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A Neverending Story - Cosmologists Find The Nothing!!

02/27/08

Particle physicists and cosmologists have yet again begun to rejoice over the significance of finding absolutely nothing in their ongoing search for Dark Matter, Unicorns and Fairies. Or so it seems from the physorg.com news of Feb 25:

Scientists of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment today announced that they have regained the lead in the worldwide race to find the particles that make up dark matter. The CDMS experiment, conducted a half-mile underground in a mine in Soudan, Minn., again sets the world’s best constraints on the properties of dark matter candidates.

“With our new result we are leapfrogging the competition,” said Blas Cabrera of Stanford University, co-spokesperson of the CDMS experiment, for which the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory hosts the project management. “We have achieved the world’s most stringent limits on how often dark matter particles interact with ordinary matter and how heavy they are, in particular in the theoretically favored mass range of more than 40 times the proton mass. Our experiment is now sensitive enough to hear WIMPs even if they ring the ‘bells’ of our crystal germanium detector only twice a year. So far, we have heard nothing.” [emphasis added]

Let's see if I've got this right. They're leading the world, leapfrogging over the competition, with the most sensitive experiment yet, AND SO FAR, HAVE HEARD NOTHING!

This is, when you boil it all down, our hard-earned taxes being spent here, millions if not billions of our dollars, being poured into a worldwide race to find SOMETHING WHICH DOES NOT EXIST. How stupid are we to let them continually get away with this?

We were disappointed about not seeing WIMPs this time. But the absence of background in our sample shows the power of our detectors as we enter into very interesting territory,” said CDMS co-spokesperson Bernard Sadoulet, of the University of California, Berkeley. [emphasis added]

They've never seen any WIMPS any other time, why be disappointed now? Surely that's a good excuse to ask for even more money, even though they're looking for something which by their own admission, might not even exist!! And the "absence of background" in their sample, means they found another nothing, yet somehow this is a measure of the power of their detectors? Please, how stupid do they think we are? Oh, but I'm just a layperson - I couldn't possibly understand...

If they exist, WIMPs might interact with ordinary matter at rates similar to those of low-energy neutrinos, elusive subatomic particles discovered in 1956. But to account for all the dark matter in the universe and the gravitational pull it produces, WIMPs must have masses about a billion times larger than those of neutrinos. The CDMS collaboration found that if WIMPs have 100 times the mass of protons (about 100 GeV/c2) they collide with one kilogram of germanium less than a few times per year; otherwise, the CDMS experiment would have detected them.

Here is a statement which begs for ridicule. "IF they exist, WIMPS MIGHT interact ... otherwise the CDMS experiment would have detected them." Now, I'm not taking these statements out of context, am I? Surely the "If" and the "might" allow the possibility that if they didn't detect any, THERE AREN'T ANY THERE!!!

“The nature of dark matter is one of the mysteries in particle physics and cosmology,” said Dr. Dennis Kovar, Acting Associate Director for High Energy Physics in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. “Congratulations to the CDMS collaboration for improved sensitivity and a new limit in the search for dark matter.”

Congratulations, you've successfully found NOTHING!! Now we'll just have to ask for more funds to make our equipment even more sensitive. If one kilogram of geraniums costs heaps, then 25 kilos will cost lots of heaps. We had better get that funding, or we may not win the race to find this nothing... well, we've found nothing, but we must look for even more nothing...

The CDMS experiment is located in the Soudan Underground Laboratory, shielded from cosmic rays and other particles that could mimic the signals expected from dark matter particles. Scientists operate the ultrasensitive CDMS detectors under clean-room conditions at a temperature of about 40 millikelvin, close to absolute zero. Physicists expect that WIMPs, if they exist, travel right through ordinary matter, rarely leaving a trace. If WIMPs crossed the CDMS detector, occasionally one of the WIMPs would hit a germanium nucleus. Like a hammer hitting a bell, the collision would create vibrations of the detector’s crystal grid, which scientists could detect. Not having observed such signals, the CDMS experiment set limits on the properties of WIMPs. [emphasis added]

How about "not having observed anything, perhaps there's nothing there..." Again we've got the IF they exist, followed by the FACT that they've not observed any, so that sets limits on their properties!! I would have thought that if there's an IF involved, perhaps non-observance or non-detection is an indication they may not exist.

“Observations made with telescopes have repeatedly shown that dark matter exists. It is the stuff that holds together all cosmic structures, including our own Milky Way. The observation of WIMPs would finally reveal the underlying nature of this dark matter, which plays such a crucial role in the formation of galaxies and the evolution of our universe,” said Joseph Dehmer, director of the Division of Physics for the National Science Foundation.

The first statement in this paragraph is an in-your-face, out-and-out first rate LIE. The observations they're referring to show there's a force at work which the cosmological community fails to understand. So they postulate this magic stuff, which cannot be seen, and in their mathematical models they shove enough of it into the universe to make their sums add up.

And all without giving any thought to a force which IS known, which we use every day, which has now been shown to exist throughout the universe, and which is 39 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. For the lay folk out there, that's one thousand billion, billion, billion, billion, times, stronger than gravity. Yet they're out there searching for WIMPS, and might just as well be searching for unicorns and faeries, and we're footing the bill for this rot.

The discovery of WIMPs would require extensions to the theoretical framework known as the Standard Model of particles and their forces. On Feb. 22, the CDMS collaboration presented its result to the scientific community at the Eighth UCLA Dark Matter and Dark Energy symposium.

They presented their result, NOTHING - to the scientific community, at get this - a SYMPOSIUM on Dark Matter and Dark Energy! I wonder who paid for that big bowl of JUNKET! And then they've gone slapping each other on the back:

“This is a fantastic result,” said UCLA professor David Cline, organizer of the conference.

A fantastic result if you stake your livelihood on it, I suppose, but not if you're paying for all this and getting ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN RETURN!!

The CDMS result tests the viability of new theoretical concepts that have been proposed.

I would venture that the results simply display how wrong the theoretical concepts that have been proposed are. Deja vu ... I remember going off a little while back when LIGO found nothing, and called it a success.

“Our results constrain theoretical models such as supersymmetry and models based on extra dimensions of space-time, which predict the existence of WIMPs,” said CDMS project manager Dan Bauer, of DOE’s Fermilab. “For WIMP masses expected from these theories, we are again the most sensitive in the world, retaking the lead from the Xenon 10 experiment at the Italian Gran Sasso laboratory. We will gain another factor of three in sensitivity by continuing to take more data with our detector in the Soudan laboratory until the end of 2008.”

I'd say their results expose the theoretical models as being unworkable, unfalsifiable, imaginative tripe! They've found nothing, not even 'background' with the most sensitive tests in the world. And by the end of the year, they'll have found three times the nothing.

A new phase of the CDMS experiment with 25 kilograms of germanium is planned for the SNOLAB facility in Canada.

“The 25-kilogram experiment has clear discovery potential,” said Fermilab Director Pier Oddone. “It covers a lot of the territory predicted by supersymmetric theories.”

Source: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Hang on just one cotton-pickin' minute. The one kilogram experiment, which was the most sensitive and best in the world, found NOTHING.

Time for some heavy math - we know theoretical physicists and cosmologists understand math, so let's exercise the grey matter. I hope it's not too stressing, most cosmological equations I see have lots of ones and zeros in them, and this one starts with a double-digit number.

25 x 0 = um, ... er, ... nothing!! zero, zilch, naught, nil, nada, zip, sweet Fanny Adams, diddly-squat,jack, NOTHING!! Sure hope I didn't confuse anyone with so many interpretations of the answer to that one. Math can be so complicated.

How on Earth can they claim that the next experiment has "clear discovery potential" - unless they're out to confirm they've found the nothing. It does seem like a never-ending story doesn't it, we keep finding the nothing, but because we've found nothing, we better keep looking, for it is nothing that we seek... and we need another 24 kilograms of geraniums to help find it. What's that? Oh, germanium. Well, they might do as well to use geraniums, at $3/bunch as against $3/gram... they're still likely to find nothing, if their track record is anything to go by.

 

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davesmith_au
Dave Smith (davesmith_au) is an independent researcher and Managing Editor of the Thunderblog.

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