Science ... designed to be questioned

 Very rare decay of a beauty meson involving an electron and positron observed at LHCb. Credit: CERN

Science ... designed to be questioned, the opposite of religion, designed to be obeyed, strikes yet again, this time dealing with the potential shortcomings of the Standard Model as forces and entities like Dark Matter cannot be explained using this existing theory of physics.

The Standard Model includes the matter particles (quarks and leptons), the force carrying particles (bosons), and the Higgs boson. Credit: Artwork courtesy of Sandbox Studio, Chicago for Symmetry

The Standard Model of particle physics predicts that particles called beauty quarks, which are measured in the LHCb experiment, should decay into either muons or electrons in equal measure. However, the new result suggests that this may not be happening, which could point to the existence of new particles or interactions not explained by the Standard Model.

The updated measurement questions the laws of nature that treat electrons and their heavier cousins, muons, identically, except for small differences due to their different masses. 

Something's afoot yet again.