You have one (1) dark matter particle detection

67 thoughts on “You have one (1) dark matter particle detection”

1. I refrained from saying this in the post itself, but I see lots of the science press taking this up as serious when mostly it smacks of desperation to keep the big science grant train rolling.

   1. Dear Stacy,
      What would you do with the money and material resources?

      In my view, MOND is an observation spanning about 10 orders of magnitude. No one disputes these measurements or observations—not even the advocates of dark matter.
      Newton is God. And Tully-Fisher is God, too.
      (how you wrote somewhere here on the blog)
      Personally, I don’t need any further measurements. I think we know enough. What we’re really looking for is a physical explanation for our observations, not just a mathematical description.
      The explanation will be relatively simple and subtle. And much of it will become clear on its own. For example, the fine-tuning between the initial expansion velocity and the strength of gravity.
      (Flatness problem fine-tuning ~ 1062
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatness_problem)
      Anything else would look how a miracle.
      Best regards
      Stefan

      1. I would distribute resources more evenly. Great gobs of money is poured into these experiments, with little going to other ideas. Worse, it has devolved into the sociology of Big Science, where to contribute you have to be a small cog in a big wheel, and tow the collaboration line. There are some things that require lots of resources to accomplish, but there is a lot that doesn’t get accomplished in small groups the way it used to.

         1. Thank you. As a theorist, one may have it a little easier in that regard. In general, good ideas always seem to come from individuals whom we know: Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Maxwell, Planck, …
            Sometimes there are two (Watson and Crick)

         2. So I’ve playing around, just a bit. I think AI is going to help here. It’s a force multiplier for small teams. As long as everyone can see the data.

2. Paging Professor Navarro…

   I vaguely remember my high school physics teacher mentioning that one magnetic monopole may have been observed. That was over 40 years ago.

   1. oh yeah it was on Valentines day. search for the 1982 Cabrera Event.

3. One detection does not seem like enough to make a claim that should be taken seriously, but over-hype is pervasive these days.

   Thanks for this blog. Your writing is entertaining, educational and thought-provoking.

4. You say “We’re close to hitting the neutrino background …” in the annotations. I have seen two papers (1 from LZ D. S. Akerib et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 091806 and 1 from XenonT E. Aprile et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 091807), which sound to me as if they have started detecting the solar neutrino background. Am I misunderstanding their claim or your comment? I am not in the field, just an atomic physicist who is trying to understand evidence for dark matter/modified dynamics, since it has become a topic in our field as well. Specifically, via searching for ultralight dark matter using optical clocks, but there is very little discussion on astronomical evidence in the talks and papers usually.

   1. They may well have reached the neutrino background already! I hadn’t been following that… there is simply too much to keep track of. Your comment about little discussion of the astronomical evidence resonates with me, because there is lots to it that seems to get boiled down to “we need dark matter” which launches a thousand well-intentioned experiments without the benefits of the astrophysical constraints. It’s kind of like going to sea to sack Troy with no clear idea of where Troy is. Hopefully I can return to this in the near future.

      1. The goal of a paper on experimental results is not to present an overview of the evidence for dark matter – that information can easily be found in a number of review papers. Whether a dark matter model is viable is directly dependent on astrophysical constraints, these are always baked in. Obviously, the actual location of Troy is unknown but there are maps that make it clear where it can’t be.

         1. They’re not making use of all the astrophysical constraints.

      2. These enormous experiments don’t get funded without establishing their sensitivity to well motivated dark matter models

         1. Maybe they shouldn’t get funded.

5. I’m not at all confident that this is a WIMP. However note that “you have 1 +/- 1 event so it’s a 1sigma detection” is simply wrong. If you are very confident that the background+false positive expected number of events is 0.001 or 10^-4 or 10^-5 etc, then getting 1 event can be highly significant.
   Not clear that applies here though.

   1. So, yes, it appears that what they are saying is that there should be no background in this part of parameter space at high confidence. That part I can believe. So, as you say, seeing something there is intriguing, even without making the obvious leap to it being dark matter. Yet in Table 1 they do list it as a WIMP. That IS subject to Poisson statistics.

      1. That is simply the signal model being tested and the best fit results for a model including background + that particular signal. It is not making a claim about whether the event actually is dark matter, just that when the WIMP is included in the model, the best fit attributes one count to that source. The event could also be some rare unaccounted for background, which is discussed in the paper.

      2. To add to this:

         I’m afraid the n±sqrt(n) you’re using is a, quite bad, approximation only valid when n is large, (e.g. bigger than >20-25). If you want a correct uncertainty you’d need to use something like a Garwood interval.
         (see: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02852)
         In the low count regime uncertainties are not Gaussian; so you CANNOT estimate the significance/P-value by just counting the “number sigma away” something is.

         And you statement that this “cannot be beat” is also, I’m afraid, just wrong. We can look at the shape of various background distributions most of which can be ruled out. If the event were, for example, an accidental (just one of the backgrounds listed in the paper) this we’d expect to see the the pdf to be filled out rather than just one events in a low density region. This is part of what the PLR framework does.
         (see: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.00599)

         Overall it seems that your statistics education is failing you.

         1. Yes, I get it. The odds of an event happening here are very small, and so that’s something significant, even if it doesn’t have to be dark matter. And yet every time something like this happens, it is implied to the public that it is an intriguing hint of dark matter nudge nudge wink wink and I get bombarded by queries as to whether we should take this seriously. Obviously not. So I’m objecting more to the public portrayal than the scientific details.

            My education isn’t lacking, the problem I’m suffering is not giving a damn. I’ve seen this movie too many times.

            1. On reading this the following morning, I’d like to apologize for the unnecessarily insult at the end. (bad stats doth offend my ’tism…)

               1. Thanks.
                  I did not, in fact, think through the stats, so have added the addendum above.

   2. Hi Will. You’re right. I’ve added an addendum to that effect.

6. “LZ is super-cooled to near absolute zero” is a bit of an exaggeration. Wikipedia says that the temperature of the liquid Xe is approximately 178 K, above its freezing point of 161.4 K

   A side-effect of this experiment should be better estimates of the half-lives of 124-Xe and 136-Xe which may be useful in future modelling of nuclei and, since the Xenon is not thrown away at the end of the experiment, it will still be available for other uses like medical imaging (which do lead to the Xe being lost into the atmosphere).

   1. Right – I was thinking of a different experiment, CDMS. LZ runs at 165 K.

7. I have a public prediction that this will NOT turn out to be dark matter at https://longbets.org/975/ . It follows from the prediction that the known list of fermions in nature is complete, which itself follows from the fermion classification provided by the strand model. Future will tell!

8. Hi Stacy.

   Thank you for this post on the “Lux-Zeplin experiment”.

   The single event from the Lux-Zeplin (LZ) experiment comes from 16-Jun-2023, recorded during a 230 day period from 27-Mar-2023 to 01-Apr-2024. Wikipedia (on the LZ experiment) says that as of 26-Aug-2024 the LZ experiment had found no evidence for dark matter. So, someone must have reexamined old data and found the event from June 2023.

   Presumably, the LZ experiment has been running since March 2023 meaning there should be well of 1,000 days of data. It would be useful to know if any other events have been detected in the intervening three years. It would be strange for there to be a single event during the first 100 days and then nothing for the next 1,000 days.

   In Fig 4 (Akerib et al), the single event lies close to the red calibration lines. In Fig 2 (Akerib et al), there are many calibration events along the red lines caused by AmBe neutrons (whatever they are). Hopefully, the single event was not caused by a rogue AmBe neutron!

9. Any possibility that the lone purported dark matter particle detected by LZ may be an ultra-high energy cosmic ray, i.e., just a plain old metal nucleus moving at close to the speed of light? Some of them would be able to penetrate 1 mile thickness of the Earth’s crust and still have leftover energy. References:

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray#Energy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle

   The paper’s table 1 does not seem to include cosmic rays – maybe it does and I am reading it wrongly? Even if LZ has detected a new type of particle, is it stable enough to be dark matter? Even it is stable enough, how do we know that this is a dark matter particle rather than a baryonic matter particle?

   1. Cosmic rays should be entirely shielded by the earth above the mine and the other aspects of the detector’s construction.

10. Re Xenon: That stuff’s expensive! I use to order Rubidium discharge blubs with Xe as a buffer gas. I didn’t know about all the isotopes of Xe, that’s cool. Maybe the ‘detection’ is a double beta decay of isotope 126 or 134.

    1. Yes, it is expensive. They could pay for a large part of the experiment if DOE rules let them manipulate the market.

11. “…. something significant, even if it doesn’t have to be dark matter …”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_xenon
    https://xenonexperiment.org/observing-the-rarest-decay-process-ever-measured/
    The main significance might be lots of payola of various kinds … perhaps involving people who speculate in the price of xenon and make connections within the U.S. federal government. It’s a safe bet that the LZ experimenters will not give MOND the credit it deserves.

12. I have an unrelated question: how can we test MOND experimentally, given current technology and unlimited budget?

    1. Just had an email conversation with a colleague about that, which I’ll paraphrase here:
       A terrestrial laboratory test of MOND would be ideal. Living on the surface of the Earth where the surface gravity is 100,000,000,000 a0, I struggle to imagine one. I once heard it suggested that there would be a brief moment at the right northerly latitude (Greenland-ish) every spring equinox (I think it was) where all the various acceleration vectors (terrestrial, lunar, solar, planetary, Galactic) would cancel out, so a small MONDian patch (basketball size) would sweep by as the Earth spun. So in principle one could build an experiment that might experience a brief moment of MONDian behavior at just the right place and time. Sounds impossible to me to implement, though I suppose one could conceive of building a giant array of detectors that could see the passage of the event. I’m skeptical that the vectors actually cancel well enough in practice.
       If I recall right, that only applied for modified inertia. In some modified gravity theories, one gets strong MONDian effects where the gradient of the potential goes to zero, so Lagrange points where the Earth-Moon-Sun gravity balance would be a place to look. The strong effects occur over a small volume, a few meters, but weak effects extend further. Benoit Famaey & I spent a fair amount of time working with the LISA team to figure out if LISA could detect it if sent to the right place. In the progress of that work, we considered lots of other solar system constraints, and pretty much ruled out anything that would be enough to trigger LISA.
       An obvious experiment would be to send a whole bunch of ballistic beacons to the outer solar system and send them off in lots of directions, then track their orbits very precisely. But one reaches a0 about a tenth of a light-year from the sun, so one has to be very patient about getting there in the first place, and then it would still take remote solar system timescales to build up a signal. So this experiment would require generational patience.

       1. “So this experiment would require generational patience.”

          That should not be problem imo. Its a requirement allready and a fundamental limit to our civilization. We need (more) long-term patience and planing if we consider our future as humanity in general.

          1. We certainly need that. Whether we can actually manage it or not seems rather in doubt these days. But perhaps we can take hope from the great cathedrals that took centuries to construct. Why not have a space mission on that scale? [Money and anti-scientific movements like MAGA are obvious concerns. It seems like we’re capable of doing long-term things, but also have spasms like burning down the library of Alexandria.]

       2. I’m interested in this terrestrial experiment to detect modified inertia. Can you give a source?

          1. It was work by Iorio. I cannot find it at present.

             1. Nevermind, I forgot the actual mechanics. It’s the Lagrange points in which I’m interested, which I can look up.

       3. On this topic the best attempt I can remember at finding a good saddle point is this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.6681 (2012).

          Do we *know* that MONDian effects manifest when all vectors cancel out, or could it be that only the sum of amplitudes matters? It seems to me it’s a pretty critical question and I’m know sure we have the answer from other observations. If the later, all hopes to measure MOND in or near the solar system would be doomed.

          1. No, we don’t know that. At this level, the predictions are theory-specific – as in, different versions of MOND theories.

    2. Can MOND be tested via the fact that we live in the transition zone of the MW? It wouldn’t be a direct experiment, but is what LCDM says about orbits in the transition zone measurably different from the interpolation functions, which are all similar.

13. …and along comes the predictable hype: https://youtu.be/W1DzHryMNPY?si=ZTj2Re2NEfQuwqrK

    1. This is why I react as I do. People complain that I am unfair to the statistics in the science paper and the carefully phrased claims there. Then it leads to much stronger public pronouncements. I guess it doesn’t take much to get excited if you work in a moribund field that hasn’t produced any interesting surprises in decades.

    2. All these kids give me time—time, that precious resource.
       I like them all.
       For me, the main argument against dark matter is McGaugh’s dog.

14. “… how can we test MOND experimentally … ?” Google “guendelman ssb”. Use Guendelman’s 2 new worldsheet scalar fields to get Guendelmanian gravitons.
    HYPOTHESIS: In Newton’s law of gravity, where G represents conservation of energy based on Newton-Einstein inertia, replace the G by (1 + ϵ ) * G, where G represents conservation of energy based on Newton-Einstein inertia, and the small positive constant ϵ represents the FUNDAMOND effect of replacing Weinbergian gravitons by Guendelmanian gravitons (resulting in FUNDAMOND inertia). The reason that the gravitational metrologists have, for the past 30 years, made no progress in more precisely measuring G is that they falsely assume that the hypothetical ϵ = 0. What proves that the preceding hypothesis is wrong?
    https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/04/nist-weighs-mystery-gravitational-constant

15. I’ve long been enamored of the idea that MONDian behavior is inertia based and arises from the emission of bi-energy gravitons from ionized matter. It’s a pretty crazy idea, but there’s a correlation between the luminosity and rotation velocity of stars and gas at a given radius. I haven’t looked into astrophysics for a while, being focused on particle physics, so did a quick search, and it came up with the Tully-Fisher relation. But I could have sworn it was under another name. All I remember is part of the wording of a single sentence that encapsulates it: “….for any feature in the rotation curve…”, or something like that. But the point is that luminosity directly follows from the magnitude of ionization, so perhaps it constitutes evidence for such a strange idea.

    There’s a cosmological coincidence where a0 is approximately equal to c squared times the square root of lambda divided by 3 that’s long been noted and written about by Milgrom and others. This connection, if I remember (too tired to look it up), ties in to an inertia version of MOND. Looking at the factor of 3 in the formula the thought occurred to me that inertia is measured on 1 axis, while the expansion of the universe takes place in 3 axes. Not sure how the math could be made to work out with the factor of 3 inside a square root. But MOND has enough flexibility to be interpreted in an inertia framework, while the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) approach can only work as a boost to existing gravity emanating from baryonic matter. So, should proof someday arise that firmly establishes an inertia based version of MOND that would completely undermine the CDM paradigm.

16. At last my ancient memory cells dredged up what I was looking for – Renzo’s Rule: “For any feature in a galaxy’s luminosity profile, there is a corresponding feature in its rotation curve, and vice versa”. I knew Stacy had covered it in the past but searching Triton Station yesterday I couldn’t find it and gave up. Meanwhile, a solitary sighting of a supposed WIMP might inaugurate a gravy train of a thousand new experiments, just as Helen of Troy’s legendary beauty launched a thousand ships.

    1. I’ve mentioned Renzo’s rule here on occasion, but not at length. I’m finding such things hard to find myself!
       But yes, I think the sociology here is that this provides a reason to keep the gravy train rolling for the existing experiments.

17. Is there a fundamental particle energy that this finding is a multiple of? I’m thinking of a publication in physics rev D of a gravitational theoretical development supporting MOND. The time component of the local expansion being “wrong “ for a outlier is perhaps as good an explanation as dark matter?

    1. Not that I know of, but I would hope someone is checking. If the event is real – which is more likely than I initially gave it credit for, but still not all that likely – then I suspect it is more likely to be some oddity within the Standard Model than something genuinely new outside it. Even in the latter case, there’s no guarantee that it is THE dark matter. That’s one reason I want more event detections: it’s not good enough for some new particle to exist, it also has to have the right properties and the right number/mass density to qualify as dark matter.

18. “… the right properties and the right number/mass density to qualify as dark matter …” According to Prof. Milgrom, “… we still lack understanding of the roots of the MOND phenomenology.”
    “MOND from a brane-world picture” by Mordehai Milgrom, 2019
    https://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.05840
    According to Kroupa, at the galactic scale, Newtonian dynamics needs to be replaced by Milgromian dynamics.
    Is is possible that dark matter particles, such as axions or sterile neutrinos, can explain most of the dark matter phenomenon?
    It seems that hypothetical, massive, dark matter particles would always have to travel extremely fast in order not to violate Milgromian dynamics. Thus, it seems likely that dark matter particles should either travel at the speed of light or have remarkably small mass. It would seem that Weinbergian gravitons need to be somehow replaced by modified gravitons, and/or some profoundly new concepts need to be introduced into the foundations of physics.

19. I’m willing to believe in dark matter, but just not the massive multi-KeV or multi-GeV variety long touted as the solution to the excess mass seemingly extant throughout the universe, notwithstanding the LZ detection. Hot dark matter was long ago discounted, simply because it wouldn’t stick around the small Dodge towns (galaxies) on the wide open prairie (intergalactic space). But if hot dark matter in the form of bi-energy gravitons, originating from ionized hydrogen and helium (that hopefully doesn’t violate the Hawking-Penrose energy conditions) was in continuous production both polarities would presumably not hang out in the shallow gravity wells of the small Dodge towns and just head out into the wide open prairie, where the negative ones would congregate in the voids pushing the universe apart as dark energy. The positive gravitons might find good lodging in the larger Dodge towns where they would enhance their gravity wells, causing disagreement with MOND expectations. Residents (stars) in the outer suburbs of the small Dodge towns would find themselves immersed in an exceedingly tiny acceleration field, perhaps giving rise to a0. And those pesky big Dodge town collisions that ‘disprove’ MOND, logically the positive gravitons would stick around with their respective big towns, with all their glamour and cabarets, showing up in gravitational lensing analyses. Oh well, so much for Wild West cosmology.

    1. One can certainly imagine a species that are mostly unbound and can only be retained by the deepest of potential wells, clusters of galaxies.

20. I forgot to specifically identify the ‘big towns’ with galaxy clusters. Atoms could never produce enough gravitons of sufficient energy to even remotely affect cosmology in the current Standard Model. Freeman Dyson years ago wrote an essay on “Can a Single Graviton be Detected”. I can’t seem to find the original essay, but there’s another one by Rothman and Boughn on the arXiv, written in 2006. Basically what they and Dyson said is that the spontaneous emission of gravitons from individual atoms is way too miniscule to even be detected with even a (going from memory) Jupiter sized detector. But I think I have a way around this restriction on the sheer magnitude of graviton emission from individual atoms, though not sure it’s truly viable.

21. “… tow the collaboration line …” How out of line are the facts about MOND and the possibilities for FUNDAMOND? Consider (a) & (b):
    (a) It might be a good idea to make a collection of, from 50 to 100, brief sketches of possible approaches, both theoretical& experimental, to FUNDAMOND string theory (or FUNDAMOND non-string theory).
    (b) According to Prof. Milgrom, “If we adhere to standard dynamics, the need for dark matter is the only solution we can conceive. It is, however, possible that the laws of dynamics, proven in the laboratory and the solar system, cannot be simply applied in the realm of the galaxies.”
    “MOND—a pedagogical review”, 2001
    https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0112069
    Should we have total confidence about “proven in the laboratory and the solar system”? Maybe FUNDAMOND has already been manifested both in the laboratory & the solar system. Gravitational metrologists might be encountering problems in more precisely measuring Newton’s G because G needs to be replaced by (1 + version-of-FUNDAMOND-data-function) * G. Furthermore, Gravity Probe B’s 4 ultra-precise gyroscopes might have functioned according to design specifications and showed that Einstein’s field equations are slightly wrong.

    1. There are things that suggest MOND is not fundamental, meaning there’d be no fundaMOND. A change to the physics when a parameter reaches a particular value isn’t a characteristic of a fundamental theory (as far as we know so far – can’t be sure of that). And vertical velocities in galaxies seem to land between Newton and Milgrom, which suggests a directional element. Again, there’s no certainty there, but that doesn’t look like a universal gravity theory.

       What makes MOND look fundamental? Mostly those apparent relationships with cosmological numbers. But if you look at the odds, it can be deceptive. If you’re allowed to pick any numbers, combine them in any way (sqrts, you name it) and find a very approximate equality, there are rather a lot of possibilities.

       Then you have other values for a0 in clusters, even in different locations within clusters. The transition happens at different acceleration scales, apparently depending on environment. Nearer the centre of non-cool-core clusters, higher a0 values are found, and lower ones further out. eMOND tries to deal with that via a correlation between depth of the gravitational potential and a0, and I’ve been working on something similar. It’s early days for attempts to generalise the RAR, but one can look at what the range of values for a0 shows.

       No doubt some who support DM would argue that because a0 doesn’t look fixed, as a similar pattern appears elsewhere, this suggests MOND is an artifact of DM distribution, which shows up in various ways. But this is the old approach Stacy has criticised: ‘if MOND is wrong then it must be DM’. That’s false logic, and MOND and the RAR have shown themselves to be far more than just an artifact of DM – DM can’t explain all the data. Flat rotation curves going well beyond the imagined halo is a good example, there’s also the EFE.

       So something is going on that we don’t understand yet, and we need an open mind, especially if showing others up for not having one. The RAR might be fundamental, as it appears in different forms in many places. But MOND isn’t – it looks like some more superficial effect, though a very important one.

22. I was just reading this morning Ethan Siegel’s write-up on the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect, a phenomena that allegedly disproves MOND on the largest astronomical scales. I remember the previous post here covered that topic, so will reread it thoroughly. Having a flat tire I can’t drive to the bike paths, in this perfect cycling weather, until the repair shops open tomorrow, so have plenty of time to read up on this.

    1. Yes, Ethan always leaps at everything anti-MOND. I don’t know why he hates the idea so much, but he is reliably an unreliable narrator on the topic.

23. If FUNDAMOND string theory is empirically valid & really involves replacing Weinbergian gravitons with Guendelmanian gravitons, then the debate about MOND & FUNDAMOND might continue for centuries.
    “Can Gravitons Be Detected?” by Tony Rothmans & Stephen Boughn, 2006
    https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0601043
    Dyson, Freeman. “Is a graviton detectable?.” International Journal of Modern Physics A 28, no. 25 (2013): 1330041.
    https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217751X1330041X
    “Freeman Dyson: Is a Graviton Detectable?”, invited talk at the Conference in Honour of the 90th Birthday of Freeman Dyson, Nanyang Technological U., Singapore, 26-29 August 2013
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-FSFtoeagc
    Section 5.8 in “Birds and Frogs: Selected Papers of Freeman Dyson, 1990–2014”
    https://books.google.com/books?id=PK5EDwAAQBAJ&pg=PR6

24. A question about your response to experimental tests of Mond. Your example of a gravitational force on a probe at a distance of 0.1 light years, gives, I think, about a 50% deviation from Newtonian gravity using the interpolation function (1-exp(-sqrt(x))^-1.
    How much confidence do you have in this interpolation function? Could the deviation actually be, say, only 10%. And, also, won’t there be significant EFE effects at this distance that might decrease the deviation from Newtonian? I am asking because if even this dramatic of an experiment could have equivocal results, experimentally tests are very discouraging.

    1. Yes, this would be in the EFE regime. The Galactic acceleration at our radius is around 2 a0, so we’re never going to see strong pure-MOND effects. Nor does the interpolation function have to have that form – indeed, I chose it because it has the right shape to fit the data around a0 while predicting very little in the solar system. That said, tracking ballistic trajectories could detect minute deviations from pure Newton – much smaller than 10% – with high confidence, and multiple trajectories (radial, circular, elliptical, in-plane, out-of-plane) might help distinguish modified inertia from modified gravity. What concerns me more is that the “right” theory might include some screening mechanism that makes solar system effects invisible.

25. According to Ethan Siegel,
    MOND’s “failure to meet the criteria of reproducing the successes of the already-established leading theory means that it has not yet risen to the status of scientifically viable.”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethan_Siegel#Outreach
    One might say that Ethan Siegel refuses to carefully study MOND’s predictions unless the MOND proponents find a FUNDAMOND that can match & exceed general relativity. Is such a refusal somewhat unreasonable?

    1. More than somewhat. The first time I heard of Ethan was a long time ago when he first wrote something critical of MOND. It expressed some common misconceptions, so I emailed him and offered to talk about it. He did not respond, which was what I expected given the tone he had struck. But I was still naively imagining reason could play a role, so I tried again – only to discover he had indeed responded to my first email by blocking the address.

26. Saying it’s not scientifically viable if it doesn’t do as well as the established theory (he probably means GR, but LCDM is the issue) is an extreme version of the either/or mentality. It’s very often used as an excuse not to look at the facts. But both sides should see that either/or doesn’t work, as both theories have failures, and their successes are at different scales. So there’s a need not to be drawn into that mentality by their attitude, as for both sides either/or can be an excuse not to look at what’s really in front of us.

    1. I did notice that he didn’t specify what “established theory” is, but I expect you are right that he means LCDM. I expect it is as you say, but worse: in addition to the excuse not to even look, there is a willful ignorance that there is evidence beyond the data pertaining to cosmology to test a theory that makes no pretense of explaining cosmology. There’s an entirely different field of extragalactic dynamics that he seems to be mostly unaware of, and to the extend that he is, he presumes it to be subservient to cosmology.

27. Thanks for digging up that article by Freeman Dyson: “Is a Graviton Detectable”. Long ago in the 1990’s to 2010’s there was a flurry of interest in possible acceleration signals emanating from superconductors chilled to liquid helium temperatures, and even liquid nitrogen temperatures. These claims came from both reputable and not so reputable sources. Back then I was eager to see if I could detect such signals. I was operating on the premise that positive/negative gravitons were emerging in equal fluxes from these superconductor condensates subjected to both electromotive and mechanical acceleration. Initially, I thought that would present a problem as the opposing polarity gravitons would mutually cancel each other out, assuming identical isotropic emission from both. But after further analyzing the geometry of the Tajmar group’s spun-up, niobium ring superconductor I figured that sufficient separation would occur so that a coherent burst of one polarity of gravitons would impinge on the detectors surrounding the ring in a cruciform pattern 90 degrees apart. Going from memory, in preliminary experiments, they claimed an actual detection of acceleration signals that seemed very significant. Their hypothesis was that “the rotating Cooper pairs were interacting with a gravitomagnetic London moment”, and “the graviton might gain mass via a Higgs-like mechanism” amplifying the frame dragging effect of GR by some 20 orders of magnitude. They cited work by others, like Claude Poher in France, and work I was doing in the US. Unfortunately, they eventually concluded experimental error was the problem to my disappointment. Here’s a link to their impulse gravity generator work, which I think will work.

    https://tu-dresden.de/ing/maschinenwesen/ilr/rfs/ressourcen/dateien/forschung/folder-2007-08-21-5231434330/ag_raumfahrtantriebe/JPC—Design-and-First-Measurements-of-a-Superconducting-Gravity-Impulse-Generator.pdf?lang=en

28. Oops, I meant to put that as a reply to David Brown’s comment at 11:38 AM on September 7.

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