Yesterday, there was a widely hyped (though not, at least publicly, by the experimental team itself) announcement of the results of one of the premier dark matter direct detection experiments, the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search. Rumors had been flying wildly across the blogosphere -- and through informal conversations -- that this announcement would be of the discovery of dark matter. Since dark matter is thought to comprise 25% of all the energy density in the Universe, as well as 5/6ths of all matter in the Universe, this would have been a big deal. It would have been among the most significant scientific discoveries of all time. However, the actual result that was announced was quite mild: an anomalously high background signal that could either be a statistical fluke (23% likely) or, possibly, the first indication that our dark matter detectors have gotten sensitive enough to see this nearly invisible form of matter.
How did what was likely a statistical fluctuation -- the odds of this being an accident are nearly the same as the odds of flipping first a heads, then a tails, on a quarter -- become the talk of the town even before there was anything announced?
The answer is that particle physicists are energetic, highly skilled, competitive ... and data starved. In contrast with my own field of cosmology, whose culture was formed during a long era of weak and inconclusive data, particle physics began as a precise experimental science with decades of spectacular interplay between theory and experiment. In the past years, though, the Standard Model of particle physics has been so well established, and so well verified by experiment, that the field has been left, like Alexander the Great, with no more worlds to conquer. Unlike the Macedonian, though, particle physicists didn't cry and then die young, but instead began to invent problems for themselves to solve. I don't mean that disparagingly: they have located many points of technical progress and principle without which the field would be unready to confront whatever the physics that lies beyond the Standard Model turns out to be. But like in Ithaca during the Trojan War, for every quietly toiling patient Penelope there are a dozen of frustrated folks who can't stand the wait.
It is this latter group that has, in the absence of real data to grapple with, come to drive the field's culture. The practical upshot is that the field, while always competitive, has become ruthless. The uptake of new ideas, while always rapid in this area, has developed to the point of being nearly faddishness.
With this backdrop, the frenzy over the CDMS result, like the frenzy a few months back over the results of the cosmic ray satellite Pamela, makes perfect sense. Like prisoners fed nothing but moldy bread for years, the scent of red meat can be enough to drive a human wild with desire.
Until a dark matter search experiment or, even better, the Large Hadron Collider, actually sees something unambiguous, this sort of boom and bust cycle will, alas, likely continue. Let's all hope for something soon.