The year is 2016, and physicists are restless. Four years ago, the LHC confirmed the Higgs boson, the last outstanding prediction of the Standard Model. The chances were good, so they thought, that the LHC would also discover other new particles - naturalness seem to demand it. But, so far, given all the data they’ve collected, their greatest hopes appear to be phantasms. The Standard Model and General Relativity do a great job, but physicists know this can’t be it. Or at least they think they know: the theories are incomplete, not only disagreeable and staring each other in the face without talking, but inadmissibly wrong, giving rise to paradoxa with no known cure. There has to be more to find,

A laboratory experiment in Hungary has spotted an anomaly in radioactive decay that could be the signature of a previously unknown fifth fundamental force of nature, physicists say-if the finding holds up. Attila Krasznahorkay at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences’s Institute for Nuclear Research in Debrecen, Hungary, and his colleagues reported their surprising result in 2015 on the arXiv preprint server, and this January in the journal Physical Review Letters. But the report - which posited the existence of a new, light boson only 34 times heavier than the electron-was largely overlooked. Then, on April 25, a group of US theoretical physicists brought the finding to wider attention by publishing its

IRVINE, Calif., May 26 (UPI) -- A team of Hungarian physicists published a paper last year hinting at the possibility of a fifth force of nature. It escaped publicity, but a recent analysis of the data by researchers at the University of California, Irvine has brought the paper back into the limelight. The Standard Model of particle physics -- a model that helps scientists explain all the physics we can observe -- features four main forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Scientists have long searched for -- and offered circumspect proof of -- a fifth force. The reason scientists continue to search for alternate forces is that the Standard Model fails to explain