Hmm, someone voted this article a 2 but didn't write a comment about it. You'd think they'd want to voice their objections/disgruntled thoughts on the matter.
Anywho, this sounds similar to the neutrino detector, how are they different? Size and content of the tank seem to be one, but are there any other subtler differences? Dark matter doesn't emit or absorb light, but can produce it when interacting with regular matter?
I don't think it's going to work as a "dark matter" experiment. i DO think they are going learn more about WIMPs. and how much of the universe is composed of dark matter again? I've heard everything between 20 and 90%. just about every article I've ever read on the subject has a different number for the amount of dark matter in the universe.
There is a lot of money wasted in the name of science. Experiments to detect the theoretical WIMP have been ongoing, with no success. And to what avail? How does benefit from Dark Matter studies? What if DM is nothing more than a combination of the optical illusion of the perceived observations of rotating and interacting galaxies whose puzzling behavior lead to crank theories like DM, and the presence of inert elements whose components do not even interact with one another and so which cannot permit the propagation of photonic waves?
Think: Spiral galaxies whose arms spin outward and yet which rotate in the opposite direction, or vice versa? They could lead to erroneous conclusions about the influence of gravity on their behavior.
-- and what is the difference between this experiment and the search for neutrino's --- tank full of liquid in a dark room and if an atom gets hit it gives off light ---- sounds like a neutrino detector to me
"...and how much of the universe is composed of dark matter again? I've heard everything between 20 and 90%. just about every article I've ever read on the subject has a different number for the amount of dark matter in the universe."
The estimate doesn't vary much between physicists, actually, but confusion among laymen (which includes me) is common, because it's presented in two different ways, depending on the conversation.
Way number 1: What percentage of matter is dark? About 84.5%.
Way number 2: What percentage of *everything* is dark matter? (Everything includes energy not bound into matter, including dark energy.) Answer: about 26.8%.
The proportions aren't terribly controversial. All of the controversy is in the questions, what *are* dark matter and dark energy?
Nobody knows. There's really no evidence for any hypothesis.
Which means that almost all of the universe is made of things we don't understand at all.
Alas, the WIMP cannot exist, as has been confirmed consistently over 30 years. The reason is its malfunction at galactic scales, as is also well known, but not really taken seriously. The Galaxy's dwarfs lie in a plane, do not come from random directions, as do newly discovered ones. To mention one of the many other problems, this week we saw a post on having 4 times too little UV radiation for the model to work.
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Jul 16, 2014Anywho, this sounds similar to the neutrino detector, how are they different? Size and content of the tank seem to be one, but are there any other subtler differences? Dark matter doesn't emit or absorb light, but can produce it when interacting with regular matter?