the data from experiments.

But isn't this merely a matter of one of their
input parameters having much less precision than
that currently available from experimental
results, which are ridiculously precise and so have
ridiculously small standard deviations?

IIUC, what these folks have is a theory that for
the first time is spitting out results that are
excellent approximations of the experimental
measurements of particle masses, and doing it for
the first time "from first principles". That they
have to use as a starting point physical constants
(IIRC, it's the "gravity one") less precise than
the known values of what they are trying to predict
will certainly produce results less accurate than
the measured ones, the important thing is that they
are producing those results _at all_; not meeting
current known precisions in the predicted values
isn't a useful criticism of the theory, merely a
motivation to measure that one input parameter
(or perhaps all of the input parameters) to
precision equal to the precision desired in the
outputs, _then_ see how the output accuracy is.


Well who knows since they dont quote their theoretical values with any
error. Given this I can only assume they are claiming the theoretical
error is so small when quoting to however many significant digits they
use the error is zero. In this case the quoted error is not compatible
with the current world average from the PDG group at Berkeley.

If they quote an error and it the measured value falls within one or 2
standard deviations of this then that is a different matter.







xanthian.


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