Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

I'm Jim Alleili and my mission is to interview

the most fascinating and important scientists alive today and to find out what makes them tick.

My guest today studies the universe, but not by spending nights looking out at the dark skies through a telescope, rather he

creates the cosmos on computers. Carlos Frank is now Ogden Professor of

Computational Cosmology at the University of Durham. He's also one of the gang of four of astrophysicists who 30 years ago

came up with one of the most important theories in their field. They worked out that the universe is full of cold dark matter.

As we'll be discussing, this mysterious missing mass is, well, still mysterious and still missing.

Astronomers don't yet know exactly what it's made of. In 2011

Carlos Frank and his colleagues were awarded the Gruber Prize, one of the leading

accolades in astronomy for their theory. For the last 30 years Carlos has continued to refine his computational

models of the universe. Carlos Frank was born and studied in Mexico but came to Cambridge

in the 1970s to do a PhD.

Forty years later, he's one of the most influential and highly cited

astronomers in the entire world.

Carlos, it's always struck me that it's rather

extraordinary that we know so much about the universe. I mean do you agree

after all we are to paraphrase Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy living

on a small insignificant planet in a remote arm of the spiral galaxy,

how can we know so much about the enormity of the universe?

I completely agree that we know a lot about the universe, but's preface that we know there's a lot we do not

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