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Comment by sprash | Hacker News Reader

If you are looking for any funding for your new Astronomy or Particle Physics project always somehow throw the popular buzzword "Dark Matter" in the mix. Nobody knows what you are actually looking for and nobody expects you to find anything. However now you have enough time and money to concentrate on "real" physics which in most cases sounds much more boring.

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What do you consider "real" physics? Dark matter is not some voodoo word, it's part of the standard model of cosmology. While we know it exists, we don't know how it works, and theorizing & experimenting about it is crucial to understanding Nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter

Except for neutrinos dark matter is NOT part of the current standard model. There has never been a single measurement of a dark matter particle in the lab. E.g. LHCb specifically build to find SUSY particles, so far has found ZERO events. Also a very big amount of the "evidence" for Dark Matter can be parametrized with corrections to the Gravitational force. Since Gravity is the only force which not quantized yet changes are going to be made there anyway. E.g. It is very plausible that the MOND potential is a parametrized correction for quantum gravity effects.

Why do you call dark matter a buzz word / not "real" physics?

I know of two occasions where the money was eventually spent on researching some sub 1% effects in particle physics, which the kind of "real" (meaning boring) physics you do today. Of course in that process the exclusion limits for some obscure made up dark matter particle were increased. But nobody in the group ever intended to find anything. However getting funding for some sub 1% effect is almost impossible.

I heard similar things from Astronomy people. You just have to talk to some actual PhD. students and postdocs who do the real work instead of the one professor whose whole job is basically to collect money.

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