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.

Comments

Still Valid

[Anonymous Coward]

A null result is actually more valuable than an inconclusive result would have been.

Re: Still Valid

[Bite The Pillow]

Null result is valuable if you know what you're looking for, can prove that your detector works, and still detects nothing. In this case, we have a detector that may work for some guesses as to what dark matter is.

So the only value here is knowing that dark matter is not any of the things this detector would find. And lest you claim that is valuable, we don't know why it didn't work, so we can't rule out a lot of stuff.

Considering it was $10 million and being upgraded with 5x spending, it seems deliberately half hearted, a first stab to test for false positives, or get lucky. Build the environment and staff, then commit.

I get the feeling that

[Camel Pilot]

dark matter is today's epicycles

A null result is not failed science

[michaelcole]

A null result is only a "fail" if you're not actually interested in science.

Re: Great news everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can come up with some way to modify gravity in such a way match more than one or two of the dozen plus lines of evidence supporting dark matter, you've got a guaranteed PRL publication. Of course every attempt so far has failed pretty miserably.

Re: String theory is just that: a theory

[Anonymous Coward]

The mass of the EM is accounted for in the 5% referred to above. All the "stuff" we can detect (mass and energy combined) only add up to 5% of the apparent total mass required to explain the effects we see.

Re:String theory is just that: a theory

[UnknowingFool]

So, um...indirect experimental evidence is not actually empirical. It is absolutely, completely un-the-same as experimental evidence.,

Um, no you don't understand. There is direct evidence that we can measure the total amount of mass and energy in the universe. However, 95% is unaccounted for if we count all the stars and planets scientists think exist. Therefore indirectly, dark matter is the placeholder for the matter that should exist but can't detect. They could have called it Zoidberg matter and it would be the same.

It's like looking at the ocean. With the naked eye we can only see the top layers of the ocean. Historically, sonar allows us to determine the depths of the ocean to be miles deep; however, until the existence of deep underwater vehicles, scientists didn't know what the bottom was like. They could only guess. They could not imagine that life exists near the Marianas Trench for example.

The case for dark matter is more inductive or abductive reasoning. Given certain premises based on our current understanding of gravity and our observations of the universe, dark matter makes sense. However, our observations could be wrong, or our models could be incorrect.

Yes everything in science could be wrong; however, you must prove that every one of their observations is incorrect rather than assume that because someone doesn't have all the answers, they don't have any answers.