Richard Gaitskell

Welcome everybody.

This is a very special and urgent lecture episode featuring my friend and professor at my alma mater, Rick Gaitskell.

Joining us from Brown University, uh, Rick is the spokesperson of the LZ Collaboration, which stands for Lux -Zeppelin, which is located at the, uh, Sanford Facility in America.

Uh, Denny Sanford was a friend.

But another dimension, you know, it's created incredible technology that's not only aided, you know, physicists and, and, and, uh, you know, philosophers alike, but, but now it's, you know, taking over the world with, with, you know, transistors and software and computers and, and GPUs.

And we'll get into that in the podcast.

I want people to watch our discussion about AI in the classroom and beyond with one of the world's great educators, Rick Gaitskell.

But Rick, tell me, I mean, how do you, how do we keep justifying it? I mean, the CMB world, you know, I'm used to this.

And over the course of seven months or so, the researchers say they saw one very weird flash, a bump that doesn't look like it could have come from any particle we know of.

So as you might imagine, physicists are cautiously pumped about this finding, especially my next guest, Dr. Richard Gaitskell, a physicist at Brown University and the spokesperson for the LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Experiment.

Richard, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you.

So this is a, you know, this is the same process, only it's happening here today.

That's really exciting.

Dr. Richard Gaitskell is a physicist at Brown University, and the spokesperson for the Lux-Zeplin Dark Matter Experiment.

Thanks for joining us today.

Physics calls something a discovery at five, so this is an anomaly, and to LZ's enormous credit, they have published it as an anomaly.

Rick Gaitskell's line was that with only one event, they are not claiming to have seen dark matter.

If people take one thing from yesterday's episode...

Let it be the difference between local and global significance.

What does the spokesperson say?

Rick Gaitskell at Brown is the spokesperson, and he's been about as disciplined as you can be.

His line: "With only one event, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves.

We are not claiming to have seen dark matter." And separately, "We're very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up and the competing backgrounds are very low."