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The John Batchelor Show

7/8: 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

Books, News, Society & Culture, Arts

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 July 2023

⏱️ 12 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

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7/8: 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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0:00.0

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0:25.0

Very under no care and teed. Cox turns another restrictions apply.

0:35.0

I'm John Dutz with Govert Shilling, a wonderful storyteller about the search for something we're not going to find.

0:42.0

But the search is the joy. 100 years from now, 200 years from now, they'll know a much more about where we were right and where we were wrong.

0:50.0

Govert is giving you the best right now that exists in the universe about the search for the universe that we're searching for.

0:58.0

And we come now to the cosmic microwave background and what that tells us about dark matter and about dark energy and how we need it.

1:07.0

The cosmic microwave background as everybody knows is something that was found in the late 20th century by looking at the sky and saying what is this buzz?

1:19.0

Like radio fuzz in the backgrounds that's left over from the very beginning.

1:25.0

That tells us that the universe was.

1:29.0

Well, the way I think of it is the universe was flat when it started.

1:33.0

Is that right? Govert? It wasn't it didn't have dimensions. It was flat.

1:38.0

Yeah, it was it was in a sense flat in a sense that it was very smooth.

1:42.0

No large scale curvature by by off face.

1:47.0

So the main thing of this cosmic microwave background is that it's the last.

1:55.0

Well, it's actually the only signal that we have from very soon after the big bang, only a few hundred thousand years.

2:01.0

So see all this light in the universe that we can study.

2:04.0

And when we study this microwave background with deck radio telescopes here on the ground and with satellites in space.

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