According to today's New York Times next Friday a team of Italian physicists
will announce first tentative laboratory evidence of the existence of dark matter.
They just finished a 3 year experiment in a deep mine shaft and they think
they've found a WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle) called the neutralino.
If so it's not rare, about a billion pass through your body every second, and it's
not light, it's heavier than a atom of nickel, about 60 times the mass of a proton.
This could be a monumental discovery because for the first time we've found
the stuff that makes up 90% to 99% of the mass of the universe. "Normal" matter,
that is everything we've known up to now, is little more than a rounding error.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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