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Dark Matter Hinted at Again at Cresst Experiment
physburn writes "The BBC is reporting recent results from the Cresst dark matter search in Italy. Between 2009 and 2011, Cresst have seen 67 events, a 4 sigma detection of dark matter particles with a mass of either around 15 GeV or 25 GeV. The results are near those previous results from DAMA and Cogent. So has dark matter finally been found, and if so what is it?"
4 sigma detection != (officially) found. You need 5 sigma for "discovery" status. The BBC have a good explanatory piece: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14811580
Dark matter always seemed like a convenient hand wave, but I'm thrilled if there's some concrete evidence of it. I do love being wrong!
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
It's consistent with DAMA and Cogent in the sense that it's ruled out by those experiments at only a few sigma. It's "near" Cogent in the sense that 8 is "near" 25, and it's "near" DAMA in the sense that 35 is "near" 10; that is, it's not near at all. It's ruled out by Xenon by many orders of magnitude. My favorite theoretical model to explain these results is IDM (Italian Dark Matter), which consists of dark matter that only exists in Italy. Presumably similar particles are responsible for whatever makes Guinness taste better in Ireland.
Starts with a Bang is an astrophysics professor's coverage of dark matter and what we know about it (including why we believe it makes up most of the matter in the universe.)
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
There are lots of experiments of this type running right now. This team, CRESST-II, has announced that they have more events than can be explained by their background. However, that's not really the most convincing evidence you could ask for, since the background could have been underestimated. A more convincing thing to see is that some of the experiments are reporting signals that are modulated by the expected amount on a yearly basis by the earth's motion relative to the frame of the cosmic microwave background. Here is a paper that includes a survey of the the results as of June. There are some apparent contradictions between some groups' positive results and others' negative results.
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Guinness tastes like soy sauce - I don't drink piss-warm "beer" so I wouldn't know.
Murphy's is better, is commonly available in the US, and also has the widget. Young's Double Chocolate Stout is even better than that. Rasputin's Imperial Stout is also not hard to find, and far better than Guinness. Australian Sheaf Stout is like heaven compared to any of those. But beware: Foster's makes a disappointing knockoff of the style and appears to have some kind of exclusive US distribution arrangement; I haven't seen a bottle of Tooth's Sheaf Stout in nearly 25 years.
The only thing that Guinness has going for it compared to other Stouts is its near ubiquity and a large marketing budget. It's the Bleedin' Watney's Red Barrel of stouts.
Oh, and also, either your piss is 40 or you let your beer get too warm.
I can see the fnords!
You are mistaken. Your parent is right. The concept of aether is indeed comming back as Gedankenexperiement or as an analogy. If you had read your parents post till the end you had seen "space time" or "fabric of space time" or "vacuum" as modern variations of the same aether concepts our for fathers had. Why don't you google? You should find many modern publications that "use" the word aether ... but not in the old classical sense.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
But that's just it - that's the underpinning of modern physics right there - it's no that there's not an aether, it's that as goes light so goes the universe.
Not, that's not just it. The underpinning of modern physics is that there is no privileged reference frame, when the whole point of the aether was that it was such a frame. That frame -- the aether -- does not exist. That's the first major distinction between "modern" and the prior physics in which the aether was hypothesised. It is inherently contradictory to talk about modern physics and then say "it's not that there's not an aether" because it is an inherent consequence of the true underpinning of modern physics that there isn't.
So calling space-time the luminiferous aether is completely stupid and and categorically wrong.
That's why nobody does. Hard to believe, I know.
Amd this is /. - all snark is warrented, elsewise what would we read?
You're so right; what would people do if they had to be snarky and make sense?
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