Is There A 5th Force Of Nature?

Let's talk about the force for a minute...

No not that one, the real force, or actually forces.

According to the Standard Model of Physics, there's the strong force, the weak force, and the electromagnetic force. But the standard model is known to be woefully incomplete and there are even well known forces that the standard model does not account for. These are the well known forces of gravity which brings things together and the lesser understood "dark energy" that is causing the expansion of the universe.

But is there another fundamental force?
According to a recent article at phys.org

Recent findings indicating the possible discovery of a previously unknown subatomic particle may be evidence of a fifth fundamental force of nature, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters by theoretical physicists at the University of California, Irvine.

The UCI work demonstrates that instead of being a dark photon, the particle may be a "protophobic X boson." While the normal electric force acts on electrons and protons, this newfound boson interacts only with electrons and neutrons - and at an extremely limited range. Analysis co-author Timothy Tait, professor of physics & astronomy, said, "There's no other boson that we've observed that has this same characteristic. Sometimes we also just call it the 'X boson,' where 'X' means unknown."

So here are some details of what this means...
Researchers in Hungary were conducting experiments looking for dark photons and instead appear to have stumbled into the X-Boson.

These particles were predicted by the Georgi–Glashow Model, which is a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) predicted back in 1974. GGM is a model, the simple elegance of which provides the basis of SUSY which itself has seen somewhat of a revival lately as string theory has been petering out a bit. In otherwords, everything old is new again.

"If true, it's revolutionary," said Jonathan Feng, professor of physics & astronomy. "For decades, we've known of four fundamental forces: gravitation, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. If confirmed by further experiments, this discovery of a possible fifth force would completely change our understanding of the universe, with consequences for the unification of forces and dark matter."

The statement above would be the understatement of the century. If this turns out to be correct, we have a whole new force in the Universe to explore and at 30x the mass of an electron it's accessible to our current generation of colliders so it should be pretty easy to verify.

this next bit is just a fun "I told you so!" to some folks who came over to steemit with me, you know who you are :)
You'll recognize that last year I predicted that both a new fundamental force of nature and a new fundamental particle would be discovered in 2016. I also predicted that this will lead to a revolution in our understanding of physics within 5 years time and the fundamental basis for our technology would begin to shift as a result
Obviously this is not the force I predicted, because it works only short range whereas I predicted the discovery of a force that would allow for supraluminal communication over unlimited distance. But I have a hunch that this force has a mate and we don't know what this mate actually does, or possibly this is the force and it has interactions beyond what have been observed...

In my previous blog I discussed a video from Space Time, which seemed to imply that the past could be rewritten. A force allowing time reversed propagation of a collapsing probability wave, would actually fit that bill while still preserving causality.
http://phys.org/news/2015-09-law-implies-thermodynamic-black-holes.html
http://phys.org/news/2016-08-quantum-imply-instant-causation.html