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The John Batchelor Show

S8 Ep692: 4. Headline: Particle Physics and the Search for WIMPs Guest Author: Govert Schilling Summary: After ruling out neutrinos, the search focuses on Cold Dark Matter and WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). While detectors at CERN search for these pa

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2026

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

4. Headline: Particle Physics and the Search for WIMPs Guest Author:Govert Schilling Summary: After ruling out neutrinos, the search focuses on Cold Dark Matter and WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). While detectors at CERN search for these particles in high-speed collisions, computer simulations like IllustrisTNG successfully model how such matter could have shaped the universe. However, physical evidence for these particles remains elusive. (4)
AUGUST 1963

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0:34.9

This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel with Govert Schilling. His new book is The Elephant in the Universe, 100-year search for dark matter, and Govert's search over several years for dark matter. He's still looking. It's a joy to travel along with him in the book. We know neutrinos don't qualify, although it's a cool idea because it took them a long time to find neutrinos.

0:57.3

And they had a theory and they went looking for it and it paid off.

1:01.8

Gravitinos also don't satisfy.

1:04.4

And rather than pursue that, I'm going to come to the, a cosmologist, Jim Peoples.

1:11.0

Jim Peoples says we have something that is cold, that is dark, that is matter.

1:16.9

Cold, dark matter.

1:18.5

However, it has to satisfy a transformation from the smoothness of the beginning of the Big Bang to the clumps we have today.

1:29.5

That means dark matter has to satisfy something, well, calling it weird isn't adequate.

1:36.0

It has to satisfy something where it, what does it interact with in that transformation?

1:41.3

What do we imagine does it have interaction with anything in our standard

1:45.8

model? Well, actually, not much. We know the cold dark matter, or the cold dark matter,

1:54.5

as Jim Peoples called it, must be interacting through gravity, because that's how we discovered

2:00.0

it. We see the gravitational effect.

2:02.1

It must have mass.

2:03.5

It must have gravity.

2:04.8

Otherwise, it doesn't fit in what we are observing.

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