How to be Really Good at Not Finding Dark Matter

Astronomers have found evidence for something that exerts a gravitational pull on stars, galaxies and even large parts of the Universe, but that doesn't otherwise seem to do anything interesting. Knowing little more about it, they call it Dark Matter. Physicists want to detect and study something strange like that, so we build detectors. Very, very sensitive and quiet detectors that have to be buried deep within the Earth to get them away from any sorts of false signals. One of these detectors, LUX, is located in Cal's old gold mine. It has looked for several years without finding any signs of Dark Matter, which is really, really interesting.

Come hear about some fun things:
*) How do people find such weird things?
*) Why look on Earth for something found in the sky?
*) What's good about _not_ finding Dark Matter?
*) How do you know your detector isn't just broken?
*) Gold mine? What gold mine?

Speaker: Bob Jacobsen, UC Berkeley