This is statistical significance ! WE NEED A BIGGER DETECTOR! GI'ME MONEY!
Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle
111–120 of 152 posts
Re: Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think that people's findings should be communicated by email? that their email chains are what should go into the permanent record and be cited and printed out and included in journals and such? would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much?
Have you never seen a 'personal correspondence' reference?
Yeah but no matter how hard I look I never seem to be able to read anyone else's email. Maybe OpenAI's upcoming models can help me find those references.
Re: Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle
#113I read their preprint[1] and they did a thorough job. They investigated a number of the things I'd suspect if I were looking for mis-reconstructed events or weird backgrounds. So it's certainly interesting! That said, particle physics history is full of 3 sigma particle "discoveries" that disappeared with more data. They're collecting more, so hopefully we'll learn more in a few more years. [1] https://lz.lbl.gov/wp-…
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Re: Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle
#114This is statistical significance ! WE NEED A BIGGER DETECTOR! GI'ME MONEY!
The total cost of this experiment may be a lot less than you expect. I'd encourage you to make a guess as to what you think it could cost the US taxpayer and then check what the Department of Energy contributed [1].
The LZ collaboration is going to run their machine until at least 2030. They have almost no hope of making a meaningfully larger detector, no will you hear them suggest one. Their detector is already designed at such a scale that it contains a substantial fraction of all the needed xenon isotope available on Earth.
[1] https://news.wisc.edu/dark-matter-detection-receives-10-ton-...
Re: Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle
#115> Such behavior could require dark matter to be more complicated than just a single new type of particle. For example, the dark matter particle might have some internal structure, like an ordinary atom, so it would only interact if hit hard enough to excite it to a higher energy internal state I get a little shiver imagining that the dark matter might be something like ordinary atoms. Imagine that other 85% of the un…
Maybe there are even dark scientists trying to explain the missing 15% of the universe! One such scientist, easily pegged as a kook, suggests a model with SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) gauge symmetry, with one sector spontaneously broken by a scalar field, and three flavors of fermions to allow for enough CP violation and masses spanning 10 or 11 orders of magnitude.
Re: Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle
#116[dead]
Re: Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle
#117> If the new result is real, more signals should emerge soon. LZ researchers have already collected three times as much data as they used in the paper. It sounds like this implies they've seen 3x more events but it seems like they would have said that if it were the case. Have they just gathered more data about the single event or is this 4 separate events they're talking about?
Whether or not they've "seen" 3x more events is a little bit of a tricky question, because while they may have captured 3x the data exposure (see sibling comments) experiments often operate blinded to the data. They can develop their analysis scripts, play out various different scenarios via Monte Carlo simulation, and get their whole pipeline working without the bias of actually seeing how each change in algorithm alters the outcome for the real data.
Then, at some point, they freeze their pipeline, "open the box", run the analysis on the real data, and report what they find. But they can only "open the box" once per exposure, after that you can worry that human bias can creep in.
Re: Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle
#118How many years until we've discovered "everything"?
Probably never. We've only mapped like 29% of the seafloor, actually explored like %5 of it, and we've barely pierced the earth's crust.
I never understood why people cite this as a demonstration for how little we humans understand about our world.
The reason we haven't mapped the seafloor is because why would we? It's like arguing we know nothing about biology because we've only sequenced the genome of a fraction of humans or something. It's not that we can't do it, the reason we haven't done it is because there's no good compelling reason to do it. What do we expect to learn from mapping 100% of the sea floor?
As for the parents question – "How many years until we've discovered "everything"?"
I think we may be fairly close to knowing everything we can know and it's quite reasonable to assume we're now comfortably on the tail end of the S-curve of physics discoveries. I hope I'm wrong of course.
Re: Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle
#119i have zero knowledge of physics, but I just can't believe something like dark matter exists. My intuition is that some math just isn't correct and falls apart at the scales of the observable universe. No idea what equations are used for getting to the reslut of having 85% unexplained matter in the universe, but I really assume there's just a constant missing or our math in general just inaccurate or not considering…
> i have zero knowledge of physics
> My intuition
> I really assume
hmmmm
Re: Biggest dark matter detector spots a single weird particle
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm guessing you're alluding to Goedel's incompleteness theorem, but that really doesn't apply to physics. It's a statement about certain properties of formal systems - basically it tells us that for any formal system that's at least as powerful as arithmetic, it's impossible to prove every statement that is true in that system. This doesn't in any way mean that you can't in principle describe with perfect accuracy w…
I don't think Gödel is necessarily what is meant here, there are very good information theoretical(and other) reasons you can never describe a system with truly perfect accuracy. The map has to be become the territory for genuinely perfect accuracy.
> The map has to be become the territory for genuinely perfect accuracy.
Why couldn't the territory be losslessly compressible?