370 | Daniel Akerib on a Faint Hint of Dark Matter

Hello, everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. You might have heard in the news, um, you know, we're not up on the news here at Mindscape. We don't actually chase after every ambulance and try to fill you in on the latest wrinkle in scientific or other intellectual discovery. But occasionally it's worth, you know, changing the rules a little bit, doing something a little bit different. So you may have heard that there was a press release out from the Lux Zeppelin experiment, or just the L Z experiment. This is an experiment deep underground looking for dark matter, looking for The occasional dark matter particle that will come into their detector. bump into a nucleus and leave a signal. And the new result is, you know, there's many experiments that have been doing this for quite a while and

Now they've seen. an event that they can't explain. And we're going to dig into this for two reasons. One is it might be the dark matter, and that would be very exciting. It's not at all super statistical significant right now. It's uh, you know, a little hint of a clue. It's absolutely not something you should get overly excited about, but it's also respectable, right? I mean, these are people who know what they're doing. They tried very hard to kill it. This is what good experimenters do, when they get a weird signal. Something they didn't anticipate or something that would be very exciting. They really put a lot of effort. into figuring out could it have been something else. And they can't figure out that it could have been anything else, even though it's only one event, it still kind of sticks out like a sore thumb. So I think it's worth getting on top of that, figuring out what might it be, why are we interested in this, that kind of thing.

But the other reason is it is a good lesson in how science works. It's how things actually get done to find something and not know whether or not it's the final answer or not. You know, we get a lot of in the modern age nonsense out there about how science works. And it's good to like really hear from a true expert The process by which we gather data and then interpret the data and try very hard to understand what it could be.

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