Except with the “god of the gaps” you leave it at that and don’t actually look for said god.

You’re looking for things in the aggregate though. Any one person may move and “dodge” a macro, but the point is that at a given moment, you have X number of macros passing through, and N number of people they could hit. Since everything is random, people moving around makes no difference.

Consider a different…

The kind of dark matter they consider in this paper is something they call “macros”, since they have macroscopic masses on the order of grams and kilograms. WIMPs wouldn’t produce any noticeable effects in people. As to whether any accounts from history exist? Maybe? It would be an interesting thing to look for, but…

From the paper: “Macros typically have hypersonic velocities (vx ∼ 250 km s^−1) but very small geometric cross sections in our parameter range of interest (as small as 1 micron^2). Hence, their destructive effect is likely to be qualitatively different from that of a bullet; a macro impact typically heats the cylinde…

“the conclusion that such a thing doesn’t exist seems at best a bad one.”

This paper was specifically looking for gunshot-like wounds, a lack of which can be used to rule out a range of possible dark matter masses and interaction strengths.

Yes, thank you! Finally someone who gets it. 

The most popular dark matter candidate so far has been the WIMP, or weakly interacting massive particle, although this is changing. WIMPs have mass and so interact gravitationally, but they can also interact via the weak nuclear force, but this is very rare (hence the “weak”). But it’s possible that it could be some…

Because the dark matter particles they're considering have macroscopic masses on the order of grams and kilograms. That much mass travelling at 250 km/s will certainly leave a mark if it happens to deposit energy inside you. 

Alright guys, pack it up. Randy figured it out. /s

They can interact via one of the other four fundamental forces, as while they leave a lot of the nitty gritty particle physics on the table they do speak at the beginning about theories of “macros” (macroscopic dark matter) actually being composites made of elementary SM particles. The masses considered in the paper…

This is how science works though. You observe something that doesn’t fit with your current model of the world, so you devise new models and then test them. One new model, arguably the simplest, is to add in some new matter that doesn’t interact with light but has mass. This isn’t that crazy, Pauli basically did the…

I’m not sure I track with what you’re saying.

First you find the dark matter number density using the mass density and your assumed individual particle mass. They calculate the total cross-sectional area represented by the population considered, and if you multiply this by the number density you get the linear density…

Yes I understand it’s not a lot of area/volume, I’m just telling you this is how it’s done, and it’s usually done with a whole lot less. The experiment I work on in Canada uses a roughly 5.5 foot diameter sphere of liquid Argon as a target mass. We look for dark matter with mass between 10 to 10^4 GeV (about 10 to…

Not really, like it makes a collision less likely, which affects how strong of limits you can place, but that’s how every direct detection dark matter experiment works.

I looked at the paper, and they consider only the last 10 years and only the US, Canada and Western Europe. Obviously lots of gun violence still occurs in these regions, but I think that definitely constrains your concerns in the last paragraph.

It’s fine that large areas of the planet don’t have people, since they’re…

I went camping with a friend’s family one time when I was a kid, and once we were on the highway the other kids all unbuckled and would even move around inside the van. The parents never batted an eye. It was terrifying to say the least.

Ok, so I googled “Alice in wonderland quantum physics”. Most of the results were about a book entitled “Alice in Quantumland”, a few others were about the “quantum Chesire cat” but the connection there flows from the cat to the physics, not the other way around. There was a blog post basically talking about how…

What the ever living fucksticks are you on, dude? Lewis Carol died when Erwin Schrodinger was 12 years old, 36 years before he would even write about the thought experiment now named after him. Carol published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in 1865, twenty two years before Schrodinger was even born. The two men…

Ah, you’re right, he does slip a bit. Still feels a little too subtle, but I guess it’s not as bad as I thought.