> The new particle contains two charm quarks and an up and a down antiquark. Several tetraquarks have been discovered in recent years (including one with two charm quarks and two charm antiquarks), but this is the first one that contains two charm quarks, without charm antiquarks to balance them.
This is not the first time a tetraquark has been measured, but instead it's the first time a tetraquark with two charm quarks and no charm antiquarks. That's still nice work, but I was initially confused by the headline ("didn't they discover those already?").
I read it as: "CERN has discovered a new particle, and that new particle is an instance of a known class of particles called tatraquarks". The wording is a little sloppy and ambiguous, but headlines are pretty tightly constrained so I'm willing to cut the writers a little slack on this. I've seen much worse.
This sort of comment is actually worse than the thing it is attempting to denigrate. "The media" isn't lying to you. "The media" is a smokescreen that lumps a wildly diverse collection of information purveyors under one, inaccurate and overly generalized, umbrella. Some media seeks to find the truth, some seeks only to manipulate you. Some is built from the ground up to push an agenda (political, religious, etc.), some was built to make money and some was built to speak truth to power. This last should not be lumped in with the rest, even when it disagrees with YOUR personal agenda. There are a great number of journalists that seek to reveal truth, to confront the powerful when they abuse their positions and to attempt to reveal and expose our failings. Don't discount them with inaccurate and dismissive comments like this. The best of them may be the only thing between you and the depredations of those that control our lives and places like the US, where laws provide at least some protection for these journalists and where a tradition of journalistic integrity at least has the possibility of being followed give such journalists a chance to do what they do so well.
It's not worse - he's stating a fact, and your qualms with his descriptor (i.e. "the media") are secondary to the fact that his statement is an accurate description of 1) the problem and 2) the opponent in question, even if you feel like the secondary component is up for debate.
I'll restate my own adjacent thoughts: If you're a journalist and you are working at a company that performs these sorts of linguistic tricks to optimize for clicks... (and constantly for that matter) then you are equally responsible. Everyone has bills to pay, but everyone who participates has to eventually take responsibility for enabling a broken system.
Truthful descriptions of novel current events, even if they derive less clicks than clickbait, cannot become ancillary goals in the field of journalism. With no exceptions!
I’m sorry, what? Definitively no part of the headline is a lie, nor is any criticism of its factual nature even remotely sensible. “New exotic particle, a type of tetraquark” is completely valid when reduced to “new exotic particle, a tetraquark,” which notably does not say “new exotic particle, the tetraquark.” Collective noun usage, not singular. It’s terse but clear English, quite common in print, and a fantastically weak hill to die on. Watch:
“The junior double whopper, a cheeseburger, is implicated in the coronary event.”
I’d forgive it if it were confusing to someone who learned English as an additional language, not if it’s dishonestly called dishonest.
So no, they are not stating a fact. They’re mad at “the media,” an apparently singular organism, and they believe they’ve found an excuse to bore us all yapping about it for a minute but instead have misunderstood the English language. And you’re right there to back up the same tiresome hooey despite its demonstrably ignorant foundation.
If you’re going to call something a “linguistic trick” it is advisable to master the language, particularly if you’re going to write three paragraphs on the “dishonesty” of a well-written, economical headline about a pretty cool thing science figured out while you were obsessing over the nefarious motivations of people telling the world about it.
Let's not throw baby out with bathwater. This kind of thinking has been so harmful for social cohesion, and we need a cohesive society if we're going to have a prayer of handling the worst problems we've ever faced as a species in a way that future generations will be remotely proud of.
Yes, my comment was a bit hyperbolic. However, if we're going to have a prayer of handling the worst problems we've ever faced as a species in a way that future generations will be remotely proud of, we need a media that doesn’t profit from the exact opposite occurrence.
This is not the first time a tetraquark has been measured, but instead it's the first time a tetraquark with two charm quarks and no charm antiquarks. That's still nice work, but I was initially confused by the headline ("didn't they discover those already?").