Gear up for a paradigm shift in physics: elementary particle weighs more that predicted.

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The grand explanation physicists use to describe how the universe works may have some major new flaws to patch after a fundamental particle was found to have more mass than scientists thought.

“It’s not just something is wrong,” said Dave Toback, a particle physicist at Texas A&M University and a spokesperson for the U.S. government’s Fermi National Accelerator Lab, which conducted the experiments. If replicated by other labs, “it literally means something fundamental in our understanding of nature is wrong.”

The physicists at the lab crashed particles together over ten years and measured the mass of 4 million W bosons. These subatomic particles are responsible for a fundamental force at the center of atoms, and they exist for only a fraction of a second before they decay into other particles.

“They are constantly popping in and out of existence in the quantum froth of the universe,” Toback said.

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