See what I mean?The future of dark matter research will ultimately be decided by politicians
See what I mean?Unfortunately, the quest to finally observe dark matter is hitting a wall. Simply put we need more particle colliders. And whether they get built is, seemingly, completely up to the powers-that-be in the European and US political arenas.
It comes down to politics ... not science.
And there you have it folks. They not only haven’t found dark matter, they admit that they haven’t produced much of anything that’s been practical (i.e., something that does the taxpayer any good). But … that doesn't stop them from begging for more …The development of particle colliders has been one of humankind’s most expensive scientific endeavors. However, they haven’t produced much in the way of practical results.
That makes sense. If you’re looking for gnomes, you just need to look wherever gnomes might be hiding … regardless of the cost.Going forward, researchers hope to create bigger, better, and more diverse colliders capable of smashing particles together at higher speeds. They also want to build colliders for different types of particles including muons and antimatter.
That’s where the excitement comes in for scientists pursuing the theory of dark matter. One of the best explanations for why we’ve, so far, been unable to observe dark matter is because we’re not looking in all the right places.
Ohhh, and it’s going to cost and that’s where politicians taking the money from US to pay for it comes into play …
HUNDREDS of proposals. Yes indeed, the particle physics community has $$$$ in their starry eyes. BUT ...Whether or not these machines — whose price tags start in the billions — get made is completely up to government funding.
In the US, a small body of physicists called the “Snowmass Community Planning Exercise” is currently considering hundreds of proposals from the particle physics community to determine which recommendations it’ll make to the Department of Energy.
Really? What is the “immense value” to the scientific community … if there have been no practical results? Doesn’t that mean there have been no results about anything that matters? Is it just bath water that we’ve been funding for 50 years? Because no baby has been found. By “immense value”, perhaps the author really means all the nice homes, car, vacations, IRAs, jewelry, good doctors, kids’ educations the bath water has paid for?Despite the immense value the LHC, for example, has had to the scientific community, its usefulness is increasingly hard to explain to the general public and there’s currently little in the way of practical applications for the data it produces.
Well it ought to be … after more than 50 years of spending billions and billions of dollars. Money doesn’t grow on trees. Scientists are taking it from We The People and we aren’t seeing ANY benefit from what they’re doing. This article admits as much. But then the article says …Asking EU member countries or the US government to shell out for more colliders is seemingly becoming a tougher sell with each passing year.
… and I disagree. Scientists don’t have anything to show for the expense. Just some instruments and a stack of gnomes that they can’t seem to prove exist without invoking other gnomes. Gnomes that don’t impact on our lives in any way that I can tell or they can explain. That wouldn’t impact our lives at this point, even if they did exist. No, maybe the REAL problem is that dark matter does not exist … and scientists have wasted billions and billions of dollars pursuing it, AND WON'T ADMIT IT. And now want to waste even more billions.It’s not that scientists have nothing to show for the expense, the real problem is that solving the mystery of dark matter is just really freaking hard.
Next the author writes …
… to which I say EXACTLY. Because DM doesn’t impact our lives other than to soak up billions of dollars in resources that we need for other things.It’s nearly impossible to put the importance of finally realizing (or dismissing) the theory of dark matter into perspective. Today, solving that particular puzzle would come with a slew of “Eureka!” headlines and, in a few months, the general public will have forgotten all about it.
Sorry, but this just another pie in the sky claim with nothing to back it up. If you ask me, scientists don’t want to figure out how the universe works. If they did, they pay more attention to what the EU community is saying. And what other alternatives have been suggesting. But they get dismissed out of hand. No … the REAL objective of mainstream scientists is to keep the status quo because that means lots of funding FOR THEM AND ONLY THEM. Because they have mortgages to pay.But a hundred years or so after we discover the truth about dark matter, future generations will be able to trace almost all of their “modern” technology and scientific breakthroughs back to the moment scientists figured out what the universe was made of.
LOL! Don’t you love how the author keep waffling back and forth? Well using his own logic … may I suggest that maybe unicorns are even more valuable than DM. Who knows … right? Maybe we should be spending the billions to find them instead? Personally, I can see immense value, RIGHT NOW, if we better understood the electromagnetism and plasma unicorn. Maybe that’s what we should be spending the billions on, rather than DM? I think public could see the value in THAT. But instead of hearing that, the public will be propagandized with spaghetti illogic like this …It’s not that dark matter itself is valuable (though, who knows, right?).
... just to sell wasting more money on DM. But this logic is GARBAGE. Quantum computers have NOTHING to do with the DM search. Linking them together is sheer desperation. It’s dredging the bottom of the barrel to try and come up with a justification for continuing their fruitless search. But they’re going to use such illogic anyway ... to give the politicians a rational, tenuous as it may be, to go forward with all the funding …The gist is that we currently have an incomplete model. If dark matter doesn’t exist, then we’ve got far more of the universe to figure out than we already have. If it does exist, and we’re close to observing it, then we’re on the cusp of having a basic understanding of how the universe works.
That’s a point of knowledge from which we can program simulations with complete confidence, build better quantum computers and systems, and start working on technology that exploits the fully realized relationships between matter, antimatter, and dark matter. In short, that’s when the magic really starts.
LOL! I can think of a lot of things. But they don’t buy the establishment physicists nice houses, cars, etc. etc. etc. So they’re a non-starter.Whether that happens over the next 30 years or the next 300 hundred could be entirely dependent on whether physicists can convince politicians to pour more money into these machines with no guarantees they’ll actually find what they’re looking for.
On the one hand, there’s so many other practical things we could put hundreds of billions of Euros into.
But, on the other, what could be more important than solving the biggest mystery in the entire universe?
Just saying ...