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%.

Why Do We Have Two Nostrils?

War is Madness | A Stoic Warning to the World

View All

The ideal gas law (PV = nRT) | Intermolecular forces and properties | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

In this video, we’re going to talk about ideal gases and how we can describe what’s going on with them. So the first question you might be wondering is, what is an ideal gas? It really is a bit of a theoretical construct that helps us describe a lot of wh…

Long run average total cost curve | APⓇ Microeconomics | Khan Academy

We’ve talked about the idea of average total cost in several videos so far, where it was the sum of your average variable cost and your average fixed cost. But when we’re talking about fixed costs, by definition, that means we’re talking about things in t…

Non-congruent shapes & transformations

[Instructor] We are told, Brenda was able to map circle M onto circle N using a translation and a dilation. This is circle M right over here. Here’s the center of it. This is circle M, this circle right over here. It looks like at first, she translates it…

Green Flags Of Financially Educated Person

One of the biggest problems that plagues the happiness of this world is a lack of financial education. Too many people have little to no understanding of how money moves around the world, and you can tell when someone is financially educated by checking f…

Interpreting equations graphically (example 2) | Mathematics III | High School Math | Khan Academy

Let F of T be ( e^{2T} - 2T^2 ) and H of T be ( 4 - 5T^2 ). The graphs of Y = F(T) and Y = H(T) are shown below. So, Y = F(T) is here in green, so this is really ( Y = e^{2T} - 2T^2 ). We see F(T) right over there, and Y = H(T) is shown in yellow. Alrigh…

Techniques for generating a simple random sample | Study design | AP Statistics | Khan Academy

Let’s say that your school has a population of 80 students in it. Maybe it’s not your whole school; maybe it’s just your grade. So there’s 80 students in your population, and you want to get an estimate of the average height in your population. You think …

Fired Up About Dark Matter | StarTalk

More Articles