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CERN Confirms Hints of Hypothetical Particle Have Disappeared (arstechnica.com)
John Timmer, writing for Ars Technica: Toward the end of last year, the people behind the Large Hadron Collider announced that they might have found signs of a new particle. Their evidence came from an analysis of the first high-energy data obtained after the LHC's two general-purpose detectors underwent an extensive upgrade. While the possible new particle didn't produce a signal that reached statistical significance, it did show up in both detectors, raising the hope that the LHC was finally on to some new physics. This week, those hopes have officially been dashed. Physicists used a conference to release their analysis of the flood of data that came out of this year's run. According to their data, the area of the apparent signal is filled by nothing but statistical noise. The search for new particles in data from the LHC starts with a calculation of the sorts of things we should expect to see at a given energy. The Standard Model, which describes particles and forces, can be used to make predictions of the frequency at which specific particles will pop out of collisions, as well as what those particles will decay into. So, for example, the Standard Model might indicate that two electrons should appear in five percent of the collisions that occur at a specific energy. Looking for new particles involves looking for deviations from those predictions.
No, but seriously. Dark matter, dark energy (with the "dark" meaning that we somehow know it has to be there but we simply cannot find a way to detect it)... it could well mean that we're simply looking in the wrong direction.
I mean, think of Vulcan. The planet. No, not Star Trek. The hypothetical planet that we thought has to be inside the orbit of Mercury because something influenced Mercury's orbit. Something had to be there that caused Mercury to not orbit the sun the way it should. Today we know that relativity caused the error, but a hundred years ago, we didn't know this and the only logical thing we could think of was of course what we observed in the past: Errors in the orbits of planets led before to the discovery of other planets that influenced it, that way we found Neptune (and afaik Uranus was also found mostly because we noticed that Saturn isn't quite moving as it "should"). So the logical conclusion was that of course there had to be another planet inside the orbit of Mercury and the only reason we couldn't see it is of course that the sun is too close that we could detect it.
Turned out that we were wrong.
And, well, we've been looking really hard for that dark matter/energy now and ... well, nothing. Not even a hint that there might and could be something. Maybe we should at least start looking in other directions?
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