Scientists could be nearing the final phase of the search for dark matter: the enigmatic substance thought to make up a quarter of our Universe.

But if this cannot see any signs of the elusive particles, then it could be that physicists have got the concept of dark matter wrong and will have to come up with some new theories.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24733131

Thoughts anyone??

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I say let's send a probe to bring back some of the stuff.

So now we have neutrinos and Wimps streaming through us all the time.

Are we sure that the missing "mass" can't be accounted for by figuring out the effective mass of the neutrino (said to be zero) as it pushes through the Higgs Field.

Fiat LUX!
Tullio

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Fiat LUX!
Tullio

Guessing here. Let there be light.

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Latest from "Nature":
Missing mass
Yes, Fiat Lux means let there be light.

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Latest from "Nature":
Missing mass
Yes, Fiat Lux means let there be light.

Thank You, tullio!

Every science show claims it's out there. Like a spiders web. Now know detection
of dark matter. Physicists must be banging their heads over this news.

Thanks for the article.

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Theory maybe they can't find or detect dark matter because we live in a region of the galaxy that has very little of it. It seems to clump and be in regions of space, there is alot of it but maybe not around us or very little. It seems very exotic, doesn't interact with normal matter, strange odd stuff and it's obvious very hard to detect.

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The AMS-2 Spectrometer on the ISS is capable of detecting any dark mass but prof. Samuel Ting is very tight lipped about it.
Tullio

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Dark matter was called "missing mass" by Fritz Zwicky in 1935 who analyzed the dynamics of spiral galaxies. Dark energy is called for to explain the acceleration in the expansion of the universe as indicated by studying supernovae as "standard candles" in faraway galaxies. It could have other explanations. The LHC is meant to find the particles predicted by supersymmetry (SUSY) such as neutralinos, which could provide the dark matter, but so far none was found. We shall see what the future holds when it gets to 14 TeV.otherwise we shall have to wait for the next accelerator, the International Linear Collider, to be built in Japan. It's the "Spiral of high energies" foreseen by Angelo Baracca and Silvio Bergia in the Seventies. When an accelerator does not find the particles you are looking for you build a bigger one and cross your fingers.
Tullio

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not ghost chasing.

I too think that there could be other explanations;but. let's wait and see what the best investigators in this field can come up with. Some pooh-poohed the Higgs Boson but it was found as was the Top Quark some time ago.

Dark matter has teased and tantalized physicists since the 1970s, when it was demonstrated that some invisible material must be providing the gravitational glue to hold galaxies together.

CERN, when back from recess will take up the dark matter. I hope they also take a look at dark flow, and dark energy.

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Once in a while at Test4Theory@home I get a physics lesson from Peter Skands, project chief scientist, when one of the jobs we are running in a window emits some obscure error messages. He then explains to us volunteers the reasons behind them and thanks us for our cooperation.
Tullio

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Sorry, it hasn't. They have found a "Higgs-like particle that needs further investigation.

Should they then give back their Nobel Prizes ??

I say that they have found it- There may be more than one type.

Remember that these are all convenient fictions to explain what we observe. I tell my students that there is no such thing as an electron (as we characterize "it"). We can understand and control electricity effectively however.

Field theory and circuit theory can each be applied successfully to electrical circuits but they are quite different in conceptualization.

To the electron! May it be useful to nobody!
Toast at the Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory in 1897 after the discovery of the electron by J.J.Thomson.
Tullio

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some invisible material must be providing the gravitational glue to hold galaxies together.

I thought that most scientists think that there is a super massive black hole at the centre of each galaxy that holds all the stars in that galaxy together, by means of gravity. Now what holds the galaxies themsevles in position relative to each other may be a different question. Bits floating on the surface of a bowl of water usually clump together after a certain time but that is due to surface tension.

Quite happy to be proved wrong!

Close galaxies do merge. I recall reading somewhere that Andromeda is on its way for a collision with Milky Way in a few billion years. I think there are larger structures of galaxies gravitationally bound as well. Galaxies further apart seem to move away due to universal expansion overpowering gravity.

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In the early 1990's, one thing was fairly certain about the expansion of the Universe. It might have enough energy density to stop its expansion and recollapse, it might have so little energy density that it would never stop expanding, but gravity was certain to slow the expansion as time went on. Granted, the slowing had not been observed, but, theoretically, the Universe had to slow. The Universe is full of matter and the attractive force of gravity pulls all matter together. Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of very distant supernovae that showed that, a long time ago, the Universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today. So the expansion of the Universe has not been slowing due to gravity, as everyone thought, it has been accelerating. No one expected this, no one knew how to explain it. But something was causing it.

http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/

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Dark matter is proof that what we don't know about the universe far exceeds what we do know. And we may never have the capability to comprehend the whole picture. But it doesn't hurt to try.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

I think that there are far too many scientists that concoct theories to try to explain what they are observing. This formuala will work if we can find substance X, so lets go looking for X. Perhaps they should be taking the opposite approach. Let's use the LHC to find new particle and stuff, then lets see how they might fit into what we already know.

There is no one single "God Particle" there will be many of them, each one a piece of the unfinished jigsaw. Scientific journals have to make a living. I predict that the LHC over the next few years will find many new particles that change what we already know.

Darn that Leonhard Euler. Why did he spend his Sunday afternoons trying to walk the 7 Bridges of Koenigsberg? Who cares if it had a solution or not? Who cares if this started the field of study known as graph (network) theory? Who cares that it took 100 years or more to bear fruit via applications in such diverse areas as chemistry, scheduling, traffic flow and so on ... . He was just one of those far too many mathematicians trying to solve a silly riddle and concoct new areas of mathematics.

I think that there are far too many scientists that concoct theories to try to explain what they are observing. This formuala will work if we can find substance X, so lets go looking for X. Perhaps they should be taking the opposite approach. Let's use the LHC to find new particle and stuff, then lets see how they might fit into what we already know.

There is no one single "God Particle" there will be many of them, each one a piece of the unfinished jigsaw. Scientific journals have to make a living. I predict that the LHC over the next few years will find many new particles that change what we already know.

Darn that Leonhard Euler. Why did he spend his Sunday afternoons trying to walk the 7 Bridges of Koenigsberg? Who cares if it had a solution or not? Who cares if this started the field of study known as graph (network) theory? Who cares that it took 100 years or more to bear fruit via applications in such diverse areas as chemistry, scheduling, traffic flow and so on ... . He was just one of those far too many mathematicians trying to solve a silly riddle and concoct new areas of mathematics.

Agreed. I think it would help Chris S. and others to actually understand how and why theoretical physicists and other scientists arrive at their hypotheses, which in turn explains why they go looking for X. Yes, it may be that X doesn't exist, but even if it doesn't exist, it still tells us something.

But I guess it's easier just to believe they're blowing millions of dollars on equipment to chase wild geese when most people haven't a clue about such things.

Einstein said: it is theory that determines what can be observed. I think he is right. The Higgs boson is nothing but a Goldstone boson of a Yang-Mills field. See for instance "Recent developments in high energy physics" by Leo van Hove (another Belgian,incidentally) in 'Trends in physics", Volume of plenary lectures of the Second general Conference of the European Physical Society, Wiesbaden, October 1972. The article mentions Peter Higgs, in 1972.
Tullio

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