You can always count on Dennis Overbye of the New York Times to run full-tilt with any Big Science (BS) press release that lands in his inbox. The latest example concerns yet another in the ongoing stream of “possible detections” in the unending snipe hunt semi-officially known as the Search for Dark Matter.

Dark matter has been experimentally sought for roughly 40 years; no convincing evidence for its existence has been uncovered in all that time. This latest bit of effusive hype (that emanates, according to Overbye from, …a multinational team of 163 scientists from 28 institutions and 11 countries…), continues the now long string of dark matter non-detections. Supposedly, the experiment under consideration was seeking a certain type of dark matter called WIMPs. The experiment failed in that regard, but hope springs eternal in the Dark Matter community.

In the elaborate and needless to say, expensive, detector, an excess of “events” was observed, which could be, it is now claimed, evidence of “axions“, or maybe another hypothetical, a “neutrino magnetic moment”, or sadly but more prosaically, the presence in undetectable amounts of tritium, a well-known (and observed) isotope of hydrogen.

It should be noted that according to Overbye:

Simulations and calculations suggested that random events should have produced about 232 such recoils over the course of a year.

But from February 2017 to February 2018, the detector recorded 285, an excess of 53 recoils.

This over-represents the excess. The original paper has the expectation value as 232 +/- 15 meaning the excess events only number 38. The 285 total does not constitute direct evidence of anything but the “events” themselves. They constitute the entire data set from a year of observations on a one-off, purpose-built system that has failed in its intended purpose.

So we have a paucity of irreplicable evidence being repurposed to justify some spare theoretical fantasies that just happen be lying around unused in in the back corner of some dusty theoretical broom closet. On the other hand, “…tritium contamination will just be one more detail that has to be considered or calibrated in future detectors“. Another day, another retrenchment.

The overall effort here is of a piece with the Higgs boson “detection” at the Large Hadron Collider and the gravitational wave “detections” at LIGO. It is nothing but an exercise in data manufacturing and manipulation as substitute for empirical science. It is the essence of BS, and this science by committee approach continues to make a mess of modern physics.

As to the perpetual snipe hunt, there is one clear message being delivered to the BS community by physical reality. It was as true 40 years ago as it is today: That Dark Matter shit ain’t here! When this simple fact is going to penetrate the thick wall of mathematicism shielding theoretical physicists from reality, however, is a question that only future historians will be able to answer.