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The John Batchelor Show

AN HOUR OF PEACE OF MIND IN THE JOYS OF THE UNDISCOVERED: 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

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2023

⏱️ 9 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

AN HOUR OF PEACE OF MIND IN THE JOYS OF THE UNDISCOVERED: 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

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.

1910 PARIS

Transcript

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0:00.0

Expand your coin collection with a range of historical denominations struck by the Royal Mint,

0:06.3

whether they're related to changes in the British monarchy or times of conflict.

0:10.8

Each denomination has a fascinating story to tell, from the shilling and the six pence

0:15.8

to the guinea and the sovereign. There is so much for you to discover with the Royal Mint.

0:21.2

Search RoyalMint.com to discover some of the most popular denominations to circulate before

0:26.8

decimalization today.

0:56.8

Give us a result that we haven't been able to find because we were looking for something small.

1:02.7

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

1:10.0

Has macho now been retired or is it absolutely absolutely but it's a very nice story because it's

1:17.2

it's a very neat story to explain how science works. Back in the 1980s, everybody thought dark

1:24.0

matter must be this non-barionic, cold dark matter, weekly, interacting, massive particle and

1:29.7

that's where the physicist started to work on and they had all these theories and they tried to

1:34.0

look for it. But then it signs you always have to think yes but what if? What if dark matter is

1:41.3

actually something else or what if dark matter might be these wind particles but there might be

1:47.2

other types of dark matter too. We can't exclude it. So we need to look for other types of dark matter

1:53.2

too. You need to be sure that some other explanation cannot be the whole or part of the truth.

2:00.2

So what they started to do was looking through this gravitational lensing at the existence of

2:05.6

of dark, massive objects in the outer parts of galaxies. And the only way you can do that is by

2:12.2

looking at the way such a dark, invisible object would bend and amplify the light of an individual

2:18.3

star. And it's a very rare event. So if you want to be successful in that, you have to study

2:24.2

hundreds of millions of stars and you have to use electronic detectors and big telescopes and

2:31.4

computer algorithms to study all these measurement data. And that's what two teams in the 1990s

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