Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer confirms unexplained excess of high-energy positrons | Hacker News Reader

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer confirms unexplained excess of high-energy positrons

physics.aps.org

40 pointsraverbashing15 comments

Surprising to see six pages of text in PRL.

It's well-written paper; it'll take a few reads to really grok the measurement. Kudos to the AMS team for sticking closely to the facts.

AMS NASA webcast will be at 1:30 PM EDT. (CERN webcast is already complete?)

http://ams.nasa.gov/

As with the other recent anomalous results it's reassuring that there are these unexplained results still out there. The concern of physicists (and I'm many years removed from being one) is in pushing experiments like the LHC, finding what we predicted and nothing more.

This points to new physics and that's a good thing. The problem with the staggeringly successful and precise "Standard Model" is the number of hand-tweaked variables you have to include to make it work. Absent new physics, if this became all we could experimentally demonstrate, we'd be left with solely anthropic reasoning (we just happen to exist in a universe compatible with our existence).

So yay for positrons!

The interesting thing is that more of the anomalous results are coming from astronomical observations and in general non-collider experiments.

Colliders have been really successful where they can be applied and have given a consistent footing to build upon, but there seems to be large areas still to explore at the weakly-interacting end of the things.

Well, we're getting to energies where colliders are approaching some pretty expensive limits and space provides much better natural accelerators for us to study.

And now for your obligatory bucket of cold water:

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/04/03/itll-take...

TLDR: "Based on what AMS has presented, there is nothing to suggest that they have detected any evidence whatsoever for particle dark matter.... Calling it misleading is generous, because I personally believe it is deceitful, and it’s a deceit that I even anticipated a few weeks ago."

Dark matter reminds me of the ether.

It reminds me that it wasn't so long ago that the thought of traveling from New Zealand to California in a few hours was inconceivable.

Thus, to assume that we have reached the pinnacle of knowledge, be it regarding physics, or any other school of thought, is similar to religious fundamentalism, and seems to be rather restrictive instead of "enlightened."

Who assume that we have reached the pinnacle of knowledge? I did not...

My apologies, I wasn't referring to you specifically, merely adding my own observation.

Proving that you know nothing of the subject other than some casual mentions in the popular press.

Dark matter is a very coherent theory which has been confirmed repeatedly in many different and diverse areas of study. Everything from large scale numerical models of the evolution of the Universe to the exact nature of ripples in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background to gravitational lensing to galaxy rotation curves and more. It's an extremely well confirmed theory at this point.

I don't know the history of aether theory (that spelling is easier to google), but I bet someone wrote something equivalent to InclinedPlane's comment about it at one time. Even if aether was contested and later disproved, the history of science should continue to enlighten our modern views of how we as humans interpret the universe.

There are several ways to interpret ttrreeww's comment: - Dark matter is a bunch of mumbo jumbo just like we know the aether theory to be. IP reacted to this meaning. - Dark matter is vaguely reminiscent of aether theory in that it was built up from observed effects without knowing what the stuff actually was. I like this one better, but we won't know if that's what ttrreeww really meant unless we ask yo.[1]

If a statement is so short that it is easy to misinterpret, why react so strongly to one of the interpretations?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5481430

Sure, fine, science is all arbitrary anyway right? Do you have any idea of the fundamental differences between the work that has gone into the current theory of dark matter and the background of the aether theory? Do you have any conception whatsoever of the level and detail of confirmation of the current theory of dark matter?

If you don't then maybe you should avoid making such sweeping comparisons and stick to talking about things you actually know anything about.

> I bet someone wrote something equivalent to InclinedPlane's comment about it at one time

Doubtful, because an equivalent statement would sport an equivalent truth value for an equivalent statement of support. Substitute "aether theory" for "dark matter" in InclinedPlane's comment, and his assertion of its wide confirmation would be trivially false. Many physicists at the time believed the aether theory to be true, but confirmation remained (rightly) elusive, despite very sophisticated attempts.[1]

I feel the need to point out that the periodic table was also built up from observed effects without knowing what the stuff actually was. It wasn't the first attempt at categorizing the elements. Mendeleev's table was special because, like dark matter and unlike aether theory, it had positive predictive value. It made predictions about the properties of unknown elements that turned out to be correct.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experi...

Ether was also a very coherent theory, widely accepted too.

But not confirmed by extensive observation.

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