"It's of no use whatsoever. This is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right—we just have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there." -- Heinrich Hertz

This is a weird thought, but maybe it depends on how far you allow yourself to imagine, and what "acceptable imagining" is? I can imagine a few things that Higgs may end up being useful for, sure, they're "insane" or "wild" or "100% not how things could work you're nuts" - but I can still see ways it could benefit humanity if I was right about my imagination, and I'm not going to bother stopping my imagination.

You're not "wrong" per se as you're entitled to your views, but a fairly common alternative view goes something like this.

Yes, while we sometimes do pursue scientific inquiry for its practical application to the betterment of humanity, we also recognize the value of scientific inquiry simply for expanding the endowment of human knowledge about the world. That is an "innate good". Moreover, if history is any guide, it's sometimes or even often difficult to predict what practical applications will or won't emerge from any given scientific endeavor. In the case of Dark Matter, it may not be exactly the case that we will ever directly manipulate it in any scientific application. However, it may be the case that by grappling with Dark Matter we will refine and deepen our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature, and that will unlock future practical applications. Then there is the topic of "human capital": training people to be scientists trains cadres of people with strong skills in science, math, engineering, and computer science, which is an investment in that human capital. Often, they're well-equipped to go on to fruitful careers outside of their initial field of inquiry, producing innovations that benefit humanity. Finally, if it's a matter of cost, many people feel that the societal cost (e.g. federal expenditures on science) are puny compared to other things which I need not name here. Consequently, "basic science" which includes fundamental physics and the study of Dark Matter, is always a great investment for society.

Or something like that...that's my understanding of how that argument goes. Make of it what you will.

Sometimes we don't know the improvements until we have done enough experiments to provide a model that aids in discovering improvements. Electricity was hard (even fatal) to experiment with before it was understood (and frontier work in electricity when running at extreme frequencies or energies is still difficult to understand, and if we're counting all EM in there it goes beyond being easy to manipulate and experiment with).

My guess? If we figure out how to detect dark matter we can get closer to figuring out how to interact with it (other than through the very very very weak gravitational force). Or maybe we figure out that it was a spinning universal frame or something that gives us a better Standard Model.

If, however, we figure out how to interact with it and can harness any potential energy from it, then by definition we won't see any interference in the electromagnetic forces. That would be incredible, that would be as good as having readily available superconductors.

Everything is hard until it's not. Invisible electromagnetic waves are invisible (hard) and frequently deadly (hard!), but now we have WiFi, cell phones, GPS, xrays, etc.

Superconductivity is absurd magic and took impossibly low temperatures until they weren't impossible, and now it's driving MRIs, massively improving medical research, and the realm of usability is constantly expanding. Absolute zero was known reasonably accurately for over 100 years before liquid helium was achieved, and superconductivity came only three years after.

It's the kind of thing you can frequently only judge accurately in retrospect.

I posted this literally yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43726217

Dark matter is a proposition put forward to explain observations. It’s not a result of pretty math, it’s the result of a lot of different observations which don’t align with the current math unless you stick something like dark matter into it.

Well you have things like the bullet cluster that can't be explained by math being wrong.

99% of the evidence points to dark matter being a real thing. And yes, many many phds have thought of the "what if we're just completely wrong" aspect. It's not interesting

Sympathetic resonance. Two guitars in a room, pluck the A string of one, the other A string will vibrate. “Spooky action at a distance”

There are appealing theoretical reasons to think an axion exists [strong-cp]; there are appealing theoretical reasons to think an axion does not exist [chiral]. What this device can do is explore. They may come up empty because dark matter is not axions; they may come up empty because dark matter is axions but the physical parameters are surprising. But people agree that if axions comprise any sizeable fraction of dark matter then its parameters should be between this and that, and this device can find it there.

[strong-cp] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_CP_problem [chiral] https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.02024

I think many people are worried, but unless there is a good alternative theory, the particle is still the simplest explanation. Over last 20 years a lot focus was on WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles), but those searches ruled out a lot of parameter space that was considered sensible. For axions, people have only recently started to design detectors, so if dark matter is an axion there is hope to detect it. If we will not find anything, it remains to be seen what is the best path forward. In the end the dark matter just behaves too much like dark particle with little cross section, so it is hard to replace it by something else ...

I would guess, "It would take a very long time--possibly forever--because scientists don't typically become 'worried' by perceived shortfalls in theories, rather they become excited." Often, that excitement finds an outlet through modifications to the theory or to wholesale alternative theories. In the case of Dark Matter, there's no shortage of proposals to overturn Dark Matter. It seems like there's a new one on HN every day. But, "the more's the merrier", I say! If you ask me (nobody did), they're all welcome. The only catch is, they have got to surpass Dark Matter on all of the many independent lines of observational evidence supporting the theory of Dark Matter, yet in my limited experience they almost never do.

There are already a growing number of astrophysicists who don't buy into dark matter/energy.

They'll just do what they've done for the past twenty years.

Adjust the theory to make it darker, lighter and more nebulous.

The end station of dark matter is that "we know it's real because computer models but due to a fluke there's no dark matter in the solar system so we can't detect it".

> I suspect success in academia is PR and funding as much as actual good ideas...

That is kind of just how the job works unfortunately.

Unless the way research funding changes (I don't know how) you need money to do research and to get that money you need to be good at selling an idea.

We do have a pretty substansive evidence that dark matter exists: from the cosmic background radiation, gravitational lensing, galaxy formation simulations, galaxy rotation curves, etc.

Why is it so hard for people to believe that there are some particles that are not interacting with electromagnetism that we haven't detected directly yet? It's not even a precedent, the neutrino is just like that.

I guess the name "dark" matter was a mistake because it implies something weird, when in fact it just means whatever this is, doesn't have electric (or chromo) charge.