Dark Matter Guys Avoid Plain English When Announcing Their Latest Failures

Behold the great spectacle of scientists who waste gigantic sums of money constructing  very fancy devices that find utterly nothing. Two of the worst examples are the observation failures of the dark matter cosmologists and the cosmic inflation cosmologists (believers in the unprovable idea that the universe underwent a momentary burst of exponential expansion during a fraction of its first second). Their efforts are schematically depicted in the visual below:

The cosmic inflation cosmologists have been using fancy equipment to try to find something called primordial b-modes. They have found no such thing. The dark matter cosmologists are trying to find the first proof that dark matter exists. They have found no such thing. 

But you might not realize that from reading the latest press account of the failure of those searching for dark matter. We do not get an honest headline saying something like this:

"The Latest Result of the Dark Matter Search: Still Nothing Found"

Instead we get this headline used by the press release announcing the failure to observe any dark matter:

"The LZ experiment's first science run sets new constraints on dark matter interactions"

Such is the rule for scientists running grand projects that find nothing. They seem to never candidly confess that they found nothing, and act like the guy imagined below:

A search on the Cornell Physics paper pre-print server for titles containing the phrase "new constraints" gives 442 results, indicating that physicists are very massively using the term "new constraints" to describe their failures to observe something. A search for the phrase "finds nothing" on the same server gives zero matches, even though a large fraction of the papers returned by the first query should have used the phrase "finds nothing" rather then "new constraints." A search for the phrase "found nothing" on the same server returns only three papers.

When I search using Google Scholar for the latest results of the fruitless search for the primordial b-modes sought by the cosmic inflation theorists, I don't get any candid "nothing found" paper titles. Instead at the top of my results are two papers talking about finding nothing, but using the word "constraint":

Diving into the press release announcing the failed LZ experiment, we get almost no mention of the "nothing found" result. We get euphemistic text like this:

"The LUX ZEPLIN (LZ) Dark Matter experiment is a large research effort involving over 200 scientists and engineers at 40 institutions worldwide...The LZ Collaboration recently released the results of the first experimental run of the LZ dark matter experiment. These results, published in Physical Review Letters, set new constraints on the interactions between dark matter and other particles, which could inform future searches for weakly-interacting dark matter candidates."

In the midst of all of the long jargon-heavy gobbledygook and euphemisms, there is a confession that only extremely careful readers will be able to notice. Below I underline and boldface that confession:

" 'Though our first search resulted in no dark matter signals, it has constrained properties of dark matter, which in turn allows for dark matter theories to be refined,'  said Williams. 'Many of the signals we searched for in this work had not been searched for before.' "

No trace of any plain speaking can be found in the abstract or title of the scientific paper announcing these results. We hear no mention of the observational failure that occurred, at least no mention using any language that even 1% of the population could understand.  The closest the paper comes to confessing the total failure that occurred is when it says, "No significant evidence of an excess is found in either the isoscalar or isovector bases," a statement that virtually no one but a dark matter scientist will recognize as a statement of observation failure.

In the January press release Williams referred to the failure of "our first search." But an August article referred to gathering "280 days of data" using the same LZ detector.  That article's headline was "LZ Experiment Sets New Record in Search for Dark Matter," which sounds like some kind of success, even though it actually was a failure to observe any dark matter. The article never told us what this record  was. We merely had the claim that a "record-setting experiment" had occurred. 

Peering into the article, I get this quote: "The results analyze 280 days’ worth of data: a new set of 220 days (collected between March 2023 and April 2024) combined with 60 earlier days from LZ’s first run." Referring to the failure of "our first search," Williams has given us a quote with a "we've only just begun" sound to it, but the truth is that the LZ experiment has been running for 280 days without success. Each of those days can be considered a search. Instead of referring to the failure of "our first search," Williams should have referred to the failure of the first 280 searches. 

Another boondoggle scientist project is what I call Dirty DUNE. It is the DUNE project, DUNE standing for Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment. Involving gigantic amounts of digging with a large chance of groundwater contamination, the project may well turn out to be an environmental nightmare, for reasons I describe in my post here. The project advocates have made unfounded and misleading attempts to try to insinuate that the project has some relevance to the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem. Studying neutrinos will shed no light on that problem. 

In the latest attempt to gin up some rationale for this misguided and environmentally reckless project, some scientists have resorted to generating fake data and appealing to never-observed extra dimensions. We read this:

" 'We simulated several years of neutrino data from the DUNE experiment using computational models,'  Masud said. 'By analyzing both the low-energy and high-energy effects of large extra dimensions on neutrino oscillation probabilities, we statistically assessed DUNE's ability to constrain the potential size of these extra dimensions, assuming they exist in nature.' "

Get the idea? They didn't use real data gathered by the DUNE experiment, but instead used fake data that was merely "simulated." It was kind of like some football coach that justifies his expensive million-dollar player salaries by using a computer program that generates fake football statistics for the years 2026 and 2027.  And how about that appeal to "these extra dimensions, assuming they exist in nature"?  That part is like having your fake football statistics for future years include lots of touchdowns scored by the cheerleaders, and lots of 100-yard field goals kicked by the referees.  

I discussed how the physicists and cosmologists use language the average person won't understand when they write up papers describing their observation failures. But at least they write up some kind of paper. It's different when neuroscientists find nothing after long eager searching. Neuroscientists have been using more and more powerful microscopes, examining endless samples of brain tissue, looking for any trace of human learned knowledge stored in brain tissue. They have found nothing of the sort. They found not a single word stored in brain tissue, and not even a single letter of the alphabet.  They found not a single image of something someone saw in the past, and not even a single pixel of such an image. They found not a single remembered sentence, and not a single syllable of such a sentence.

Do our neuroscientists write up papers describing such failures, so relevant to the topic of whether brains store memories? No, neuroscientists just avoid doing that, and hope very much you won't ever notice the observation failure. If memories were actually stored in human brains, they would have been discovered by microscopic examination around the year 1960, shortly after the genetic code was discovered. For a full post about this topic, read my January 16th post at https://headtruth.blogspot.com/ .