Well it is a very subdued night in physics central with most just scratching there heads after the LUX report on dark matter.

From the detector and apparatus side LUX is operating at nearly twenty times the sensitivity of it's nearest competitor. It's calibrations and backgrounds are a spectacular achievement to those dedicated scientists who worked on the system.

Most expected it to see something for most types of dark matter the counts at this level should have been thousands of events instead LUX saw exactly 2.4 events which is more or less it's background sensitivity.

That means it has ruled out a lot of weakly interacting Dark Matter candidates (WIMPS) and light candidates from most popular theories.

I have no heard from any scientists that doubt the results because of the backgrounds that it is showing so most are factoring in a NULL result for dark matter.

Edit: The paper is out now
http://luxdarkmatter.org/papers/LUX_First_Results_2013.pdf

So we are left with either Dark Matter being very dark and hardly interacting with matter at all or it doesn't exist and both are a little unsettling to science.

Very dark matter with lack of any sort of interaction with matter means it is going to be very hard to do any sort of experiments at least with the limit of science at the moment.

On the other side if there is no dark matter then we need to mix up what we know exists in some form of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) and get a consistent theory. Almost every attempt at doing this so far has been less than successful.

You will get the usual nutcases that claim this shows there xyz crackpot stupidity is thus validated but the reality is LUX signed a death note to most of the testable most likely to be able to tested theories. In that sense the lunatics win because no theory left is going to be testable for a good many years unless we get a physics break through.

I guess it was too much to hope for a Higgs and Dark matter resolution within a short timespan but it would have been nice.

So there you have it ... roll out your theories that have completely Dark Matter or no Dark matter at all none of which can be tested anytime soon and try and convince people that yours is the best answer laugh

I see a few of the bloggers have put there thoughts up ... the usual suspects
http://resonaances.blogspot.com.au/
http://www.science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/lux_no_dark_matter_sensitive_direct_search-123473
http://motls.blogspot.com.au/2013/10/dark-matter-wars-are-over-lux-safely.htm

Last edited by Orac; 10/31/13 01:00 AM.

I believe in "Evil, Bad, Ungodly fantasy science and maths", so I am undoubtedly wrong to you.