The Elephant in the Universe: 100-year search for dark matter Author: Govert Schilling The Enigma of Dark Energy and Einstein's Lost "Blunder"
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 7 September 2025
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
The Enigma of Dark Energy and Einstein's Lost "Blunder"
Headline: Universe's Acceleration Reveals Dark Energy, Validating Einstein's Constant
Just as the search for dark matter intensified, cosmology faced a new puzzle: in 1998, two independent teams discovered that the universe's expansion is not slowing down but is, in fact, accelerating. This unexpected finding led to the concept of dark energy, a mysterious vacuum energy in empty space, as the force driving this acceleration. This revelation meant that visible baryonic matter accounts for only about 4.9% of the universe, with dark matter making up 26.6%, and dark energy a staggering 68.5%. Ironically, this unexpected acceleration harked back to Albert Einstein's "cosmological constant," a term he had introduced into his equations as an accelerating force to maintain a static universe and later deemed his "biggest blunder." The discovery of dark energy suggests Einstein may have had a profound, albeit unrecognized, foresight.
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| 0:26.9 | This is CBSI in the world. |
| 0:28.6 | I'm John Batchel with Govert Schilling, |
| 0:32.7 | and his wonderful new book is a search for something that we haven't found. |
| 0:34.1 | But the search continues. |
| 0:38.8 | And one of the ways the search is, well, if it's not small, what if it's massive? |
| 0:52.3 | What if it's massive, complex halo object, macho? What if gravitational lending can give us a result that we haven't been able to find because we were looking for something small? |
| 0:57.4 | As far as I can see right now, there are teams who exhausted themselves in the late 20th century. Has macho now been retired? Or is... |
| 1:03.1 | Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. But it's a very nice story because it's a very neat story to explain |
| 1:09.5 | how science works. |
| 1:16.2 | Back in the 1980s, everybody thought dark matter must be this non-barionic, |
| 1:19.6 | called dark matter, weekly interacting massive particles, |
| 1:21.8 | and that's where the physicists started to work on, |
| 1:25.0 | and they had all these theories, and they tried to look for it. |
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