SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
GPS has a new job. It does a great job of telling us our location, but the network of hyper-accurate clocks in space could get a fix on something far more elusive: dark matter.
Dark matter makes up 80 per cent of the universe's matter but scarcely interacts with ordinary matter. A novel particle is the most popular candidate, but Andrei Derevianko ( http://www.dereviankogroup.com/dark-matter-atomic-clocks-idea-call-experimental-efforts/ ) at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Maxim Pospelov ( http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/people/maxim-pospelov ) at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada propose that kinks or cracks in the quantum fields that permeate the universe could be the culprit.
If they are right, fundamental properties such as the mass of an electron or the strength of electromagnetic fields would change at the kinks. "The effect is essentially locally modifying fundamental constants," Derevianko says. Clocks would be affected too, measuring time slightly differently as a result.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26575-dark-matter-could-be-seen-in-gps-time-glitches.html
[Abstract/Paper]:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.1244
http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys3137.html
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 18 2014, @01:39PM
Nobody talks about the side effects of the experiment? Too bad. Basically you're building a massive passive radar system. Cool. You're going to have to "correct" for stuff like meteor scatter and the effect of solar flares and ionospheric "stuff" and maybe drones and spy satellites. Anything that isn't the impedance of vacuum is going to distort the signals and need to be corrected, with the theoretical result you'll have something uncorrectable, aka dark matter.
However the correction data is highly likely to be more fascinating than the probable null result. In this way its a worthy project even if the goal is likely going to fail.
Its like "angels dancing on the head of a pin" is not really a complete waste of time if it results in electron microscopes as a tool to study the theoretical angels on pins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @07:30AM
... But if we laugh with derision, we will never understand. Human
intellectual capacity has not altered for thousands of years so far as
we can tell. If intelligent people invested intense energy in issues
that now seem foolish to us, then the failure lies in our understanding
of their world, not in their distorted perceptions. Even the standard
example of ancient nonsense -- the debate about angels on pinheads --
makes sense once you realize that theologians were not discussing
whether five or eighteen would fit, but whether a pin could house a
finite or an infinite number.
-- S. J. Gould, "Wide Hats and Narrow Minds"