Editing 3085: About 20 Pounds

{{comic
| number    = 3085
| date      = May 5, 2025
| title     = About 20 Pounds
| image     = about_20_pounds_2x.png
| imagesize = 666x278px
| noexpand  = true
| titletext = In addition to gravity, burritos interact through the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, which is believed to be a major contributor to their popularity.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|Created by a LUDICROUSLY MASSIVE PARTICLE. Don't remove this notice too soon.}}

In general, not all forces interact with all particles; indeed, gravity is the only force that is (believed to) interact with everything. If a force doesn't interact with a particle, then its existence cannot be observed via disturbances in that force. In particular, something that doesn't interact with electromagnetism cannot be 'seen', as photons will pass through it completely unaffected.

Even neutrinos -- famous for interacting with ''almost'' nothing -- still in fact interact via the weak force, allowing them to be detected with sufficiently large tanks of dense material (as most atoms do in fact interact with the weak force, however weakly). A particle that interacts with ''nothing'' except gravity, could only be detected by a gravitational telescope.

However, even if a particle does interact via a given force, an interaction is only possible if energy is conserved. If dark matter is entirely due to a single kind of particle, and the fundamental mass of that particle is ''twenty pounds'' -- an absolutely ludicrous amount of energy for particle physics -- then any interaction would (roughly speaking) have to involve an equally ludicrous amount of other particles being in exactly the right place and time, a coincidence that could easily reach "never in the history of the universe" levels. (By comparison, the top quark, otherwise the heaviest single particle with a mass over a hundred times that of the proton, is still nevertheless around a tenth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a pound.)

Under more normal circumstances, we might still hope to observe the properties of the particle via creating it ourselves under controlled laboratory conditions. But again, there is no reasonable way to focus the energy required into a single particle interaction -- the LHC, for example, peaks at about ten thousand times the mass of the proton, a solid billion times less energy than required -- so that's out too.

Finally, despite all this, twenty pounds is also much too ''small'' to be detectable via gravitational interaction -- its influence on the orbits of planets, say, or the strength of its gravitational lensing effect, will be entirely negligible.

Thus, in the scenario posed by the comic, there is essentially no plausible way to observe more about dark matter while on Earth, and going out for burritos is precisely as productive as any other approach (i.e. "not at all").

==Transcript==
{{incomplete transcript|Don't remove this notice too soon.}}

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