ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Daniel Whiteson spent about ten years at CERN trying to make dark matter inside the collider. He never saw it. He still says it is real, that it is passing through the room as he speaks, and that the biggest machine on Earth may be looking for the wrong thing. This compilation follows that problem from the collider floor out to the edge of the observable universe. 00:00 How colliders would detect dark matter and the evidence it exists 11:02 The accelerating expansion discovery and the supernova debate 19:29 Wheeler's information theory and why an expanding universe does not conserve energy 31:00 JWST early galaxies, Big Bang misconceptions and primordial black holes 39:17 Making black holes at CERN, Hawking radiation and quantum gravity 48:29 Ion drives, the Exodus electrostatic drive and the Voyager probes He starts with why dark matter is such a hard target. It gives off no light and reflects none, so a collider can only spot it as a missing piece: two things fly apart from a collision and only one shows up. Gravity is too weak to help, since a fridge magnet beats the pull of the whole Earth. What convinces physicists anyway is the number of independent clues. Galaxies spin fast enough to throw their stars into space and do not. Galaxy clusters formed in 14 billion years when the visible matter alone would need 50. The ripples in the cosmic microwave background, the oldest light we can see, come out wrong without extra mass. Whiteson's own suspicion is that dark matter is not a particle at all, and that atoms, the only kind of matter anyone has ever studied, are a five percent slice of what exists. From there the conversation widens. He names the discovery that the universe's expansion is speeding up as the moment that changed everything for his field, and Danny pulls up an article published the day before the interview arguing that the supernova evidence behind it may be wrong. Whiteson explains why energy is created and destroyed in an expanding universe, and why dark energy grows while everything else thins out. Danny brings up the James Webb galaxies that formed too early, which leads into what the Big Bang theory does and does not claim, and into primordial black holes as a dark matter candidate. The CERN story returns near the end. Whiteson's team hoped to make microscopic black holes and watch them evaporate in a flash of Hawking radiation, and he explains why cosmic rays prove the experiment could never have swallowed the planet. The final stretch covers ion drives, a propellantless engine from a NASA electrostatics engineer that Whiteson wants measured by someone with no stake in it, and where the Voyager probes are after decades of flight.
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