6/8: Dark6 Matter is an explanation that remains unsolved, unfound, even unbelievable: 6/8: 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
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🗓️ 26 March 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
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6/8: Dark6 Matter is an explanation that remains unsolved, unfound, even unbelievable: 6/8: 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
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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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batch with Gov. Schilling and his wonderful new book |
| 0:09.5 | is a search for something that we haven't found. But the search continues. And one of the |
| 0:15.0 | ways to search is, well, if it's not small, what if it's massive? What if it's massive, |
| 0:19.8 | complex, halo object, macho? What if gravitational lending, lensing can give us a result that |
| 0:27.8 | we haven't been able to find because we were looking for something small. As far as I can see |
| 0:33.7 | right now, there are teams who exhausted themselves in the late 20th century. Has macho now been retired? |
| 0:41.6 | Absolutely. But it's a very nice story because it's a very neat story to explain how science works. |
| 0:50.2 | Back in the 1980s, everybody thought dark matter must be this non-barionic, cold dark matter. |
| 0:57.4 | Weakly interacting massive particles. That's where the physicists started to work on. They had |
| 1:02.4 | all these theories and they tried to look for it. But then in science, you always have to think, |
| 1:07.6 | yes, but what if? What if dark matter is actually something else? Or what if dark matter might be |
| 1:15.2 | these wind particles, but there might be other types of dark matter too. We can't exclude it. |
| 1:20.3 | So we need to look for other types of dark matter too. You need to be sure that some other |
| 1:25.4 | explanation cannot be the whole or part of the truth. So what they started to do was looking |
| 1:32.3 | through these gravitational venting at the existence of dark, massive objects in the outer parts of |
| 1:39.2 | galaxies. And the only way you can do that is by looking at the way such a dark, invisible object |
| 1:45.5 | would bend and amplify the light of an individual star. And it's a very rare event. So if you want to |
| 1:51.9 | be successful in that, you have to study hundreds of millions of stars. And you have to use |
| 1:57.3 | electronic detectors and big telescopes and computer algorithms to study all these measurement |
| 2:04.1 | data. And that's what two teams in the 1990s started to do. And they spent a lot of effort in |
| 2:10.4 | it. There was a big race. And in the end, they had to admit, well, we did not find these massive |
| 2:17.9 | compact halo objects. Probably they don't exist. And it's not that their search had been for nothing |
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