Dark Matter Fails Another Test

The Chinese didn’t find dark matter with their super-detector, but they still believe it has to be there.

Rafi Letzer reported in Live Science that the Chinese PandaX detector, one of the most sensitive detectors on the planet, has failed to find theoretical WIMPs (Weakly Interactive Massive Particles), a favored candidate for dark matter. He writes as if this is becoming a broken record. “Once again, dark matter has failed to turn up where researchers hoped they might find it.” PandaX should have been able to find WIMPs if they exist. It would see an occasional flash from detectors when a WIMP disturbs a xenon atom in the huge underground tank of liquid xenon.

But recently reported data from an 80-day experiment at the facility, which was completed in 2015, tells physicists that hasn’t happened. And that null result, the umpteenth null result in the hunt for dark matter, tells us something about dark matter.

It tells us it doesn’t exist. That’s the simple conclusion. But cosmologists insist that dark matter has to be there for their theories to work. These umpteen failures should make them think outside the box. If dark matter doesn’t interact with regular matter at all, is it even there?

“We have to be prepared for the idea that dark matter might not interact with other matter except through gravity,” [Hai-Bo] Yu told Live Science.

If that were true, scientists would be positing a ghostly material that does not manifest itself in any conceivable way “except through gravity.” How could that be?

And astronomical observations, Yu said, point increasingly toward a model called self-interacting dark matter — particles that interact primarily with one another through unknown means, rather than interacting primarily (or interacting at all) with the ordinary matter we’re used to. And the best way to observe dark matter of this sort, he said, is through its effects on what we can see in outer space.

But this sounds absurd, like saying you can be married to yourself through unknown means and bear children. The very notion would defy everything we know about regular matter. It would seem after so many failures that somebody should consider the possibility that the current big-bang cosmology is flawed.

One possibility not on the table is to say there has not been time for galaxies and clusters to move the way big-bangers think they should have after 13.7 billion years.

Behold the dogged commitment of scientists to a paradigm. These cosmologists may have to die off before giving up on their failed quest. Does that ever happen in science? Look no further. And think of all the money poured into this occult belief.