The Elephant in the Universe: 100-year search for dark matter Author: Govert Schilling Headline: Particle Physics and Simulations Hunt for the Elusive WIMP
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
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🗓️ 7 September 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
The Elephant in the Universe: 100-year search for dark matter Author: Govert Schilling
Headline: Particle Physics and Simulations Hunt for the Elusive WIMP
The concept of cold dark matter, championed by cosmologists like Jim Peebles, describes particles that interact primarily through gravity but lack electrical charge, meaning they don't interact with light, magnetism, or strong nuclear forces. Their only potential interaction is a rare "bump" into an atomic nucleus via the weak nuclear force. This led to the theoretical candidate known as the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP). Experiments at facilities like CERN's Large Hadron Collider, with its massive underground detectors, attempt to create and detect these WIMPsthrough high-energy particle collisions, though none have been found yet. Complementing this, computer simulations, such as IllustrisTNG, successfully model the universe's evolution from its smooth beginning to its current clumpiness, but only when incorporating cold dark matter with specific properties, guiding the ongoing search.
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| 0:29.7 | This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Batchel with Govert Schilling. His new book is The Elephant in the Universe, 100 years search for dark matter and Govert's search over several |
| 0:35.1 | years for dark matter. He's still looking. It's a joy to |
| 0:38.4 | travel along with him in the book. We know it, neutrinos don't qualify, although it's a cool |
| 0:44.1 | idea because it took them a long time to find neutrinos. And they had a theory, and they |
| 0:49.0 | went looking for it, and it paid off. Gravitinos also don't satisfy. And rather than pursue that, I'm going to come to |
| 0:56.9 | the cosmologist Jim Peoples. Jim Peoples says we have something that is cold, that is dark, |
| 1:06.3 | that is matter, cold, dark matter. However, it has to satisfy a transformation from the smoothness |
| 1:14.3 | of the beginning of the Big Bang to the clumps we have today. That means dark matter has to |
| 1:22.3 | satisfy something, well, calling it weird isn't adequate. It has to satisfy something where it, what does it interact with in that transformation? |
| 1:31.3 | What do we imagine does it have interaction with anything in our standard model? |
| 1:37.2 | Well, actually, not much. |
| 1:40.5 | We know dark matter, or the cold dark matter, as Jim Peoples called it, must be interacting |
| 1:47.1 | through gravity because that's how we discovered it. |
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