IS DARK MATTER FROM BEFORE THE BIG BANG? 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
4.6 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 5 April 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a64379333/dark-matter-older-than-universe/
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 observatio
2010 BIG BANG
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI in the world. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm John Batchel with Govert Schilling, |
| 0:08.6 | and his wonderful new book is a search for something that we haven't found. |
| 0:12.8 | But the search continues. |
| 0:14.5 | And one of the ways the search is, well, if it's not small, |
| 0:17.7 | what if it's massive? |
| 0:18.8 | What if it's massive, complex halo object, macho? What if |
| 0:23.5 | gravitational lending can give us a result that we haven't been able to find because we were |
| 0:29.9 | looking for something small? As far as I can see right now, there are teams who exhausted |
| 0:37.3 | themselves in the late 20th century. |
| 0:40.1 | Has macho now been retired? |
| 0:42.6 | Absolutely. |
| 0:44.1 | Absolutely. |
| 0:44.8 | But it's a very nice story because it's a very neat story to explain how science works. |
| 0:50.9 | Back in the 1980s, everybody thought dark matter must be this non-barionic, cold dark matter, |
| 0:57.7 | weakly interacting massive particles, and that's where the physicists started to work on, |
| 1:02.1 | and they had all these theories, and they tried to look for it. But then in science, you always |
| 1:06.8 | have to think, yes, but what if? What if dark matter is actually something else? |
| 1:12.6 | Or what if dark matter might be these wind particles, |
| 1:16.6 | but there might be other types of dark matter too. |
| 1:18.6 | We can't exclude it. |
| 1:20.6 | So we need to look for other types of dark matter too. |
... |
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