Seeking Dark Matter, They Detected Another Mystery (opens in new tab)

(nytimes.com)

33 pointsdankohn15y ago8 comments

8 comments

One has to acknowledge that particle physicists are very good at publicity. They keep people on the edge of their seats even for something that might be just a mistake of their equipment.

keanebean865y ago

For months when the LHC came online there were articles about it creating a black hole that would gobble the earth. I'm waiting for a larger accelerator to get built so everyone will claim it could lower the vacuum ground state and destroy the universe.

manicdee5y ago

A cascading bubble of quantum vacuum propagating outwards at the speed of light!

I don't see the need to worry about such things, since we'll never know that they happened.

klyrs5y ago

My personal favorite is negatively charged strangelets... probably never caught on because black holes are a familiar concept.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangelet#Dangers

mellosouls5y ago

Original paper discussed here at the time (the article in the OP is also from June):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23561543

ncmncm5y ago

Last time this came up, it was something that could be accounted for by what seemed like an entirely plausible amount of tritium. Has anything been done, since, to rule out tritium contamination?

Metacelsus5y ago

>“We want to be very clear that all we are reporting is observation of an excess (a fairly significant one) and not a discovery of any kind,” said Evan Shockley of the University of Chicago in an email.

Random thought: is Evan related to William Shockley?

badosu5y ago

Gotta love the non clickbaity title

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse