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Scientists' Biggest Search For Dark Matter To Date Just Turned Up Nothing (sciencealert.com)
Peter Dockrill, reporting for ScienceAlert: For something that's hypothesised to make up more than 80 percent of the mass of the entire universe, it's no easy thing to detect the existence of dark matter. That's the conclusion the world is coming to today, after scientists announced that a massive $10 million experiment to find traces of elusive dark matter particles had failed after an exhaustive 20-month search. "We've probed previously unexplored regions of parameter space with the aim of making the first definitive discovery of dark matter," said physicist Cham Ghag from University College London in the UK, one of the scientists who took part in the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) project based in South Dakota. "Though a positive signal would have been welcome, nature was not so kind! Nonetheless, a null result is significant as it changes the landscape of the field by constraining models for what dark matter could be beyond anything that existed previously."Ars Technica has more details.
I keep looking for my imaginary friend, but he's never there.
Well, the dark matter explanation feels a bit hacky anyway. Hopefully some better explanation will gain traction.
A null result is actually more valuable than an inconclusive result would have been.
Your search for a clue turned up no results
. . . just follow my friend 'Harvey' - he'll take you straight to it, despite the funky geodesics.
Perhaps, if they built a giant flashlight....
"I don't think you appreciate the gravity of the situation."
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
...there is only the Force.
Nope, it's turtles, all the way down, sonny.
Trump told me so.
And it's not even a good one.
Look, I know you're stuck on it, but sometimes you just have to admit you've gone down the wrong path, and you start over.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
That's what I want to know....
From Ars:
The LUX detector (Large Underground Xenon) is designed to pick up signs of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, when they engage in one of their rare interactions with normal matter.
There are indeed other candidates for dark matter, WIMPs being only one of those. This experiment searched specifically for WIMPs, which only rules them out, while of course the other remaining candidates remain to be explored.
Dark matter is proposed because galaxies hold together despite having greater rotational speed than 'normal' matter would keep together, yes? There's is presumed to be a black hole at the center of all galaxies, yes? How is the (equivalent?) mass of a black hole estimated? For instance, if matter is dynamically spiraling into this black-hole (not in a stable orbit), might orbital assessments of the black hole's mass be wrong?
Scientists' Biggest Search For Dark Matter To Date Just Turned Up Nothing
SUCCESS!!!!!
Dark matter is the 21st century's luminiferous aether. They're looking for something that doesn't exist. It's a lack of understanding of how gravity actually works.
dark matter is today's epicycles
It's quantitization error along with SOL roundtrip time.
Ok then, smarty-pants, how does gravity actually work? Answer should include a solution to the three body problem.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
Dark matter, which is a complete and utter fantasy to cover for the fact that we don't know how gravity works, reminds me of the last time scientists pushed baseless nonsense so they could keep their jobs and keep funding their research into knowingly wrong science. Anyone remember "The Ether?" which was allegedly what empty space was made of. As it turns out empty space is made of empty space. Who would have thought?
The Michelson-Morley experiment was experiment that turned up nothing, and lead to the development of general relativity. Perhaps this experiment will also turn nothing into something.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
A null result is only a "fail" if you're not actually interested in science.
It's a lack of understanding of how gravity actually works.
You idiot, if we understood how gravity works, we'd probably have gravity generators. Aircraft wouldn't need wings anymore, and spacecraft wouldn't need reaction motors either. Hoverboards would be real.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Funny how ACs who are entirely ignorant of a subject imagine themselves to be experts with great insights.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
They need to look around Uranus.
(ducks)
But I fucking told you so!!
I have nothing to go on other than my own impertinence and pigheadedness, but I am convinced that simply adding mass to the equation is not what is needed to solve it. Yes, our models look right when we add that mass, but I think it's something else going on. Something fundamental, misunderstood, and/or some emergent interaction of other forces.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
That's because there's no such thing as dark matter or dark energy. In 50 years, we'll look back at this theory (and "junk DNA") as a quaint historical silliness, the way we look at "the ether/aether" today.
This is great timing. I like how the LUX researchers' conceptual description of WIMPs sounds exactly like neutrinos: https://medium.com/starts-with...
Yay! We are all saved!
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
According to theoretical calculations. Maybe havent built good enough instrument yet.
I was a long time skeptic of gravitational waves after 20 years of failed LIGO observations. But their instruments finally got good enough.
The definition of theory is a comphrehensive explanation of a phenomenom that may be support by experimental data.
For example, Einsteins Theory of General Relativity gives a detailed description of gravity. It was not proved with data until years afterwards.
Scientific theories are not in the same category as conspiracy theories or cockamamie theories.
It's spelled aether, not ether. If you're going to act like you know what you're talking about, at least spell it correctly!
What is the 'parameter space' that they were searching? Is it an accepted term in physics? I'd expect to find nothing in my parameter space except for variables (and a number of logical and conceptual errors).
Analogy - you are in a dark room with lit objects on the other side of the room and something heavy is on your foot but you can't see what it is.
Gravitational effects tell us that things are there but it's too dark to see them.
Wow you're dumb even by Slashshit standards. Did you even Google your dimwitted nonsense first to see if it was plausibly true? Go kill yourself.
Our universe exists 'on' the 4-dimensional soft skin of an 'onion'. Matter and energy as we see it deforms the surface of the skin, and it is this deformation that we perceive as gravity. What we call dark matter is simply the cumulative effect of the (contents of the) other skins of the onion on ours, which we cannot yet directly measure, having no way to 'focus our measurements' outside our universe.
Several solutions exist for special cases of the three body problem, but I'm sure you're after a general solution. As it happens a general solution to the three body problem has been shown to exist, by Karl F Sundman, which takes the form of a convergent infinite series, but as the series takes so long to converge it is practically useless.
Having taken a somewhat different approach to the problem, I have discovered a more practical and surprisingly elegant solution, but unfortunately /.s character limit is too low to allow me to post it here...
*I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which bits are which ;-)
Just like global warming and evolution, then?
--
roman_mir
...Just doesn't exist and they're barking up the wrong tree?
Or maybe this dark matter isn't matter at all, but a property of space-time itself.
Everyone knows if you are searching for something dark, you have to use a light to find it. ;)
Why are all corporate energy scammers called Randell?
It's spelled aether, not ether. If you're going to act like you know what you're talking about, at least spell it correctly!
When I first started looking into relativity as a kid, I remember getting stuck on that word. How was one supposed to pronounce that funny character (I mean the ligature æ)? I even tried making both vowel sounds. There was nobody around to ask, and I wasn't comfortable assuming the ether pronunciation. I filed it away, hoping that someday I would get the problem resolved by hearing an authority say the word.
Later in life, I notice everybody using the simplified spelling, and consequently the simple ether pronunciation. Yes, this allows some ambiguity with the chemical (CH3–CH2–O–CH2–CH3), but aside from that, it is a victory of the people against the elite.
But it's up to you. You can spell it ether way.
(||) Nehmo (||)
There is an obvious candidate for dark matter. Not interacting, hard or impossible to detect, interacts with gravity (maybe). I'm talking about tachyons, possibly with net negative mass. Such a tachyon will have an internal FTL geometry but its external geometry may make it travel faster or slower than light. (A tachyons internal speed of light is a special local only value.) Objects with negative mass don't really work with general relativity, but then general relativity doesn't really work at FTL speeds anyway.
Ironically this is why conventional physics wont even consider the idea of dark energy as tachyons. FTL physics requires a different theory (based on a flat absolute FTL frame) which breaks general relativity above the speed of light. So one theory with absolutely no proof is rejected because of another theory with absolutely no proof. (Above the speed of light there is less proof for general relativity then there is for astrology..)
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
so, the search was successful, then.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Scientists' Biggest Search For Dark Matter To Date Just Turned Up Nothing
dude, that's heavy.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I see a bunch of jokes already on this one.
The other part is a bunch of people will probably get their PhD on finding nothing.
> Well, the thing about a black hole - its main distinguishing feature - is it's black. And the thing about space, the colour of space, your basic space colour, is black. So how are you supposed to see them?
Given that there may several exaquintrillion tonnes of asteroids, planetesimals, rocky planets gas giants, black, brown and red dwarves and even reasonably large stars, roaming around that we are only just beginning to be able to see, a large amount of dark matter may well turn out to be regular matter, just very hard to see.