Lead, SD: For the past 110 days, an international team of physicists have been holed up in the former Homestake Gold Mine in Lead, South Dakota in order to run tests with LUX (Large Underground Xenon) that would detect detect dark matter. These tests were conducted with a container filled with 368 kilograms of liquid xenon, which they promised would detect dark matter, a hypothetical type of matter that composed of subatomic particles that no one has ever heard of yet.
With the conclusion of this stage of testing, the scientists were ecstatic over the results, celebrating jovially in a morning ceremony with the governor of South Dakota, Dennis Daugaard, in attendance.
The results? The scientists were proud to exclaim that they haven’t found “jack shit.”
“These findings, or lack thereof, are better than we ever thought possible,” stated assistant professor Daniel Raynen. “We thought maybe we would find anything for 10 or 20 days, to come up with absolutely zilch for 110 days is beyond expectations. Who knows? With more rigorous and time-consuming experiments, we may be able to go years, even decades without finding diddly squat. One can only hope.”
The idea behind the LUX is that it will help verify dark matter findings by other testing devices such as with the Large Hadron Collider, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, and waving your hand back and forth really, really fast. Now, with a $15 million per year laboratory at their disposal, physicists are ready and willing to continue on finding absolutely bubkes in their experiments with the LUX.
In the event that the LUX finds no evidence of dark matter, physicists will have cause to celebrate the fact that they have been jerking around for close to 80+ years.