Further to Barry Arrington’s Chasing shadows: How long can we keep looking for dark matter?, curiously, New Scientist has been asking the same question:
We’ve known we need dark matter since the 1930s, but still haven’t found it. The search can’t go on forever
Even CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, our best and by far most expensive tool for finding it, has so far drawn a blank. How much longer can we keep looking?
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Perhaps we have simply been looking for the wrong thing. Perhaps dark matter particles are very massive, rather than fairly light, as many assume. The first experiments are now under way to detect any such “superheavy” dark matter that might have been created when the universe was just getting started (see “WIMPZILLAs: Monster particles from the dawn of time”).
Or perhaps the true identity of dark matter is so unexpected that we haven’t even thought to look for it, despite potential evidence lurking somewhere in the vast quantities of data from the LHC. More.
Suggested answer: Usually, things that can’t go on forever don’t. But when people are determined to believe something, they just keep it going by will power alone. Will we end up inventing dark matter, so we can go on having a basis for believing what we now believe?
In a high tech age, maybe it won’t be like Copernicus vs Galileo any more, as New Scientist goes on to suggest. Maybe people will just create their own reality. The heck with facts!
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