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The John Batchelor Show

6/8: THE UNKNOWN UNKNOWN: 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

Arts, News, Society & Culture, Books

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

PHOTO: NO KNOWN RESTRICTIONS ON PUBLICATION.
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6/8: THE UNKNOWN UNKNOWN: 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.

Transcript

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0:31.0

This is CBSI in the World.

0:37.6

I'm John Batch with Gov. Schilling and his wonderful new book is a search for something

0:42.4

that we haven't found.

0:43.6

But the search continues.

0:45.3

And one of the ways to search is, well, if it's not small, what if it's massive?

0:49.5

What if it's massive, complex, halo object, macho?

0:53.8

What if gravitational lending, lensing, can give us a result that we haven't been able

0:59.3

to find because we were looking for something small?

1:03.5

As far as I can see right now, there are teams who exhausted themselves in the late 20th

1:09.9

century.

1:10.9

Has macho now been retired?

1:13.1

Or is it...

1:14.1

Absolutely.

...

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