Friday, November 19, 2010

Should debatable data generate theoretical hyper-activity?

At the physics colloquium today recent experimental data was highlighted that has been interpreted as evidence for dark matter. I thought this looked familiar and recalled I wrote an earlier blog post Trust but verify, urging caution. If one does a search on the arxiv with the words "dark matter AND positron AND FERMI" one finds more than one hundred papers, many proposing exotic theoretical scenarios.
It will be interesting to see in a decade whether all this theoretical hyper-activity was justified.

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