what's the bloody point

Write out a hundred times:

I must stop watching physics programmes on the television.

I must stop watching physics programmes on the television.

I must stop watching physics progr…...

No, really.  I must stop.  Not that they’re not interesting.  It’s just that they make me really cross.

Take for instance the excellent “Sky at Night” last month.  It was looking into dark matter and dark energy.  It focussed on a facility built at no doubt huuuuuge cost in Italy to detect the particles that identify the presence of dark energy.  It does this by measuring these particles hitting a tank filled with xenon gas deep, deep (1.5 kilometres deep to be exact) under the Apennine Mountains.  Only it would measure them if they ever interacted with the gas.  In the years that it has been operational, not one instance of a dark particle has been detected.

Yet there are any number of physicists “working” there.  I say working.  What I actually mean is they are collecting a large bursary for waiting for something that will likely never happen.  A bit like being a dinosaur inspector, or a comedian in North Korea.

And what is this dark matter anyway?  Well, nobody knows.  But it must exist, we are told, as there is insufficient observable matter in the universe for gravity to actually work.  So, this unobservable, or dark, matter must be there or we’d all just fly off into space.  And why is it so vitally, crucially and urgently important that we spend all this money trying to detect it?  Because it’ll enable us to forecast how the universe will end.  In around 20 billion years’ time.

Seriously.  Who cares?

Actually, if anyone asks, I do - as I’m about to apply for a grant to build a dark energy detector in my garage. 

About £15,000,000 should do it.

There!  There!!  Sorry, my mistake.  Another fly...