If darkness is our oldest friend and if we return to it again and again, it's because it was

with us, around us, and in us before we emerged into the day's divinity.

When we search for origins, for the seminal priority of first principles, we venture into

the depths of a metaphysical night that extends far beyond Earth's nocturnal shadow unto

the source of all sources.

Look up at the night sky, all those stars, and all ordinary matter, make up only a small fraction of what's out there.

The rest is dark upon dark.

Stay tuned, friends, a show on the evidence of things unseen coming up.

Moving near the edge of night. Dust is dancing in the space. The dark and heard of far away.

The sun comes I'm I'm I'm Robert Harrison

from the on the KZSU on the Stanford campus.

And if it pains you that I'm fading out Julie Cruz's interstellar voice singing The World Spins,

sit tight because I'll play the song in its entirety at the end of today's show.

Who said angels don't exist?

I'm joined today by Maria Elena Monzani, one of the world's pioneering investigators of what

goes by the name of Dark Matter.

Maria Elena is a lead scientist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, or Slack, as we call it around here,

and one of the leaders of the Luke's Zeppelin Dark Matter experiment with the Cavley Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology.

In 2005, she received a joint PhD in astroparticle physics from the Doni Diedre, University of Paris,

Paris, and the Universita de L'E Studi di Milano in 2005.

She received the Excess Scale Science Application Award in 2019 and NASA's Group Achievement Award in 2010.

It's a real pleasure to welcome her to the program.

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