Comment by SaberTail
15 hours ago
I read their preprint[1] and they did a thorough job. They investigated a number of the things I'd suspect if I were looking for mis-reconstructed events or weird backgrounds.
So it's certainly interesting!
That said, particle physics history is full of 3 sigma particle "discoveries" that disappeared with more data. They're collecting more, so hopefully we'll learn more in a few more years.
[1] https://lz.lbl.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2026/08/LZ_Pre...
This sort of thing is really useful for helping people to understand what the purpose of scientific publication is. It's not about presenting finished products to society, it's more like a Discord where you communicate new findings with other authors. Often the reason for a communication is because you found something weird, and you want other people to know about it so they can help you confirm or rule it out as bad data. People shouldn't feel gunshy about this. (My field even has a conference for failed results, CFAIL.) I like to highlight examples of this stuff, because I see so many angry online comments when a paper turns out to be "wrong" or doesn't replicate.
Yep. Publishing like this gives a heads up to those operating similar observatories to keep an eye out for similar events. And it gives a nudge to theorists that might help them start looking in a more fruitful direction, appropriately caveated that it may be a statistical fluke.
You have accurately described a email mailing list. Where in the value-add here?
> You have accurately described a email mailing list. Where in the value-add here?
Pre-prints are basically a mailinglist where you post your paper prior to peer review.
The value over a simple mailinglist is:
1. Stable URL and citation to enable other work and discussions to cite and reference it.
2. Versioning of the paper, allowing updates to be made without having mail out the paper, while allowing everyone to find all prior versions
3. Host for a PDF and data that might be quite large
4. Centralized searchable long term archive of scientific papers
5. Scalability, arxiv gets 30,000 submissions a day, no one wants to receive 30,000 PDFs in their inbox everyday
You think that people's findings should be communicated by email? that their email chains are what should go into the permanent record and be cited and printed out and included in journals and such?
would you include all the quoted text in the reply-alls, or is that too much?
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No so wrong. The oldest journals started as smailing list :)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/information-culture/...
If I had the email address of every researcher in my field, I would never send a mass email to them describing my latest goofy idea. I would, however, send my latest goofy idea to a conference with those same reviewers (if I felt it was technically appropriate and correct.)
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Instead of reading everybody's spam or having to have a centralized body decide who gets to send messages to the mailing list, journal editors filter which things are worthy of publication and in which journal such that readers don't have to wade through garbage or uninteresting results.
They were - in the past. I imagine that right now, Discord is their Discord.
Or this[2] 2007 Science paper on ultra high energy cosmic ray source candidates ("anisotropy") that we had to retract because significance started dropping almost the day the paper was approved.
It was a fascinating experience as a junior member to follow the collaboration internal conversation and investigation on this, because a lot of extremely principled scientists were clearly deeply worried about losing their hard earned reputation. In the end, I am convinced that we were simply unlucky.
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.2843
Reminds me of the FTL neutrinos too, where the scientist where pretty much "hey, something is wrong, can you help us figure it out?" and the general public were the ones screaming "OMG! Physics is dead!"
Then when it comes out as measurement error, the public is all "Damn these scientists are all hype machine clowns..."
That was a fiendish thing to debug; if I recall correctly it was a slightly and intermittently defective connector.
I’m fine with that. Put it at the feet of pop science blogging.
I’m less fine with the time and resources spent on mouse models. They already know you’d get the same utility from a magic 8 ball, but they do it anyway.
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Wow haha, that is a lot of authors! Never seen this before!
Most horrifying is a 2014 Science paper on Ebola with 58 authors, 5 of whom died of Ebola before publication. https://www.science.org/content/article/ebolas-heavy-toll-st...
The ATLAS-CMS joint Higgs boson mass measurement paper has close to 6000 authors: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.191803
I think the final COVID consortium report has something like 30k authors.
> we had to retract because significance started dropping almost the day the paper was approved.
It's stories like this that raise my p(we are in a simulation).
Are there any other candidate particles besides WIMPs that the observation could be from, assuming it’s a real signal?
In one sense anything that passed all their background rejection is a WIMP. To interact with a nucleus through so much matter, it's not interacting electromagnetically. The main candidate for a strong force interaction would be a neutron, and they did a lot of work to model that and eliminate it as a background. So definitionally it would be a WIMP.
They were pretty model agnostic in what they were looking for. They modeled and simulated a number of different ways a WIMP could interact with normal matter. If this is a discovery, more data will be needed to figure out the nature of that interaction and how it fits into particle physics.
But there's always a chance it's something completely new, or some extremely rare manifestation of things we already know about, but have never seen before. And even if it is WIMP, it may not be the right type of WIMP (wrong mass, or wrong interaction strength) to explain cosmological dark matter.
If neutrons are on the list, how are they ruled out from a random decay event emitting particles, from some mineral in the surrounding rock?
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The mainstream TV news report that I saw about this ended with a comment about how we should continue to fund this detector. Made me wonder if the nature of this release involved forces other than purely scientific ones. Apparently funding has already been cut for the successor to the LUX-ZEPLIN detector.