I am home for the holidays. Here is a picture of the insides of our Christmas tree.
I think that is a nice tree, don’t you?
***
I don’t know what you’re doing right now, aside from reading this blog, but you need to hold the phone, and by “hold the phone“, I mean “Yo! Yo yo yo!” and I mean “There is spine-tingling news in the world of physics!” Seriously, take a cold compress out of your steamer trunk, and place it gently on your forehead. If you do not have a steamer trunk, get one:
So anyways, here’s the dealio [NYT]:
“An international team pf physicists working in the bottom of an old iron mine in Minnesota said Thursday that they might have registered the first faint hints of a ghostly sea of subatomic particles known as dark matter long thought to permeate the cosmos.”
Then:
“The particles showed as two tiny pulses of heat deposited over the course of two years in chunks of germanium and silicon that had been cooled to a temperature near absolute zero.”
Apparently, these particles are referred to as “weakly interacting massive particles”, or “WIMPS” [sincerely, they are called this, and if you think I am not going to start referring to people as "weakly interacting massive particles", you have another thing coming, and that thing is called BEING WRONG]. They have been “long-theorized but never confirmed”.
I guess the [theorized?] majority of dark matter is either in the form of:
1. WIMPS
2. Something called Primordial Fog Particles, and if you want to read more about that, read this, because Jesus God, I’ve only got so much verbiage at my command for this folderol, people.
This is something I found about the universe:
That is a lot of stuff, in there!
SO THE THING IS:
“The stakes for astronomy and physics could hardly be greater. If the particles are confirmed by tests at other detectors, it would mean that, after more than half a century of speculation, astronomers are zeroing in on the identity of the invisible material that accounts for 25% of the natural universe and determines the architecture of the visible universe.”
DEAR LORD!
I love that these guys were mucking around at the bottom of an iron mine in Minnesota and potentially uncovered something of this magnitude.
IRON MINE: How ’bout them Cowboys?
***
Please note, however: This is not definitive. There exists a chance that the “pulses were caused by fluctuations in the background radioactivity of [the] cavern”. There does.
But I would not leave you on a low note. I will leave you on a comedic one. Another scientist, Elena Aprile, will be testing these findings [as will others] on her OWN detector, which is under the Alps in Italy, and which is called XENON.
They quote her:
“‘All eyes will be on Xenon,’ she said in an interview a few days before, explaining that her detector, which is bigger, will see more events, adding, ‘Otherwise there will be a big clash.’”
ALL EYES WILL BE ON XENON.
Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!
***
I was reading some poems yesterday, in a scattershot sort of way. One I read was called “On Turning 65″. The poem had an epigraph. It was:
From now on it’s late.
-Tomas Tranströmer
I LOVE THAT, I thought, and I searched out its source. It’s from a poem called “Winter’s Gaze”, by the aforementioned Tomas Tranströmer, a famous Swedish poet.
From now on it’s late.
I have been feeling that a-much, lately. From now on it’s late.
It spurs you to action. Don’t wait. Do not regret.
Winter’s Gaze
I lean like a ladder and with my face
reach in to the second floor of the cherry tree.
I’m inside the bell of colors, it chimes with sunlight.
I polish off the swarthy red berries faster than four magpies.
A sudden chill, from a great distance, meets me.
The moment blackens
and remains like an axe-cut in a tree trunk.
From now on it’s late. We make off half running,
out of sight, down, down into the ancient sewage system.
The tunnels. We wander around for months
half in service and half in flight.
Brief devotions when some hatchway opens above us
and a weak light falls.
We look up: the starry sky through the grating.
Tomas Tranströmer












































