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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone help me understand, is the "breakthrough" this? :

>t is the world’s first and only experiment to have achieved the necessary sensitivity to “hear” the telltale signs of dark matter axions. This technological breakthrough is the result of more than 30 years of research and development, with the latest piece of the puzzle coming in the form of a quantum-enabled device that allows ADMX to listen for axions more closely than any experiment ever built.

Basically, is the purpose to announce that a new higher-fidelity device has come online? If that's the case, I feel mildly bamboozled... creation of a newer, better tool doesn't to me indicate any new "discoveries" regarding dark matter.

I'm pretty bad at understanding anything "physics" above the most basic classical stuff though so it's very possible I'm totally off base here.

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The headline calls it a "breakthrough technology", not "breakthrough science".

Basically this is a new experiment about to begin operating. If nothing goes wrong, within a few years we'll be able to confirm or reject the axion theory of dark matter. Which is pretty big news, all told. A confirmed axion detection would be at least as important to physics as the Higgs result from CERN or the discovery of the W/Z in the 80's.

> If nothing goes wrong, within a few years we'll be able to confirm or reject the axion theory of dark matter.

Well, we'll be able to reject the current axion theory of dark matter. I suspect we won't be able to reject all possible ones. (But I don't know for sure.)

That's sorta speciously true of any experiment. The space of hypotheses is infinte, you can only target one. Ruling out one attractive and well-supported theory would be news on its own. A confirmation of a particle discovery would be bigger still, of course.

You both may be correct. Fundamentally though the philosophy of science prefers a hypothesis that is falsifiable to one too vague to falsify.

The axion may not be an example of the following, but there are highly specific predictions of new particles (etc) that drop out of current theory and knowledge. Antiparticles, from Dirac is one example. If they hadn't been found there would have been no motivation to look for something much like an antiparticle, since those variants wouldn't have fit into Dirac's theory.

So not speciously true of all predictions or most (before String Theory came along!)

You have to admit that the headline achieves maximum separation between "breakthrough" and "technology". I got bamboozeled too.

Yes, the "breakthrough" is the instrument; an ultra low noise receiver with a new type of amplifier. Thus "Detection Technology" in the title.

Here, this should explain it in a bit more detail: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v11/34

It's written by someone more interested in conveying truth than hyping a null result, so it even mentions a woman was involved in inventing it! (rather than the copywriter who instead just mentions the man that gave it a name).

The title nor the article make no claim of such a discovery. The "breakthrough" is, as claimed, the technology that will hopefully be used to detect something leading to making a discovery.

The article describes how a better instrument enables a search in the band of interest:

“This result signals the start of the true hunt for axions,” said Fermilab’s Andrew Sonnenschein, the operations manager for ADMX. “If dark matter axions exist within the frequency band we will be probing for the next few years, then it’s only a matter of time before we find them.”

[for this experiment] I presume he added silently, or did he just diss all the other axion searches out there?

It looks like a nice experiment with interesting new technology, but calling this a "breakthrough" is just an exaggeration (until they find the particles they are looking for).

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