Ian Sample

speaker

2,123 appearances 29 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard today

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 — 29 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 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

So one in 200, you know, sounds, well, you know, it still feels pretty certain. voice-verified

But the thing about particle physics is with these kinds of experiments, voice-verified

You do so many experiments. voice-verified

There are so many events going on that you have to go through. voice-verified

One in 100, one in 200. voice-verified

These kinds of signals can come and go. voice-verified

So you try not to get too excited about them until you hit that five sigma level because it's just too much of a noisy environment. voice-verified

I really wanted to know this myself. voice-verified

And as we know, physicists, they really like to cross their T's and dot their I's before they put anything out there. voice-verified

And so this was something I asked Sam about. voice-verified

What is the mood among you lot right now? voice-verified

The simple answer is that the scientists just need more data. voice-verified

They need to gather more data. voice-verified

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