Scientific American Experimental anomalies have sent researchers scrambling to concoct new explanations Print The Large Hadron Collider’s LHCb detector, pictured, reported anomalies in the behavior of muons, two weeks before the Muon g – 2 experiment announced a puzzling finding about muon magnetism. Credit: Peter Ginter Advertisement Physicists should be ecstatic right now. Taken at face value, the surprisingly strong magnetism of the elementary particles called muons, revealed by an experiment this month, suggests that the established theory of fundamental particles is incomplete. If the discrepancy pans out, it would be the first time that the theory has failed to account for observations since its inception five decades ago—and there is nothing physicists love more than proving a theory wrong.