2/8: The Elephant in the Universe: Our Hundred-Year Search for Dark Matter by Govert Schilling (Author), Avi Loeb (Foreword)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 December 2022
⏱️ 12 minutes
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2/8: The Elephant in the Universe: Our Hundred-Year Search for Dark Matter by Govert Schilling (Author), Avi Loeb (Foreword)
https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Universe-Hundred-Year-Search-Matter/dp/0674248996
In The Elephant in the Universe, Govert Schilling explores the fascinating history of the search for dark matter. Evidence for its existence comes from a wealth of astronomical observations. Theories and computer simulations of the evolution of the universe are also suggestive: they can be reconciled with astronomical measurements only if dark matter is a dominant component of nature. Physicists have devised huge, sensitive instruments to search for dark matter, which may be unlike anything else in the cosmos―some unknown elementary particle. Yet so far dark matter has escaped every experiment. Indeed, dark matter is so elusive that some scientists are beginning to suspect there might be something wrong with our theories about gravity or with the current paradigms of cosmology. Schilling interviews both believers and heretics and paints a colorful picture of the history and current status of dark matter research, with astronomers and physicists alike trying to make sense of theory and observation.
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| 0:33.2 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batch with Goverge Shilling and Astronomer |
| 0:38.9 | Chronicleer who is taking us into the part of astronomy that is the most confounding and tempting |
| 0:45.8 | to astronomers, to cosmologists, to people who read Goverge's book. |
| 0:50.4 | We're looking for something that we can't see. We've never found |
| 0:54.5 | and we're going to try to imagine how we can certify. It exists. We need theories. Wonderful. |
| 1:02.2 | But how do we certify it? Now we come to Jeremiah Osterker who thanks to Goverge, |
| 1:07.6 | I've been led to his book Heart of Darkness published in a few years ago. He's an astronomer with firm ideas. |
| 1:14.6 | And one of those firm ideas is to picture again what we can't see. It's called the halo effect |
| 1:21.6 | around our galaxy, the Milky Way around all galaxies. What is that? How should we picture it? |
| 1:27.4 | Yeah, it was a strange situation because as we discussed before Fritz Vicki was the one who |
| 1:33.8 | was the main one who realized there must be a lot of unseen mattering galaxies. But no one |
| 1:39.4 | paid too much attention back then. And only in the 1960s and the late 1960s, there were those |
| 1:47.2 | theories like Jerry Osterker who started to calculate how a massive galaxy, like around Milky |
| 1:54.2 | Way galaxy, could be stable because it's all these rotating stars and gas clouds in a flattened |
| 1:59.8 | disk. And when he did the calculations using the first generation of big computers back then, |
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