The Nature of Reality and the Reality of Nature: Resources and Waste in the Search for Dark Matter

Dark matter detectors are digging up tonnes of rock, consuming megawatts of power, and leaving behind radioactive waste—but no one has systematically tracked the environmental cost of this search. The problem is that physicists have focused on isolating their experiments from the world—building detectors deep underground, shielding them from cosmic rays, filtering every molecule of air—while ignoring how those laboratories intrude back on the environment. This project fills a gap: it asks what happens when a kilometre of rock is excavated, when tonnes of liquid xenon are purified and eventually disposed of, and when a facility built to detect nothing at all becomes a permanent fixture on the landscape. If successful, the research will produce the first detailed history of the experimental search for dark matter, but more importantly it will create a new vocabulary for thinking about the environmental footprint of fundamental science. This could reshape how funding agencies evaluate large-scale experiments, pushing them to consider not just scientific yield but also land use, energy consumption, and waste streams. The project is fundamentally a work of environmental history and science studies—it will not detect dark matter itself, but it may change how future detectors are built and sited.