Seeking Dark Matter, They Detected Another Mystery
nytimes.comOne has to acknowledge that particle physicists are very good at publicity. They keep people on the edge of their seats even for something that might be just a mistake of their equipment.
For months when the LHC came online there were articles about it creating a black hole that would gobble the earth. I'm waiting for a larger accelerator to get built so everyone will claim it could lower the vacuum ground state and destroy the universe.
A cascading bubble of quantum vacuum propagating outwards at the speed of light!
I don't see the need to worry about such things, since we'll never know that they happened.
My personal favorite is negatively charged strangelets... probably never caught on because black holes are a familiar concept.
Original paper discussed here at the time (the article in the OP is also from June):
Last time this came up, it was something that could be accounted for by what seemed like an entirely plausible amount of tritium. Has anything been done, since, to rule out tritium contamination?
>“We want to be very clear that all we are reporting is observation of an excess (a fairly significant one) and not a discovery of any kind,” said Evan Shockley of the University of Chicago in an email.
Random thought: is Evan related to William Shockley?
Gotta love the non clickbaity title