Physicists expand knowledge of what we don’t know

Researchers at CERN working with the Large Hadron Collider have recently found evidence that the universe may not work at all like we thought it did. A team of physicists have discovered three new types of matter to add on to our list of normal matter, antimatter and dark matter. The new discov­eries have been named shy matter, “double negative matter and hiding matter.

For many years scientists have only suc­cessfully misunderstood the first three types of matter. However, CERN’s latest discovery adds two novel areas of confusion to the al­ready murky picture. “Through our research into particle and astrophysics, we hope to reveal more things about the universe that we will never be able to explain. This break­through was just what we are looking for,” ex­plained CERN spokesperson Albert Price.

antimatter and dark matter are relatively well understood, and only have merely a few enormous questions that have not been an­swered. The premise behind antimatter is as follows: energy can be converted to matter and antimatter, and when these matter and antimatter particles collide, they destroy each other and release energy.

Astrophysicist Jenna Quark explains that, “Antimatter has been observed and synthet­ically created, so the only fundamentally problematic question is why hasn’t all our matter been destroyed. This issue is patheti­cally small, so we decided we needed to find a theory that has more problems.” Dark matter, despite its George Lucas style name, could not fulfill this desire either. Even though we can’t see it, we notice its effect on galaxies and light. Scientists were frustrated by this ability to observe and calculate gravitational effects so accurately.This new extra-matter theory adds much needed problems and unexplainable is­sues to particle theories.

Alex Mistifie, the leader of the team that helped find the three new kinds of matter claimed to be “extremely excited for the future all-encompassing confusion our work is point­ing to.” Mistifie and his colleagues observed some very telling squiggles and spikes a su­per-official supercomputer. They discovered the double negative matter first, because it ap­peared to behave the same way normal matter does, but then was inexplicably removed from the environment. Mistifie believes that space-time itself acts as a proofreader that removes these particles, the same way that a good ed­itor removes double negatives from a paper, but to be honest he “[doesn’t] really know what the fuck [he’s] talking about.”

After their discovery of the double nega­tive matter, an intern spotted small crests of activity long after the colision was over. This level of activity was so low that many of the researchers deemed it merely a sensor error, but Mistifie trusted the intern, and labelled the result as “shy matter”. Since shy matter is so quiet, it is barely detectable with million dol­lar sensors, and doesn’t even respond when patient researchers ask coaxingly how its day was, or how the universe started.

As for the existence of hidden matter, Mis­tifie explained that the theoretical particles were “probably out there somewhere.” He later confided that the problem is not that the hidden nature of the particles, but the ways we are looking for them, explaining that they need more time and more money to develop a more cohesive and confusing theory.

What better place to do this type of re­search than at the CERN Large Hadron Col­lider, a facility so important that the adjective large legally had to be included in its name. The collider features a 27 kilometer long parti­cle accelerator that consists of superconduct­ing magnets, an ultrahigh vacuum and many other superlatives. Using this advanced and extremely expensive technology, scientists like Mistifie and colleagues can help us find how little we know about the universe.

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