S8 Ep692: 6. Headline: Debunking MACHOs and the Rise of Dark Energy Guest Author: Govert Schilling Summary: The search for MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects) in the 1990s largely excluded them as the primary dark matter candidate. Meanwhile, researchers discover
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 4 April 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
6. Headline: Debunking MACHOs and the Rise of Dark Energy Guest Author: Govert Schilling Summary: The search for MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects) in the 1990s largely excluded them as the primary dark matter candidate. Meanwhile, researchers discovered that the universe's expansion is accelerating, attributed to dark energy. This mysterious force, which may be Einstein's cosmological constant, makes up roughly 68.5% of the universe's total composition. (6)
MAY 1930
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. |
| 0:04.8 | Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable |
| 0:10.4 | themes that let you build your brand, marketing tools that get your products out there. |
| 0:14.7 | Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time. From startups to scaleups, online, |
| 0:20.1 | in person and on the go. Shopify is made for |
| 0:22.8 | entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. |
| 0:35.1 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel with Govert Schilling, and his wonderful new book is a search for something that we haven't found. But the search continues. And one of the ways to search is, well, if it's not small, what if it's massive? What if it's massive, complex halo object, macho? What if gravitational lending, lensing, can give us a result that we |
| 0:58.1 | haven't been able to find because we were looking for something small? As far as I can see right |
| 1:04.2 | now, there are teams who exhausted themselves in the late 20th century. Has macho now been retired? |
| 1:11.6 | Or is... |
| 1:12.6 | Yeah, absolutely. |
| 1:13.6 | Absolutely. |
| 1:14.6 | But it's a very nice story because it's a very neat story to explain how science works. |
| 1:20.6 | Back in the 1980s, everybody thought dark matter must be this non-barionic cold dark matter weakly interacting massive particle and that's |
| 1:30.0 | where the physicists started to work on and they had all these theories and they tried to look for it |
| 1:35.0 | but then in science you always have to think yes but what if what if dark matter is actually something |
| 1:42.1 | else or what if dark matter might be these wind particles, |
| 1:46.5 | but there might be other types of dark matter too. |
| 1:49.0 | We can't exclude it. |
| 1:50.6 | So we need to look for other types of dark matter too. |
| 1:53.4 | You need to be sure that some other explanation |
| 1:56.6 | cannot be the whole or part of the truth. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.