Whatever it is, it's settled on my chest and it's no fun at all. Oh, oooooh, oooooooohhhhhhhh, there MUST be a cure for this... [hock, gasp] Quick, Nurse, the screens!
November 19th, 2003
The High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation in Tsukuba, Japan has discovered, and FermiLab has independently confirmed the existence of, a mystery meson that doesn't fit into the Standard Model. Known for now as X(3872), it's both extremely massive, and extraordinarily long-lived for a particle of its mass.
This could have interesting ramifications for physics. The current speculations apparently center on either "We don't understand the color force as well as we thought we did," or "We don't understand mesons as well as we thought we did." The latter theory speculates that a meson can be composed of two quarks and two antiquarks instead of one of each.
