So far, the scientific world has accepted that four forces of nature control the known universe.

To be clear, they are not Tendai ‘Beast’ Mtawarira, Duane Vermuelen, Pieter-Steph du Toit and Cheslin Kolbe’s sidestep, before we go down that route.

The four forces of nature are gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and the strong force, although scientists are now flirting with a fifth.

Woah, are we ready for this yet? According to scientists at the Institute for Nuclear Research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Atomki), we better be, because they’ve posted findings that they say point to this fifth force.

Below from CNN:

The scientists were closely watching how an excited helium atom emitted light as it decayed. The particles split at an unusual angle — 115 degrees — which couldn’t be explained by known physics.

The study’s lead scientist, Attila Krasznahorkay, told CNN that this was the second time his team had detected a new particle, which they call X17, because they calculated its mass at 17 megaelectronvolts.

“X17 could be a particle, which connects our visible world with the dark matter,” he said in an email.

Jonathan Feng, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California at Irvine told CNN he’s been following the Hungarian team’s work for years, and believes its research is shaping up to be a game changer.

If these results can be replicated, “this would be a no-brainer Nobel Prize,” he said.

That’s when you know you’ve cracked the big time.

The groundwork for Atomki’s work was laid by one of their earlier studies from three years back, although much of the scientific world was very sceptical of their 2016 work.

Feng was never one of the doubters, and built upon the original findings:

His research group published a paper on the heels of the Hungarians’ 2016 work, laying out a theory to observe what Krasznahorkay’s experimental team had seen.

They referred to this unseen fifth force in action as a “protophobic force,” meaning that it was as though the particles were “afraid of protons.”

Meanwhile, nuclear physicists around the world set to work looking for errors in the Hungarians’ work, and have come up empty-handed over the past few years.

“Some very well-known nuclear physicists have done that exercise,” Feng [above, on the set of The Big Bang Theory] said. The numbers seemed to add up, and no one could find ways their equipment was calibrated incorrectly.

And Feng said his own team was comparing the Hungarian experiments “with every other experiment that’s been done in the history of physics.”

The only way to explain X17 was a hitherto undetected “fifth force.”

Whilst more proof is needed before it can be scientifically declared, Feng says that day may not be far off, and other research groups are already planning to further probe this area.

Ultimately, such a discovery would bring us closer to a “unified field theory”, considered the Holy Grail in physics, which explains “all cosmic forces from the formation of galaxies down to the quirks of quarks”.

Rather ominously, though, Feng says there could even be a sixth, seventh, and eighth force, so I guess a scientist’s work is never done.

[source:cnn]