Now, I have a bit of a past history of doing
dark matter searches in astrophysical and
cosmological data sets and finding signals
which initially look like they might be a
signal of dark matter physics, but turn out
to be telling us something interesting about
the astrophysics of our galaxy.
And people have asked me, "Well, are you disappointed
that you didn't find dark matter in this search?"
I guess I feel that whenever you learn something
like this, the universe is telling you something
amazing about itself.
You just learned something that nobody in
the world has ever understood before.
And in those circumstances, it feels a little
bit ungrateful to complain that, "No, the
really cool thing I just learned was not the
cool thing that I wanted to learn.
It's something else."
So, you know, of course I'd be happy if we
discovered dark matter.
But if we just keep doing better and better
dark matter searches and we keep learning
more and more about the fascinating history
of our galaxy and the astrophysics of our
galaxy and our local cosmos, I'll be okay
with that.
