yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Fired Up About Dark Matter | StarTalk


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

All right, number two. This next question is from, okay, let's see. This is, uh, this is from David Crosby.

Oh, okay, and in his interview with you, he asked me, he was asking me questions. You tell me, you snap, you clipped the question. I clipped a question, and he was very fired up about it. So let's see what he had to ask.

All right, what the hell? What? What? I totally don't understand what dark energy or dark matter are. Why? You sounded angry with me because I got nobody else. Man, you coming to my office saying, "What the hell? What the hell is going on with this? This is messed up. It's your job to be able to know this stuff, and who else I got to ask?"

Okay, so, uh, Neil, what the hell? Seriously, all right? What is dark matter?

Okay, so, I’m happy to answer that question. We have no idea. Wow! Next question.

We do not know what dark matter is. It’s pro—it's probably misnamed. I know what it is. It's—well, sorry, what it should have been called is dark gravity.

There's gravity in the universe; we have no idea what's causing it. If you say dark matter, that implies it's matter, but we don't even know if it is or is not that. But we do know it is gravity with no known source, so it's dark gravity.

We can see it—gravity; we don't know anything else about it. We can't see it, we can't taste it, we can't touch it; our light doesn't interact with it. It doesn't make spectra; we are clueless.

Same goes for dark energy. Dark energy is a mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space that's pressing against the fabric of the universe, making it accelerate in its expansion against the gravitational wishes of the galaxies it contains.

We are deeply steeped in this ignorance. You combine dark matter and dark energy; it is 96% of all that drives the universe, and all we really have command of is that remaining 4%. All the known laws of physics, chemistry, biology are in those 4%.

More Articles

View All
Building Your Board | Glenn Kelman
I’m Glenn, um, and I’m here to talk about building the board. I was surprised that James Slavit, the Greylock partner, asked me to discuss this topic because I’ve actually had sort of a fraught relationship with our board. In fact, I really didn’t have mu…
United States v. Lopez | US government and civics | Khan Academy
What we’re going to do in this video is talk about a relatively recent U.S. Supreme Court case, and this is the United States versus Lopez. The decision was made in 1995, and this is significant because many of the cases we have talked about are things th…
YC Women in Tech: Breaking Into Product
All right, hi everyone! It’s, uh, thanks for joining us today. I’m Captain Yala. I’m excited to have you join us for our work at a startup panel on getting into product. We have three PMs with us today and will be joined also by YC alumni Helena Merk, and…
How To Save A LOT Of Money In College
What’s up, guys? It’s Graham here. So I took a look at my YouTube analytics the other day, and it turns out that a very large percentage of my audience, nearly 80%, is between the ages of 18 and 35 years old. I know from that a big part of the demographic…
Parallel structure | Syntax | Khan Academy
Hello grammarians. Hello Rosie. Hello Paige. Hi David. Hi David. Today all three of us are going to be talking about parallel structure. And I’ve always had trouble spelling the word “parallel,” but Rosie pointed out something just before we started reco…
How to Buy Happiness With Money
[Laughter] What would you do if you won the lottery? Personally, I’d pay off my debt, quit my job, and move to Japan. It’s a fun scenario to think about, even if it’s never going to happen. Statistically, you’re more likely to give birth to quadruplets or…