Thursday, April 14, 2011
Lack of WIMPS in Italy
The XENON project in Italy has been looking for WIMPS for over a year now. The data for the first six months was publicly released and it detected zero Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. These particles are believed to be "dark matter" and the lack of evidence shows that there are a great number of holes in the CDM hypothesis. The inability to detect this matter is an epistemological problem for the CDM theory. The article is at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/45697
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That result is indeed a blow. However, the number of candidate dark matter particles is quite large, so there are still many DM candidates that are not ruled out. Of course, this impacts the falsifiability of the theory - if there are always unlimited other particles one can postulate as dark matter, no experiment can flasify the theory. Luckily for dark matter proponents, that is not the case, because large categories of dark matter particles can be ruled out by the effects we would observe (and don't) on galactic and extra-galactic motions.
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