Fermilab measured the wobble of the muon to a very high accuracy (9 places) as a test of the standard model. Now I understand that the theorists have two ways of doing the calculation: dispersive and lattice (whatever that means) but the problem is that these two approaches don’t agree. What’s going on? Also these calculations of the standard model are so complicated they have to be run on a supercomputer apparently. So much for the old days when theorists could do paper and pencil calculations to describe some aspect of the world.
@Diffgeometer1 - what's going on is that virtual hadrons affect the muon's magnetic moment and we've reached the point of experimental accuracy where these effects matter. A hadron is an extremely complicated bag of quarks and gluons which cannot possibly be understood quantitatively using pencil and paper. For example, we can compute the ratio of the neutron and proton mass from first principles, but it takes a supercomputer and a lot of clever approximations. This is a nice easy intro:
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