Ian Sample

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1,976 appearances 28 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard yesterday

Ian Sample’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 28 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.

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Science Weekly · ‘One of the biggest discoveries in science’: have scientists found dark matter? · 10 Sep 2026 podcast

So I called up Dr. Samuel Erickson. voice-verified

He's a senior research associate at the University of Bristol. voice-verified

And he's also the first author of the research paper that the LZ detector experiment put out discussing this new finding. voice-verified

nonetheless. voice-verified

So Sam says this is really exciting. voice-verified

So I wanted to know what it felt like when they saw in their data what might be this interesting potential first glimpse of dark matter. voice-verified

I mean, let's be clear that nobody on the experiment is claiming to have found dark matter. voice-verified

What they're saying is we've looked at everything else we think it could be and we can't explain it. voice-verified

So we're going to put it out there. voice-verified

We're going to let people discuss it. voice-verified

And that's all we're doing. voice-verified

The good thing about particle physicists is that they have... voice-verified

pretty strict sort of thresholds, statistical thresholds that you have to meet before you can claim a discovery. voice-verified

So this is all kind of formalized. voice-verified

What you want to do, and we saw this with the discovery way back of the Higgs boson, was that you need the statistical significance of your discovery to reach what's called five sigma before you can officially claim a discovery, okay? voice-verified

Now, five sigma is equivalent to... voice-verified

a one in three and a half million chance of it being just a fluke. voice-verified

So very low, okay? voice-verified

The result that they've got, the result that the LZ detector have got at the moment is about 2.6 sigma. voice-verified

And that is more like a one in 200 chance of it being a fluke. voice-verified

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