The WIMP and the Dark Matter Hypothesis

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The xenon experiment has for a while now been one of the best out there at ruling out parameter space for dark matter. If they are WIMPs, then there are dark matter particles around you flying through your body right now but not interacting very much. You build a detector which waits for those rare times when dark matter particles will interact with ordinary atoms and deposit some energy. And I haven't seen it yet. It's a very, very difficult thing to do because there are other things in the world that could bump into an atom and deposit someEnergy.

Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a "crisis" in any real sense. But there are ways I think the academic community could handle the problem better, especially by making more space for respectable but minority approaches to deep puzzles.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-solo-the-crisis-in-physics/

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