Resonaances

The "black holes as dark matter" were termed MACHOs (massive astrophysical compact halo object) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_compact_halo_object

Most of that has been ruled out (see the graph on http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/06/black-hole-dark-matter.html ) and while some black holes may fall into the dark matter category, the observed "if there were that many black holes, micro lensing would be this common..."

The result of those tests constrains black holes to less than 1% of the calculated dark matter... though there are some windows where there is very likely active research to try to detect black holes with those masses along with the cosmological models needed to have an early universe that produces black holes of that size in that quantity.

From https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.10722v3.pdf

> Primordial Black Holes, in particular asteroid mass ones, remain a viable dark matter candidate. Further improve- ments in the theoretical calculations of the production and evolution of PBHs are required to reliably predict the abundance and properties of PBHs from a given model. Even so, it seems clear that a cosmologically interesting num- ber of PBHs can only be produced in specific models of the early Universe, and often fine-tuning is required. However, whether or not PBHs are a significant component of the DM is a question that has to be answered observationally. Novel ideas are needed here to either detect or rule out the remaining open parameter space.

Note…

It's not censorship, it's just a social seperation of professional concerns. Non-physicists have no chance in hell to understand arxiv papers, in fact most physicists don't have a chance in hell to understand arxiv papers, even the ones from their own field. (I'm saying this as a physicist.)

In this case, the MIT TR writes about a bleeding edge, unpublished paper written by a non big-name physicist that will most likely be discarded and never be talked about in 6 months.

The author is from a "Institute of Statistics" and the paper was written in Word with double-space formatting. That means the author is probably not a physicist, and non-physicists have a very low chance of being able to grasp the problems with current models and propose better ones, not to mention accounting for all the astro observations coming out every day.

Looking at the actual paper as somebody with a cosmology background, what he's saying is:

1. Let's take the classical Einstein equations

2. Let's see what happens if c, the speed of light, is not constant, but a function of time c(t)

3. Hm, but to not break the original equations let's also make G be a function of time G(t) such that c(t)^2/G(t) is fixed

4. Hm, but then in the derivations, where there are derivatives wrt. to time new dc/dt and dG/dt terms appear

5. and so on

There is no new physics in this paper, it's just a routine derivation with a twist. The TR blogger is probably not a physicist and/or has not read it, he just pushed out…

Well, why not? As many point out it has interesting engineering challenges, and gives particle physicists something to do..
However, maybe there is nothing to do after all. One wonders if this is a last hail mary for those clinging to super symmetric particle theories or maybe for multiple higgs ideas. Or just for a job. There doesnt seem any sound reason to me to think the particle desert isnt real and wont stretch all the way to GUT energy. Though i suppose 13.4 - 100 may yield extra discoveries of some nature.
I used to read this blog http://resonaances.blogspot.com, though im not a particle physicist, it was interesting. The posts dried up and it was hard not to detect pessimism after a null result via supersymmetry. Indeed i seem to remember hearing no one would want to go into particles as a career now and many will pivot into condensed matter physics etc.
So what are they gonna do for 25 years? I guess the youngsters 25 years hence will have to dust off the particle books.
Meta materials, gravity waves and plasma physics are so much more intetesting now..
I seem to remember reading about plasma wave accelerators the size of a table top many years ago with giant theoretical energies.
Interesting to note the ssc had 40 Tev energy which would have fairly concretely answered the ss question without the need of another machine

> Strumia complains that he personally was not hired for a position that a woman was hired for, despite having a larger number of citations than her. He even compares his citation number to that of a (female) member of the search committee for this job. [... but] almost 1/3 of Strumia's citations come from being one of thousands of authors on the CMS Higgs discovery paper [... and] the statistically insignificant 750 GeV fluctuation at CERN, which disappeared with more data.

Yeah, saying your talk will be about "Bibliometrics data about gender issues in fundamental theory" and then spend parts of it attacking the hiring committee for lacking citation numbers is not really a proper way to behave.

It seems winning the contest for the Iron Throne @ 750 GeV[1] got to his head and he concocted a cunning plan to strike back as the woman who bested him unfairly.

[1]: http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2016/06/game-of-thrones-750-gev-edition.html

The constraints on the signal are:

decays into 2 photons, so must be a boson, integer spin, probably 0, 1 or 2
both signals are 45Gev wide and look like the Higgs signal.
ATLAS has a 1.6TeV bump at 2.5 Sigma, potentially a resonance.
ATLAS has 747 GeV at 3.6 Sigma, CMS 766 GeV at 2.6 Sigma - combines to 4 Sigma although the Look Elsewhere Effect is disputed.
ATLAS run1 at 8TeV did not see the signal.
ATLAS has a 2.2 sigma for the 2 TeV excess that CMS saw in Run1, potentially indicating the 750GeV is a composite particle.

4 Sigma diPhoton excesses have turned out to be random fluctuations before.

http://resonaances.blogspot.fr/2015/12/a-new-boson-at-750-gev.html

http://motls.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/first-batch-of-9-pheno-papers-on-new.html

http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8174

I wish I had good recommendations for you. Quanta can be quite good, but it misses sometimes. Most coverage of fundamental physics, especially theory, fails (for obvious reasons) to provide the key context that progress in the field is very slow and getting slower.

There are a few excellent specialist blogs, like Resonaances for particle physics,

http://resonaances.blogspot.com/

but they are not very accessible to outsiders. Sean Carroll, Sabine Hossenfelder, and Peter Woit are pretty good and accessible

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/ http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/

but they aren't neutral; that's fine since they are personal blogs, but it can be difficult for laymen to get an objective picture of the field.