Pallab Ghosh is a science correspondent.
The mass of a sub-atomic particle is not what it should be.
One of the most important and successful theories of modern physics is at odds with the measurement.
The team found that the particle is more massive than they thought.
The result has been described as shocking by the project co-spokesperson, Prof David Tobak.
A new theory of how the Universe works could be developed by the discovery.
The world is going to look different, he said. The hope is that this result will break the dam.
Carl Sagan, the famous astronomer, said extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. We believe we have that.
The scientists at the CDF in Illinois found a small difference in the mass of the W Boson compared to what the theory says it should be. The implications are enormous if confirmed by other experiments. For fifty years, the Standard Model of particle physics has predicted the behavior and properties of sub-atomic particles. Until now.
The research team could not believe their eyes when they saw the results, according to Prof Chiarelli.
No one was expecting this. Maybe we got something wrong. The researchers went through their results and tried to find errors. They didn't find anything.
The result could be related to other experiments at the Large Hadron collider. The results suggest deviations from the Standard Model, possibly due to an undiscovered fifth force of nature.
Physicists have known for a while that the theory needs to be updated. The presence of invisible material in space, called Dark Matter, and the continued expansion of the Universe by a force called Dark Energy cannot be explained. It can't explain gravity.
The biggest shift in our understanding of the Universe since Einstein's theories of relativity more than a hundred years ago could be the result of the first of many new results if the Fermilab result is confirmed.
The hope is that these cracks will turn into chasms and eventually we will see some spectacular signature that not only confirms that the Standard Model has broken down as a description of nature, but also give us a new direction to help us understand what we are seeing and what the new physics is like
If this holds, there have to be new particles and new forces to explain how to make the data consistent.
There is a loud note of caution in the physics community. The most accurate measurement of the mass of the W boson to date is the result from the Fermilab, but it is at odds with two of the next most accurate measurements.
Prof Ben Allanach is a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University.
We need to know what is happening with the measurement. The fact that we have two other experiments that agree with each other and the Standard Model is worrying to me.
After a three-year upgrade, the Large Hadron collider is due to restart its experiments. The hope is that the results will lay the groundwork for a new theory of physics.
Most scientists will be a little bit cautious.
We have been here before and been disappointed, but we are all secretly hoping that this is really it, and that in our lifetime we might see the kind of transformation that we have read about in history books.
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