Here’s an ammusing little happening in the world of physics from Nature News.
You’ve probably heard about the mysterious Dark Matter. It’s a hypothesized form of matter that is much more abundant than the “regular” matter we have come to know and love; protons, neutrons, electrons, etc. We’re pretty sure it’s out there, we’re just not sure what it is! There have been many theories as to what this matter is and how it behaves, but there hasn’t been any detection, direct or indirect, of dark matter… except perhaps until now.
A satellite mission called PAMELA has recently collected some data that seems to give indirect support for a specific model of dark matter. The PAMELA team recently gave a preliminary presentation of their data and invited physicists to attend, of course. It seems that tempting physicists with this data is like tempting a pack of starving wolves with a T-bone. Some of them took it upon themselves to bring their digital cameras (with consent of the PAMELA team) to this preliminary display. This data has not yet been officially released into the public domain, however, these starving physicists took it upon themselves to use the data they had photographed and released papers which pointed out how the data indirectly supported their theories!
I’m not sure what to think of this. I think many people in the field aren’t sure what to make of this either. It does seem a bit cheeky… but is it wrong? We’ll just have to wait and see…
Just goes to show you how desperate particle physicists are getting for dark matter data.
haha.
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