SSM Plebiscite

[LP]

Even if I cannot detect what gets blown into my hair, there would no doubt be something that could, maybe even something as simple as a magnifying glass. So direct detection is certainly possible, but what is required to do that may not be ready to hand.

It's not a direct detection PaulP, you are seeing or detecting the effects of something, but it gives you no information of what that something is. It parallels dark matter experiments perfectly.

Even with the world's best electron or atomic force microscopes showing atoms, the images are mathematical reconstructions of scattered beam data, magnetic or electric fields. They are not like photographs.

Even many of the grand cosmological deep space images of quasars and distance galaxies, they are often not optical photographs but reconstructions that are the result of radio interferometry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferometry

To a human eye the data as imaged would look more like the Filth's football jumper.

The next space telescope, JWST, will send back data as images of things that are invisible to humans but detectable by infrared sensor. Detecting and displaying galaxies that we cannot always see! The warmth of the fire without the light, A La William Herschel and his thermometer.