Hello everybody, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

A few weeks ago, I'm recording this in April 2021,

we had not won but two different reports of completely independent anomalies in particle physics.

That is to say, apparent disagreements between the theoretical predictions based on the standard model of particle physics,

which is very well-established, and new experimental results.

One of the results came from the Large Hadron Collider, outside Geneva, Switzerland,

the other from Fermi Lab, outside Chicago, Illinois.

They both involve muons, little particles that are heavier cousins of the electrons,

but they're otherwise not immediately connected to each other.

We don't yet know whether these anomalies are real in some sense.

I mean, the anomalies are real, they're there, but we don't know where they actually represent new physics,

or we just made a mistake, either experimentally or theoretically.

So lots of people have asked for my opinion about these things, so that's what this podcast is going to do.

But because I am who I am, I'm not going to focus mostly on what it means for the future of particle physics,

because we don't know what it means for the future of particle physics.

I mean, number one, we don't know if it's real, like we just said,

we don't know if it's going to stick around, either one.

And number two, the data that we're getting, the information that we're measuring, is kind of meager,

right? You're measuring two different numbers in two different ways,

and that's not quite enough to be very explicit about what model might explain it.

The problem with this kind of thing is, there's many models that could possibly explain this.

So you can't instantly say, ah, you've detected this, therefore, supersymmetry,

...