Mason Inman - science journalist

2007-07-05, 09:28:30

I'd been wanting to write about tantalizing hints of dark matter, the elusive particles thought to make up most of the matter in the universe, ever since reading a New Scientist article about an Italian experiment that may have made the first sighting of one kind of dark matter.

Then more signs of this particle popped up in an experiment at CERN, the big particle physics lab outside Geneva. And groups in Germany and the U.S. were going to look for these particles, too (as reported in New Scientist and Science).

So I was bummed, because I felt like I might have missed the boat on this whole story. But now it turns out the Italian group who made the first apparent sighting of axions wasn't able to reproduce their result. Or, rather, they were able to reproduce it, when they had their experimental set-up exactly the same as before, but when they changed it just slightly, in ways that would help them confirm that the signal they got was real, they didn't see any signs of the axion.

Now they're saying that it was an artifact all along, and that they didn't see anything real. Although stories about how researchers go through this kind of thing—which happens all the time in physics—are interesting, now I don't feel so bad about missing out on reporting on the ups and downs of this saga.