Geophysics guides particles physics

Abstract

When geophysicists from the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory (AFGL), Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., presented evidence of a sixth fundamental force at the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco last month, an uncommon thing happened. Particle physicists responded, in t h e press and elsewhere, to a potential scientific breakthrough made by a group of earth scientists.The event is uncommon because theoretical physicists have been leading the game of leapfrog between the theoreticians, who use mathematics to present new hypotheses and provide rigor for observations, and the experimentalists, who use measurements to test old theories or demonstrate the need for new ones. In recent years, particle physicists have published dozens of theories to explain the behavior of matter and energy on a subatomic scale, according to Purdue physicist Ephraim Fischbach. Some theories, with names like “supersymmetry” or “supergravity,” predict the existence of fundamental forces in addition to the four now known to exist: electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces