You're in for a treat, it's a fun watch!

How do you know if it’s on the verge of breaking?

One of the hypotheses for dark matter is a type of particle called a WIMP, short for Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. They’re sort of like a neutrino but with a lot more mass. If these WIMPs were what’s known as a Majoranna Fermion they would be their own anti-particle. Then they could annihilate with each other,…

I think it’s both, that the increased sensitivity allows for detection of more distant events since the effect of the gravitational waves decreases with increasing distance (probably an inverse square law but don’t quote me on that).

“17 mega electron-volts (around 35 times the proton’s mass)“

In physics massive also gets used in reference to mass quite often, such as the dark matter candidate “Weakly Interacting Massive Particles”, so named because they have large masses (as far as particles go).

The second sentence definitely has something funky going on though.

He did post on Twitter and Instagram every several months, so I knew the project was never completely dead. Instead I just figured he would never see it as finished and as such never release it, so I’m glad I turned out to be wrong because I loved the alpha and am very much looking forward to this.

I hate to be that guy, but you forgot a few zeros, or a ‘k’.

Just gonna do a quick drive-by comment to say that electrons are fundamental particles and are not composed of quarks. Carry on!

Unless there’s something I’m forgetting to factor in, the energy received drops with distance squared.

Not doing so is actually a federal crime (if you’re caught)

Well that answers that, thank you!

Granted newer planes are (hopefully) more reliable than older ones, but doesn’t four engines give you a bit of redundancy in the event of an engine failure? Can they still get along fine (for an emergency landing) with just one engine?

If you read the article you’d see that the type of dark matter considered would cause “unexplained gunshot-like wound in human beings.”

If you expect UPS trucks to be passing through the field randomly and uniformly, then not getting hit would let you place limits on how big the trucks could be or how many of them there are.

Right, cause that’s why we go and build detectors to look for it, because it can’t be detected. /s

No, most theories of dark matter are that it is weakly interacting with regular matter. Most of the time it passes straight through, but occasionally it will scatter and deposit some energy, which can be detected if you…

They actually mention that in the paper too: “For macro masses Mx ≤ 55 g, careful examination of specimens of old mica for tracks made by passing dark matter[9, 10] has ruled out such objects as the primary dark-matter candidate”

The magnetosphere can only shield against charged particles though, neutral particles will pass through a magnetic field without deflection.

It may turn out to be just another aether, sure, but also don’t forget that experimentalists looked for said aether and were unable to find it. We didn’t just one day decide the aether was dumb and discarded it, but rather did not find evidence of it and eventually worked out new theories which could explain what we…

Yes, it’s a bit of a different case, my point just being that we can and have hypothesized new particles to explain new phenomena. A better, more relevant example is the discovery of Neptune. Observations of Uranus’ orbit deviated from predictions, and Le Verrier worked out that another large planet in the outer solar…