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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 FatPhil on Wednesday November 19 2014, @09:07AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday November 19 2014, @08:40PM
Nice try. But let me first quote the OP again, this time highlighting another word, showing why your claim, even if nothing else were questionable about it, would still be besides the point:
Dark matter was not introduced to fix a shortcoming of QM. It was introduced to explain the rotation curves of galaxies, which don't agree with the ones calculated using the gravitation of the observed matter. Those rotation curves have exactly nothing to do with QM (indeed, gravitation is the one force which up to now has no generally accepted quantum mechanical explanation).
But you're not only completely besides the point, you're also factually wrong. DM is not a proposal to extend the SM. DM is the proposal of additional matter in the universe which we cannot see. There are two main proposals for DM: MACHOs (which don't need an extension of the standard model) and WIMPs (that's the additional particles).
But even if we take only WIMPs, it is still wrong that SM extensions are proposed specifically for dark matter. That's not necessary, since people have been trying to extend the SM for completely different reasons, and when going past the standard model, there always appear extra particles, some of which happen to be perfect candidates for dark matter.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.