Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Elephant In The Universe: Govert Schilling (#242)

Episode Date: July 24, 2022

In The Elephant in the Universe, Govert Schilling explores the fascinating history of the search for dark matter. Evidence for its existence comes from a wealth of astronomical observations. Theories and computer simulations of the evolution of the universe are also suggestive: they can be reconciled with astronomical measurements only if dark matter is a dominant component of nature. Physicists have devised huge, sensitive instruments to search for dark matter, which may be unlike anything else in the cosmos—some unknown elementary particle. Yet so far dark matter has escaped every experiment. Indeed, dark matter is so elusive that some scientists are beginning to suspect there might be something wrong with our theories about gravity or with the current paradigms of cosmology. Schilling interviews both believers and heretics and paints a colorful picture of the history and current status of dark matter research, with astronomers and physicists alike trying to make sense of theory and observation. Govert Schilling is an internationally acclaimed astronomy writer in the Netherlands. He is a contributing editor of Sky & Telescope, and his articles have appeared in Science, New Scientist and BBC Sky at Night Magazine. He wrote over fifty books (in Dutch) on a wide variety of astronomical topics, some of which have been translated into English, including Evolving Cosmos, Flash! The Hunt for the Biggest Explosions in the Universe, The Hunt for Planet X, and Atlas of Astronomical Discoveries. In 2007, the International Astronomical Union named asteroid (10986) Govert after him. Find him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/govertschilling 📺 Watch my most popular videos:📺 A New Contender is Here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6A6myur--c Frank Wilczek https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and Wolfram https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1 Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1 Neil deGrasse Tyson https://youtu.be/1kxgK6J4S5Y Michio Kaku: https://youtu.be/3to9ymn-XKI Sir Roger Penrose: https://youtu.be/AMuqyAvX7Wo Topics Include: Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) What is the most convincing evidence for the existence of Dark Matter? When do you stop an experiment? What tool or technology is the most promising for unlocking more secrets of the Universe? Some secretive dark matter experiments. The Xenon Wars. Be my friend: 🏄‍♂️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 Subscribe https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list; just click here http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php ✍️ Detailed Blog posts here: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Listen on audio-only platforms: https://briankeating.com/podcast.php A production of http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast: https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our world has shrunk into the 30 centimeters between our eyes and our smartphone. We are all zoomed in. Let's stop that and zoom out instead. Learn about the universe and your life will change forever. For the better, my crash course in astronomy will give you a fresh look at your own existence. A new perspective on life. perspective on life and a gentle way to view the world and the people on it. So put your smartphones away for a minute. Give yourself some space in the most literal sense. Don't look down

at your screen. Look up at the stars. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. It is I, your fearful host, Dr. Brian Keating, proprietor of The End of the Impossible Podcast. Today coming to you with a phenomenal episode featuring Govert Schilling, a Dutchman of great renown, who has written many, many books endorsed by some of your friends on the previous episodes of The Impossible podcast, including Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, who reads the Queen, her horoscope on a deal. No, he doesn't do that. But he endorsed Govert's first book called, or not first book, one of its many books called Ripples in Space Time.

He not only endorsed it, wrote a foreword. And this book, The Elephant in the Universe that we're talking about today, his next book, was endorsed and forwarded by a past guest, multiple guest, Avi Loeb at Harvard. And we talk about the parallels between looking for unseen extraterrestrials as Avi's want to do and Govert and his depiction of astronomers, physicists, computational scientists, looking for unseen dark matter, the force that gravitationally binds the universe together. And in fact, it's responsible for me and you talking today because without dark matter, we would not exist. There would simply not be enough time and enough gravitational force to create the halos around galaxies and create the galaxies themselves and clusters of galaxies where they formed.

And so you and I live in a galaxy, which is in a cluster, which is being pulled towards a great attractor. And it is responsible for our very existence. And we take it for granted. Probably because we can't see it. And no one's been able to detect it. It was predicted over 80 years ago by Fritz Zwicki, who is a character, later observed by a friend of UCSD, Vera Rubin, and her exploration with my late great colleagues, Margaret Burbage and Jeff Burbage, where she learned to do spectroscopy. So this has many, many characters in it, this wonderful book, The Elephant in the Universe. You'll hear about what the title means, what the subtitle and so forth and the motivation of it.

And spoiler alert, we don't describe what is dark matter because we don't know what it is, but that's exciting for a scientist. Along the way, we talk about controversies, including a controversial theory called Mond, where its proponent Mordecai Milgram is still, and many supporters, are still promoting the idea that no, no, no, dark matter is not a particle. It needs to be a modification to not only Newton's laws of gravity, as the title modified Newtonian dynamics, or Monde suggests, but also to modify, eventually a relativistic version of that to be incorporated within Einstein's theory of general relativity.

How does that work? Controversies abound. We discuss a controversial claim detection for the last quarter century by an Italian collaboration called Dama. Why aren't they being taken seriously by the rest of the scientific community? How come nobody is replicating or been able to replicate these data produced by this quarter century-long collaboration? And what is most exciting to both Govert and to myself in the pursuit amidst all the challenges ranging from funding, personality. We talk about the vivacious Elena Appreel past guest to the The Impossible podcast and how her work and her personality and the work of her collaborators has really changed the way that we look at dark matter as a particle. Anyway, all this is to welcome you to another exciting episode.

And stay tuned for more on particles, forces, and fields and controversy, including an interview with Frank Close about Peter Higgs, the namesake of the Higgs boson. And Frank Close's new book, based on interviews with Higgs, rare interviews. He is very reclusive in many ways, is Higgs. And his new book is called Elusive. I love that book too. That's coming up soon. You'll enjoy it.

So for now, sit back, relax, and enjoy this trip into The Impossible with myself and go over chilling. Enjoy. Any sufficiently advanced technology? is indistinguishable from magic. Open the pot-bay doors, please help. Ladies and gentlemen, you are in for a treat coming to us today as an author that I have loved his work

from the time I first encountered him and Scientific American to his previous book, Ripples in Space Time, the Einstein gravitational waves and the future of astronomy, which featured my favorite CMB experiment, at least until this book came out. That was Bicep 2 is featured heavily in this book.

Some friends of the show like Barry Barrett, Ray Weiss, Kip Thorne are in that book. But this book features a Simon's Observatory, and so we've got to talk about that. But it's Govert Schilling, who is a Dutch writer originally, but he is one of my favorite authors. I love this book.

I love all your writing, Sky and Telescope, everywhere I find you, Govert Schilling. How are you doing today, sir? I'm doing very well. Well, Brian, thanks for having me on your podcast. And I'm especially doing very well because I'm not in my home country, the Netherlands, but I'm in Sweden in the north of Europe because my daughter, who lives here, was married just two days ago. So I'm happy.

Congratulations. Thank you. What could be better? Every father of young girls and older girls dreams of the day when that will happen. And then she's somebody else's problem. Now, I'm just kidding. We love our girls. The girls are the best.

I have, in both of my girls' rooms, I have posters of Maria Gepart-Mayer and all these scientists. I don't know what your daughter is interested in. But coming from the Netherlands, I wonder if you've always had kind of a natural inclination towards the telescope and the microscope, because you can tell us, what is the connection between the telescope and the microscope? Of course, since both instruments were first developed in the Netherlands, but I didn't learn about that after I... before I started to become interested in astronomy.

As a young teenager boy, that was in the Apollo days in the 1960s, I got hooked on astronomy. I had a Saturday job in a supermarket, so I saved some money to buy a telescope, became a member of a youth association here in the Netherlands. And what I did was make drawings of the moon and of the planets and all those kinds of things. And I love to read, because I've always loved to read books,

and I've also always loved to write about the topics that I love. So when it was a member of this youth association in the Netherlands, I also started to write for them. And that's how it all started. And that's one of the reasons why I never took up an academic study in astronomy, which I never have done, because it just was my hobby. And so in a sense, I've turned my hobby into a profession, and that's good. Yes, your avocation has become your vocation.

And of course, I believe that both the microscope and the telescope were invented by guys by the name of Hans. At least I know that for the telescope. And that's because my good friend Galileo Galilei, who we just translated with Frank Wilczek and Carlobellae and Fabio La Gianati, we just made the first ever, not translation, but we did the first ever audiobook of Galileo. You can find that on my website. But he talks about in Cedarius Nunzias, you know, how, man, you know, he just recently discovered a device that came by way of the low country, the Netherlands. And I wonder, you know, I often think about, you know, what other instrument from the telescope to the large Hadron Collider to the microscope to CRISPR technology? Is there any other technology that has changed the universe, our perception of our place within it, more than the telescope? Yeah, I think, basically I think the telescope and the microscope are the two main instruments

because they just give us a view beyond our natural scope of observation. We have some sort of biological and natural way of looking at the world. So to be able to see the very small and to be able to see the very big and very distant, that's really important. And obviously the other thing that has been very important in learning our world is the possibility to go to other places. And funny enough, the Netherlands played an important role in that too, because the first seafarers and the major explorers, many of them were from the low countries.

And obviously, today we are talking about spaceflight and flying our spacecraft to other planets and other satellites. But in the past, it was visiting other continents and other countries and seeing things that you did not have at home. I think these three things, going to other places, going to look at other scales, very small, and going to look at very remote distances, like in cosmology and astronomy. Those may have been the biggest changes in our learning and knowing about the world.

And there's no shortage of Dutch men in this book, which is called The Elephant in the Universe. We'll get to that as we go on. But the thing I love to do with all the authors who honor us with their present, on The Into the Impossible podcast. My regular listeners will know this by heart. It's a game that we call judging books by their covers.

So this book came with a beautiful picture and a very kind of maybe mysterious title. Unlike this book, which was written a couple of years back and has many interesting experiments and things that were familiar with, as I said, past guests. It even has a forward by past guest Martin Rees on this book. Lord Martin was on the podcast not too long ago last year.

But this one has our good friend Avi Loeb, who is no stranger for searching for things that no one's ever seen before. So Govert, I want to ask you a question. What is the meaning of the title of this book? What is the meaning of the picture on the cover? And why did you choose Avi Loeb of all people to grace it with a piece? beautiful forward. Yeah, let's start with the last question. The book was published by Harvard University Press and Avi is obviously connected to Harvard University and I

know him a little bit. I interviewed him for part of the book and I have to say that I made a suggestion to the publishers. Maybe we could ask him to write a forward. I didn't like to ask Martin Rees again. He probably probably would have declined for a second time. And we all knew that Avi has been dealing with looking for extraterrestrials and the whole thing about Omuamua, the visitor from outer space. And not everyone is taking his claims about or his possibilities about ET2 series. But I said, well, in any case, he's a famous name. And it might push the sales of the book because everybody knows who he is. And this book is not about aliens, not at all.

It's about a serious scientific mystery in which he is dabbling a lot too. So he is working on a variety of theories on dark matter. So we decided this was safe to do and he was happy to do that. And then working backwards with your three questions. My publisher came up, the designer at Harvard came up with the idea of not using a traditional dark blue or black cover for this book. because almost every astronomy book has a black cover or a purple cover or a dark blue cover. And he thought maybe when we combine this with the starry background in the elephant shape

and then use all the colors of the rainbow because it's it attracts the attention. So it's a very, yeah, I like it very much. So this is this is the other thing. But then getting to your first question about the title, that's really an interesting story. Because it's a broad topic. Dark matter is about history, it's about physics, particle physics, cosmology, theory, all kind of things. And yeah, you could call this book searching for dark matter or whatever you want to choose. But it was, in fact, my European agent who came up with a suggestion for this title.

And he said, I've been thinking about it and what about the title, the elephant in the universe. And I was immediately enthusiastic for a couple of reasons. First of all, dark matter, as most of your viewers will know, is about a lot of mass in the universe. It's about 85% of all the matter in the universe is unknown to us. It's dark. It's mysterious. So it's a lot of mass. So the elephant is a good metaphor for that because it's a very massive animal.

But then obviously you also have these connotations. with certain sayings like the elephant in the room. We all know what we're talking about when there's a big problem that is mysterious, but we sort of walk around it. We don't want to put our finger on it. And that's something that has been happening in dark matter research for a long time. Because as my book shows in the first chapters, it all started out in the 1930s, 1920s actually, about a century ago.

And then in the 1940s and the 1950s and most of the 60s, not that much happened about this riddle of dark matter. People knew about it and it just walked around it like it was the elephant in the room. And finally there's also a Dutch saying. I don't know if that's a known saying in English too. But we say the elephant in the porcelain in the china cupboard. That's what we're saying. Elephant in the China cupboard. He's rambling around and destroying everything.

And that's a nice connotation too, because this problem of dark matter may well stir up all our current thinking about the universe. It may lead us to a whole new understanding of physics and cosmology. So I love the title a lot. It worked very well in Dutch too. The book has been translated into Dutch or not. into Dutch already and it will also be at least the Chinese and a German edition. So I think it's a very good suggestion from my agent and in combination with the cover and the forward I like it a lot and I hope that people who judge the book by the cover will be attracted

to it like dark matter is attracting a lot of other matter in the universe. And no spoilers but you talk about in the very beginning of the book so it's not really a a spoiler, that we don't have the answer. What I loved about the title, actually the subtitle, you say, Our, which is inclusive, which is nice, but also it really kind of connotes the fact that we are in this together, this mystery that we're trying to solve, is a global mystery. It's a mystery conversation through the ages, through time. You start with the first person who is Dutch. Capitan, I think, is how you pronounce his name, who. who really coined the term in English,

and really did a lot of this work. Orte obviously plays a role in the book as well. And so there is a Dutch thread that runs throughout it, not too overly heavy-handed, but very nice. And I only know one Dutch saying, and it's what my late, great colleague, Hans Parr, used to call me when I acted stupid. He said, you are cluff in a mollen.

Does that make sense? Cluff in a moulin? Have you ever heard that hit with a windmill? Yeah, I know the windmill. So, obviously, I don't know exactly what you were meaning by that saying. Maybe cuff in the moment? Ah, okay. Yeah, you got a hit by one of the wings of the windmill.

Yeah. So that would be pretty obvious. You'd be hard, pressed not to notice if you got hit by a windmill. But dark matter is very subtle. And we don't know much about it. As you say, we don't know the answer by the end of this book. But I wonder if we could start off with maybe a different tack. I've talked in my show, I've done videos, which I'll link to above, about the only type of dark matter that we know for sure exists is the neutrino.

But throughout the history of physics, people have done one of two things to explain strange gravitational effects. They've postulated new forms of matter, as is in the case of Neptune, the prediction and discovery of Neptune. And then they predicted new forces and dynamical features of fields, as in the case of Einstein, explaining the anomalous behavior of the perihelian of Mercury. Today, there's a lot in this book in physics about new particles, new forces, new fields, but not as much attention to the kind of outliers, the maybe somewhat out of left field, as we say in America, suggestions of modifications to not Einstein, but to Newton. Can we start with an interview that you did with Mutti, Mordecai Milgram in Israel at Weitzman,

and his theory. And where does that stand now? First of all, what is that theory? Is it appealing? Is there any point in taking it seriously at this point? First describe this so-called modified Newtonian dynamics or mon. Right. Yeah.

Well, it's a very exciting and interesting idea, because Milgrom, back in the early 1980s, I believe, he learned about this problem of dark matter, and he thought it was sort of made up. Like, we see particular movements in galaxies and motions of stars, and we come up just with a solution by proposing there's a lot of unseen mysterious matter in the universe. And he thought, well, maybe I can also explain it by tuning the laws of gravity a little bit. And that was also sort of made up to fit the answer. So he came up with a modification of Newtonian gravity. That's something I come back to in a moment. And he suggested a different kind of Newtonian gravitational law. And this gravitational law that he come up with could explain the weird reverse.

properties of spiral galaxies. So he said, well, maybe we're just misunderstanding gravity and we need to change that. And not many people took that too serious back then, but even now, it has never been written off, so to say. So there is no observation, there's no clear indication that Mons, as the theory is known, that it must be wrong. It's still a possibility that there is some truth to it.

And that's very interesting because many other alternative theories have been ruled out over the decades. And Milgram's theory still is sort of a viable theory. And he has not a very big, but a very loyal group of scientists following in his steps, even a number of many of young people, young scientists who are maybe more eager or more creative to embrace these new kind of ideas. and there's still some possibility that this might be the solution to the problem. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. There's a couple of things. You ask what is the current status of month? One problem is it's a modification of Newtonian dynamics. And it has turned out to be very, very difficult to get a similar modification to Einsteinian gravity.

And obviously, we need to do that because we know Einstein is a more a better theory than Newton. So if you want to change your theory of gravity, in the end you need to have a modification of Einstein. People are working on that, and even a couple months ago there was a new publication in that direction, but it's all very, very complicated. And that means that the theory of month has problems with explaining everything that has to do with Einstein, like explaining gravitational lensing, which is the bending of light as described by Einstein.

Einstein's theory and also by explaining even the expansion of the universe. So there's a couple of loose ends in months. But I have to say I wrote at least one chapter on this alternative theory for dark matter. And I talk to Milgram and some of his followers a lot. And I've also always been intrigued by this idea because when you read about all this kind of things and scientists thinking that I that they know there must be this many dark matter, and we just don't know what it is, but we'll probably find out as a reader,

and certain as a non-academic or a hobbyist sonomer that I was, you always get this feeling, can that really be true? And then if there's one single person who comes up with an alternative theory, you feel some sympathy for him. So even back in the 1980s, I first read about Milgram's theory,

and I thought, yeah, that's, That sounds much more interesting. And the funny thing is it's still not ruled out. So I don't know. Another Dutch physicist in Amsterdam, Eric Vrelinda, he's working on your new alternative theory of gravity, still in a very early stage, but it has a couple of comparisons with Milgram's theory

and also is an alternative theory of explaining dark matter. So who knows what will happen in the next couple of years? Right. Well, of course, Milgram is Israeli, and the late great Jacob Beckinstein was Israeli, and he came up with a royal tovistic version called Tevez or a tensor vector scalar. And so I'm going to not use a Dutch phrase now, but a Hebrew phrase translated into English, which is, you know, prove to me the existence of dark matter while the standing on one leg, so to speak. So what is the most convincing aspect of dark matter to you that motivates that we need it in the universe?

I mean, we can't see it, we can't smell it, we can't touch it, we haven't detected it. What makes you and other scientists, rather, believe in the truth of its existence? It's a very interesting question because there's a strange change or evolution in the history of science here. When dark matter came up as a problem for the first time in the past century, it was all about gravity and motions and dynamics, the rotation curves of galaxies, like the outer parts of galaxies appear to move too fast, the motions of galaxies and clusters. It was all about the influence of gravity, the gravitational influence of this proposed dark matter. And that's how I learned about it for the first time, because I was interested in astronomy and I read about all these kind of

of things. But the interesting thing is right now, I believe that the most compelling reason to believe, so to say, in dark matter is not a rotation curves of galaxies anymore, and it's not a motion of galaxies and clusters. It's the cosmic background radiation. And you know all about that. And we have studied and mapped the CMB in such a high detail. And with all the statistical properties of these tiny temperature fluctuations in C&B, people try to explain these statistical properties and the only single, only way they can do that is to introduce both dark matter and dark energy. And as soon as you change the amount of mysterious dark matter, because we still don't know what it is, as soon as you change that by just a percent or change the properties

of this mysterious dark energy a little bit, you're your calculations do not match the observations of the cosmic microwave background anymore. So the funny thing is, if we did not have all these dynamical observations, like rotation curves and motions of galaxies, if that had never been observed, even the CNB observations of today would tell us there must be a lot of dark matter in the universe. Otherwise, we can never go from the universe back then, as we observe its properties in the cosmic background. radiation to the universe right now with the observed distribution of clusters and galaxies. The only way scientists are able to do that is using the gravity of dark matter. And I believe this is by now, and it's more of a physical reason than a classical,

astronomical reason to believe in it, but that's the most compelling reason to believe in the stuff. Yeah, I often point that out. Yeah, we hear a lot about rotation curves and, and, uh, Of course, Zwicki is so prominent in the discussion of it. And whenever I do a discussion about Dark Matter, and I bring up Vera Rubin, who spent not a small amount of time here at UC San Diego, working with her colleague Margaret Burbage and her husband, Jeff Burbage.

But Margaret was really the observer that taught Vera Rubin, while she was on sabbatical here in the 1960s, how to use a spectrograph to take observations of galaxy. and her work with Ford, who you interviewed in this book, Vera's work, really was definitive in many of our minds, making the case for its reality, even more so than dark energy, at least for a long time. And yet, you know, the fact that we've known about dark matter

for so much longer since the, you know, since Captan maybe, but also, you know, since Wiki, and had evidence for its existence. I wonder, you know, is there a point at which you, you would counsel my colleagues, some of whom are here, like Kaishuan Nie, who helps co-run the Xenon experiment with your friend and my friend, Alina Abreel, and past guests. But when would you tell a physicist, you've got to stop this experiment?

I mean, you don't keep running, once you detect the bottom quark, they don't just keep running it and getting more and more decimal places. Is there, or would there ever come a point where you go over it would tell my colleagues, my colleagues, your friends that you interviewed in this book, stop the search. It's not going to pan out. Yeah, that's a very hard question because I will make a comparison to another interesting thing. And that's the search for alien technology, extraterrestrial life, the SETI search, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

We've never found it. And then you can say, well, let's stop it because it's probably will never find it. But the other thing is that the people who do the search will tell you, oh, bam, but we've just started. We are only just beginning. There's so many areas to explore. And I think for the physical, the particle physics search for dark matter is more or less the same. So it would be hard for me to tell professional scientists, oh, you'd better stop because you'll probably never find. But the thing is, they will have to stop searching for it by the way they do it.

right now, like the Xenon experiments with this big underground laboratories where they try to find the very rare interactions of dark matter particles with atom, atomic nuclei, they will have to stop, because if these instruments get about, and they have been increasing in sensitivity over the years many, many times, but if they increase the sensitivity more than 10 times over the current value and the signal from dark matter would be below that they will never find it because neutrinos which you mentioned before will take over and at that very low level of signal neutrinos are everywhere and they will sort of disturb your experiment and if dark matter is so elusive that you will not find it by the next generation of xenon experiments

then this way of looking for it will have to stop because it doesn't make sense so um The xenon scientists, the particle physicists who are looking for it by this kind of experience, they really hope that this next generation will give their answer, because otherwise they're out of the game, and they have to find other ways to look for this mysterious stuff. So maybe it's nature itself who tells us when and where to stop. Very good. So a reminder we're talking with Govert Chilling, who's a favorite of author of mine. He's author of dozens of books, articles.

He find him in the sky and telescope and many other things. He won the David Schramm Award from the American Astronomical Society. And in 2007, he got his own piece of dark matter named after him, an asteroid called a 10-986 govert in his honor. It's such a delight to talk to you. So I am reminded of a book by, or maybe it's a saying, I think it's a book, by Sherlock Holmes, a great. mystery writer. And it was called the dog that didn't bark. And it's all about, you know, how you could notice something by its absence, not necessarily looking for its presence. So what's so unusual about a dog that doesn't bark? Well, I mean, I think a lot of it is, you know, kind of in the sense that

of all the things we know really well. And of course, you know that people criticize astronomers, at least from the, you know, maybe unorthodox side, but say, oh, well, you don't know what 95% of the universe is made above. Why should I listen to you about the Earth being around and all these other nonsense that we talk? So I find some of the strongest evidence for dark matter comes from our exquisite knowledge about ordinary matter, barionic matter, the matter that makes up you and me and your asteroid and everything else. The protons, the protons, I always say the croutons, my favorite edible part of it. called the Pyon, which is made of pies, I think. But, you know, we know so much about ordinary matter.

And I want to talk about the tools. And what is sort of, of all the, you're kind of this traveler in this book, this hero, making a journey to conferences during COVID and different countries, different continents. And of all the different tools and technologies, which one is sort of the most interesting? Maybe one coming in the future. You talk about Axion searches. What is about the technology? Is it the computer? Is it the supercomputer inside of our skull?

What technology is the most exciting, if not, most promising, but most interesting to you personally? Yeah. Well, first of all, we certainly do not have a supercomputer in our skull. I think our brain is pretty limited. And it's very good that you mentioned the computer revolution, because without the computer revolution, most of today's science could not have been done at all. I mean, the big particle accelerators and even the xenon experiments, they produce such a huge amount of computing instruments to even search through the data to find what you're looking for. But in terms of experiments, it's a good question because, again, my background is in astronomy.

So I know telescopes and I've been to many observatories all over the world and I've been impressed by big, well, I've been at your experiment at the South Pole. which was a very, very interesting trip, obviously. So that people are able to build and construct and think up these kind of experiments in such remote places, or like the Alma Observatory at five kilometers altitude above sea level in Chile, these are all extremely impressive. But in preparing this book, I paid a visit to the big CERN laboratory in Switzerland, the big particle physics laboratory. And I have always been impressed by big astronomical instruments.

They might be as big as a car behind the telescope. But here at CERN, we have an experiment, a detector, which is as big as a castle. It's a huge thing. It's about the mass of the Notre Dame in Paris. And it's all filled up with wires and detectors and electronics. and to see that in action is incredibly impressive. And I think that when you think about understanding the matter that we are all made of, we have made such giant leaps over the past decades using these kind of experiments.

That's really tremendously impressive to me because I think finding out more about normal matter may well be the way of solving the riddle of dark matter, because after all, it's all part of part of one universe, part of one nature. Nature doesn't care what we call it. Nature just has a bunch of particles, and the fact that we have not discovered all of them and call some of them dark matter, nature doesn't care.

It's just a complete, complete, well, system of particles and forces. So maybe the solution to this problem may come from the more or less regular experiments in particle physics. And as you and your listeners, probably know over the past year there has been a couple of observations that there might be hints of a possible fifth force in nature because nuance the nephews of

normal electrons are behaving a little bit strange and if this really pans out and it turns out to be to be seen by other experiments too this may well lead us to a new understanding of the of the of the of our current understanding of the of particle physics and it may well lead to a better understanding of dark matter too yeah um what is it like to write a book where the story is not as you know cleanly wrapped up as it was in this book you know you Nobel Prize award you know which i often talked about and in negative terms is kind of like uh false history of the of not your book but but it gives a distorted impression about, you know, what are the stakes involved? And in this book, there is no

concluded. I'm asking for myself because, you know, we're involved in documentaries and things about the CMB and you can find those online. And it's always about the promise of the future. And this current book, the elephant in the universe, has an awful lot of promise for the future. But as you said, there is an ultimate stop sign in the cosmic neutrino background or the supernova relic neutrino background. How is it to write a book where there is a no, you know, tidy ending and, you know, the third act of the, of the play. How did, how did you handle that ambiguity? Yeah. There's a fun story here. I think I mentioned it in my, in my introduction, because in the late, in the mid-1990s, I was doing research for a book on excess solar planets

because I knew there are new experiments and maybe within a couple of years they will find the first planet and then, well, let's start researching the book. And, Even before I started writing, the first extrasolar planet was discovered. So I had to hurry up producing that book, which has never been published in the United States, by the way, but you have many exoplanet books there by your own. And then a couple of years later, with the gravitational wave book, the Ripples in Space Time book that you just showed, it was more or less the same because there would be a second generation of the gravitational wave detectors

coming online soon. And I thought, well, when they start to do their measurements, within three or four years we will have the detection of gravitational wave. So I started to work on this book and bang, right after they switched the detector on, they found the first gravitational wave. And again, I had to hurry. But in both cases of these two books, the real discovery was in the book, obviously, and that was good. So when I started to think about the dark matter book and I talked to all these scientists, I jokingly said to them, well, you got to prepare yourself because when I start writing a book,

scientists usually make the final discovery. And that didn't happen. And it's hard, Brian. I know it's difficult because you want to go to a climax, you want to make the story complete. And it didn't happen in this case. And it was prepared for that. So what I try to do, and I hope I succeeded, what I try to do is give people a feeling of how it is to work on a search where you do not know what the final goal, the final route will be. You do not know whether or not you will be successful, but you need this passion and this, yeah, this way of going on with this kind of experiments to be able to do it.

And what I hope that I have done is throughout the book, people who are looking for dark matter, they came up with, experiments, they came up with new observational technology, they come up with new theories. And all these experiments and technologies and theories have given us a much broader vision of our universe. And it's about the distribution of matter in the universe, and it's about the CMB, and it's about distant galaxies, and it's about the makeup of galaxies and the formation of structure in the universe.

And all those kind of topics have been dealt with by people who were interested in solving the dark matter mystery. So even if we will never find dark matter, it has been a way of discovering our universe. And in a sense, I will make that comparison again. In a sense, it's like searching for extraterrestrial life. We have not found it yet, and maybe we will not find it in our lifetime, and maybe we will never find it. But looking for extraterrestrial life has given us astrobiology, it has given us extrasolar planets, it has given us chemical evolution of the universe, it is given of the knowledge about the origin of our solar system. So maybe we need such big mysteries as a drive to push forward our understanding of the universe. And hopefully

that will happen with this topic too. Yeah, absolutely. Going back to my predilection for discussing aberrations or perhaps iconoclass or unorthodox topics in this book is the story of the Dama experiment, which has fascinated me for 25 years, and I imagine many other people as well. I don't have many criticisms of this book that you've written, but if there's one, I would have love to have seen even more kind of psychological discussion of what's going on in these people's minds. We have this experiment that claims something like what, go over 13 Sigma evidence for dark matter, not only for dark matter, but for an annual modulation of the signal. Talk about what it was like to talk to these people. I get, and I'm only teasing, I don't criticize the book

at all. But someone like Harry Collins, you know, who gets into the sociology of scientists, I can convince him to do a book about this collaboration someday. But maybe he wouldn't get anywhere because they're so secretive, right? So talk about what is the DOMA experiment? What is the annual modulation, which was predicted by past guests on the show and good friends of mine and collaborators on the Simon's Observatory, Katie Freeze and David Spurgel. Talk about DOMA. What is annual modulation?

Why should we care? And what is going on? Maybe speculate on why they are so perhaps. unwilling to share their data and results. Okay, so Dama stands for dark matter. It's just an abbreviation, and it's an experiment run by Italian physicists, and it's based in Italy, in the Grand Saso Laboratory, which is deep in the Eponine Mountains,

away from all the cosmic disturbances that you may get. And it's the same location where also the big international xenon experiment is based. So there are a lot of dark matter experiments going on there. experiments going on there. Now what they claim to have found is this. When our Milky Way galaxy is is situated inside the big halo of dark matter, these particles must be all around us. And our solar system is moving through this cloud of dark matter particles. So you should see a certain sort of flux of dark matter particles. That's what Xenan also tries to find. The dark matter particles that are supposedly all around us. Now what Dama says, our earth is also circling around the sun.

So sometimes when the sun is moving in this direction through the galaxy and our earth is circling around the sun, sometimes they're moving in the same direction and some in the opposite direction. So the flux of dark matter particles should show a tiny variation over the year. And that's something that people had predicted a couple of decades ago and people have been looking for it and never found it. And now here comes this tiny dama experiment and they claim they have found this signal. So you would suppose when they first presented their results that everybody would say, yeah, we have found it finally and the problem has been solved. But that's not how science works. Scientists will always, when they hear a proposed solution, they will also always be critical

and they will ask the scientists, maybe you did this wrong or maybe your analysis wrong or let us do a second experiment to see if we can confirm it. And the Dama experimentalists have always been a little bit secretive about their experiment in the sense that they produced their final conclusions. They published their final conclusions, and their conclusions seem to be very convincing, as you said, many Sigma results. But they have never been willing to be very convincing. to produce their raw data so that other people could do their own analysis on the data to see if they come up for the same results.

The other thing that I found, which was a little bit of a surprise to me, I thought, I'm this science journalist, I'm not a competing scientist, I'm not involved with any other experiment, I'm just a neutral science journalist doing a book on this project. Dear Italian dama physicists, you claim to have found dark matter, I'll give you a call, let's make an appointment for an interview, and I will visit your experiment and we talk about it. You can explain all to me, and it will be a big chapter in my book. And the response was, when I emailed the leader of this project, the response was, no, we never do oral interviews with journalists. The only way we be in touch with you will be answering your questions through email.

And, well, as you can tell from the discussion we have right now, the way we are discussing my book right now would never be possible by exchanging questions and answers to email. So when I send them a list of questions, pretty critical questions, pretty informative questions, they came up with very basic answers like one or two sentences, and it didn't make, yeah, it didn't help me at all to learn more about it. So I think that the biggest criticism of the Dharma scientists is not their publications, but it's the fact that nobody can check how they came up with these published results because they keep the data to themselves. They have not been willing to tell too much about the setup of their experiments.

And by now, we have a big problem because you would say, well, if Dharma finds this, there must be something to it. But obviously there can be many kind of other influences that may create a spurious annual variation in the signal. And if dama is correct, and if their annual modulation is due to dark matter, that would tell you the amount of dark matter would be at a certain level. And if it really is at that level, the current version of the Xenan experiment would easily detect it. And it detects none. And then the other thing is a couple of scientists have reproduced the Dama experiment as best as they can. And one of these experiments is based in the Pyrenees between Spain and France, also in the mountains.

And they published their first results about half a year or a year ago, and they don't see any annual variation at all. So not many people are convinced about it. And it's a shame because this is a very. that experiments and everybody would love to work together with these Italian scientists to solve the riddle and maybe it will keep going like this for a long time. Yeah and I think, you know, one of the hallmarks of a good scientist, I'm not casting aspersions on them, but just speaking generally, is that you want criticism, you want attention, even if it's negative because that makes your discovery anti-fracic. It makes it robust. It makes it

immune to future attacks and solidifies it in the scientific canon. Now, one way they could do that is to do what good scientists have always known, is that there's more than one way to get any signal, including going back to the Galileo and his prediction about the tides and how he thought it and was completely wrong, as I point out. And he could have done a simple measurement, as he did, to prove Aristotle wrong that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. So it's doing experiments and it's accounting for what are called systematic.

So there's fundamental irreducible noise you can only reduce by taking more data and that's called statistical noise, statistical errors. And then there's so-called systematic errors which are either associated with your instrument, the system or the environment in which it's in or the planet which it's on and or you know where it is in the galaxy is in the case of Bicep 2 and the signal that we. later retracted our claim that it was due to inflation and more from the presence of dust in the Milky Way galaxy. Which, by the way, you can get, if you're in America, I am on my mailing list, join it, and you live in the U.S., I will send you some space dust, which is the villain of my book, and that's at briankeating.com slash list. Check that. I'll check out Govert Shillings website. We'll have links to all that in the show notes down below. But in the case of Dama, they could easily show that it's not systematic error.

by repeating this sodium iodide experiment in the southern hemisphere, right? I mean, that would give an antivariate, but they've not yet done that. Other teams I understand are. What do you make up, and you mentioned the liquid xenon detectors that are also obviously hot and have really obliterated much of the competition, including my favorite, you know, previous experiments, which were like the CDS, MS experiments, the germanium and silicon detectors. So now those have just been wiped off the map by people like my friend Richard Gatesgill and Elena Appreel. Talk about what you call the Xenon Wars.

This is a very, actually, I didn't know this about, you know, you always assume your friends are friends with each other, but that could not be farther from the truth in certain cases. Elena is one of my favorite scientists. We did an event here right before the pandemic with her, right around her birthday in March of 2020. and that was called Chasing Einstein, and that was with the filmmaker from LA that has done such wonderful work on that documentary. Talk about Elena, her personality, the kind of Italian, and there are a lot of Italians that work in Dark Matters, a lot of Italian women, which is really cool, but talk about her personality, maybe what you observe from her lessons that she learned from her experience with Rubia, Nobel laureate, and other approaches, but also her.

her kind of obsession in some ways, and I teased her about that, you know, that she fixates on this Nobel Prize and she really wants to detect it and does so as, you know, with the greatest experimental, you know, equipment team, ideas and skills that she has. Talk about her personality. Talk about this xenon, what you call the xenon wars. Yeah, I think Elena, April is one of the most intriguing persons who I met in researching this book. I have to say that before I started researching this book, I had read about the Xenon experiment, but they didn't know the people involved very much, as it was more particle physics than astronomy. So when you understood that she was leading this experiment ever since the start

of this century, I thought, well, I need to visit her and look her up in New York where she lives. And I did that, and it was a very exciting and interesting and interesting day that we met in her Brooklyn apartment and she talked about all the history and what I learned from her was how important it is to be really passionate about what you want to reach. Ever since she was a young girl, she had set her mind on becoming a famous physicist and every time the goal was higher and higher and when she worked on certain detectors for detecting gamma rays from space, she realized that maybe that is not something in which there is a big discovery space left anymore. I'm not sure if that's true, but around that time when she was doing this kind of experiment,

she learned about dark matter for the first time. Even particle physicists sometimes do not know about what their colleagues are working on. And when she heard about this problem, she got hooked on solving the problem of dark matter, especially since her work with noble gases would make it possible to work on this kind of xenon detectors that she helped develop. So she changed careers and she applied for National Science Foundation money and she received it and she built up her own research group and started with a very tiny test experiment in her lab, a tabletop experiment more or less, and she has been working, working all the time and as soon as one experiment is being, becomes operational,

workers already going on on the next version of the experiment, so she just will never give up. And what excites me about this is what will happen, I hope not for her, but what will happen if the xenon development, as I said before, when it becomes 10 or a couple of tens of times more sensitive, it won't work anymore because neutrinos will take over the signal level. What will you do when you have spent decades of your professional career in improving this technique and searching and looking for it,

hoping that you will make the final discovery and it will not happen? That must be a big psychological shock. So we talked about all this and part of it what was the reason why I mentioned, why I gave this, chapter the title the Xenum Wars is that there's not just one group. She used to work with Rick Gateskell, whom you just mentioned, and with a couple of other American scientists. So it's really an international experiment, a lot of Dutch people too. Her own husband was involved in this project too. But then Gateskell and a couple of his colleagues, they thought, well, Italy is far away, and we have some other things of thinking how we can do it, and maybe we can set up our own experiments,

also using Xenon, same kind of technology. So they split. And it was not a real war, but it was not a nice story too, because when you have a big research group and some people in your group say, well, we don't want to cooperate anymore and we set up her own group, that's, well, it's complicated. Let's call it that way. And then there was a third group in China where her husband went to after they got divorced already. So it's really a mix of personal relations and colleagues that were friends of you and even your ex-husband whom you had worked with. And then suddenly you are all more or less competing because you're working with the same kind of technology, the same kind of goal. And all of you hope to be the first one to make this

this important discovery. So I'm really, yeah, I was amazed by Elena April's passion and her perseverance in this whole project and it's probably the same for other kind of people. I also interviewed Rick Gateskell, who is a very nice person to talk to. And unfortunately because of the COVID pandemic, I could not visit the new laboratory that's now being constructed in the United States. It's not, I think it has become operational around this time. So it's finished in any way. But yeah, all the, all the experiments are in the book. And I think maybe you might say maybe despite this competition, or maybe thanks to this competition,

the scene and experiments might well play an important role in solving the riddle. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies last, price invalid May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply.

See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think about yet another kind of saying that you just mentioned, you know, you want to be the first to get there. But often, you know, we speak about the first mover advantage and business and constructing things. But sometimes the last mover You know, in the case of Galileo, everybody knows Galileo's name. Nobody knows Hans Lippersey's name, unfortunately, for the Dutch. But, you know, that's okay. In other words, it's not the person who, you know, maybe initially had the idea.

It's the person who makes the definitive ultimate measurement or utilization of that tool. And I wonder, you know, if we can maybe close with the opening character in this book, who couldn't be more different than the fiery Elena. April or the wonderfully, you know, kind of whimsical Richard Gateskill. And that's, and that's Jim Peoples, who you begin the book with. And once about eight or nine years ago, Jim gave a colloquium here at UC San Diego, and I spent the day with him, and it was so much fun. And in the colloquium, you know, he started talking about things, you know, that in his gentle Canadian way that he has, about, you know, where do we go from here to detect things like this or to constrain them?

And I said, you know, there's so many competing theories and it's all just, you know, so bewildering. And he actually told me to shut up. Can you believe that? He said, he said, shut up and measure. He didn't say shut up to me, you know, insulting me. But I'll always treasure the time that Nobel laureate, Jim Peebles, told yours truly, Brian Keating to shut up. Talk about, you know, that philosophy that really we should be kind of agnostic to use a loaded word,

but we should be agnostic as to what the dark matter might be. And it could surprise us. He and his early papers, which you really delightfully unravel for me as a professional scientist, you know, we never, I don't have the time to read the papers that came out today, let alone the paper that was written the year I was born, you know, start to make the case for cold dark matter. But what is your philosophy? Should we, I mean, in an error of constrained budgets, you know, where you just talked about

three different experiments, Lux, Panda, Zina, they're all going, I mean, can we just say, you know, that, you know, we should all get along, we should all make a measurement, or is it really just worth the competition is good in and of itself in the case of Dama? How did you emerge from this wonderful story, which doesn't have the nice, neat, golden, you know, of Alfred Nobel at the end of it. But talk about, you know, in the theory of in the spirit of Jim Peoples, what would you think we should do going forward? More experiments, more theory, more computation. What's the best approach? It's a very, very difficult question. If it was an easy question, everybody would know the answer and we would be doing that already. And again, I am not in a

position to judge the scientist or the people who provide the money. So it's all connected in that way. But at some point in what you just said, you talked about, we need to be agnostic and not having this particular view of what dark matter should be. And that's very, very hard because we are all people, we are all loaded with history and our current view of physics and of the science we are working in. So I think it's very important to be open and to have an open mind to new angles and new discoveries. And the people who are best in being open are the young people.

Because as soon as you are 25 or 26 or 27, you start to lose your creativity and you get too much influenced by by the world around you. And so I think the creative ideas by young people are very important here. And maybe the best thing we could do is even at an earlier stage, maybe already at high school or at elementary school and to train our children to be creative in their thoughts and to be real scientific thinkers and to think out of the box and to know how it works, how to check a scientific theory or a particular idea,

and to learn, which is important in these days of fake news and all kinds of things that we now have, to learn what you can trust and what kind of measurements are necessary to really be convinced by something. And if we train the younger generation of being better scientists and to be much more creative than the older generation, who are all spending their careers in a particular direction and maybe not so eager to change gears anymore. Yeah, maybe that will help us forward. And it's both in theory and in experiments. There are a lot of young creative minds and new technologies that come around, and that may give

us the possibility of dreaming up new experiments to solve this particular problem. I'm certain that there will be a solution to the dark matter problem. I hope to be alive when it will arrive. And it might be extremely interesting if it's something completely unexpected. Actually, I would love that. But even if it's just another strange particle, which is not that unexpected, it might be a very interesting find.

And I'm sure we will eventually get there if we have the creative minds and if we feed the creative minds to go on with this. But it's difficult to not be influenced by common knowledge, so to say. Yeah. Well, Govert, this has been a delight, a treat for me. You're a delightful writer. You always inspire me to look deeper into mysteries that I might take for granted. You're not afraid to be technical, but you write with a poet and kind of the delightful prose that is rare in scientific, so-called popular science. So I want to thank you. We've been talking today with Govert Schilling, author of Ripples in Space Time, with an endorsement by Lord Martin Rees on the front of it, a forward by him, and by today's book. We discussed the elephant in the universe. What is it? Is it a tusk? Is it a rope? Is it a tree? What is the elephant in the universe? You will find out more about this stalking elephant, pachyderm that is lurking in the universe when you read this wonderful book. Govert, where can people find out?

you online? I'm active on Twitter. It's just my Twitter handle is just my first and last name strung together, Gover Schilling. I have my own website, but it's basically in Dutch, obviously, but all the stories that have write for English language magazines like Skyat Telescope that you mentioned or Sky Night in the UK, you can find my English language articles there too. but I look forward to meeting your podcast viewers on Twitter or whenever and maybe in the future in person. Yeah, it'll be great. And thanks very much for having me, Brian.

It was a pleasure talking to you. And thanks for your kind words about my book. Thank you so much for coming on, Goverett. Be well. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishing and magic. Well, that's a wrap. Did this episode shed any light on dark math? I hope it did. Govert's really delightful to talk to and it was so gracious of him to spend so much time

taking time out from the wedding ceremony of his daughter. No, I wouldn't do that. But I think the search for dark matter is as elusive as finding as if a best friend, a partner in life and more. And it's worth pursuing, as you heard. And hopefully I've been inspired to do. I hope that you folks out there enjoy the podcast. I, if you did, I ask you to do one very simple favor. if you're listening on a podcast app like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, et cetera, that allows you to give a rating, a star rating, asterism would be appreciated, five stars, but anything would be appropriate. On Apple, you can even do me the grand favor of leaving a written review,

such as Zormby did with solid rant chaps, very legit math chatter with some real legit guests. So please do leave me a five-star review like Zornby did, Zornble, I don't know, It's a strange name. But anyway, I want to make up strange names myself. Please do me that small favor. And one more favor, if you would, if you're interested and you live in the United States, and you would like some space dust, some schmutz, the villain of my first book, losing the Nobel Prize. You can get that when you join my mailing list and leave your address.

Again, it has to be in the U.S. It's just too expensive, too difficult to send this package that I will send to you. Not really packaged, an envelope. With some real-life space dust, some analysis done by one of my podcast. listeners using an x-ray resonance spectrometer that proves it came from space. You will love it. How often can you get an actual piece, a substance that is the villain of a book? You can't do that with Dark Manor in the Elephant and the Universe.

Sorry, Govert. Love the book, but you can't send my listeners any Dark Manor. Because we don't know where it is, what it is. It might not even be any manner in the particle form anyway. But if you would like some space schmuts, live in the U.S., go to my website, briankeaton.com, slash list. Sign up. It's easy to join, easy to leave, though I hope you won't. And there's thousands upon thousands of people that have done it so far. And this, my summer gift to you for being good friends and fans of the podcast. So for now, I bid you adieu. And until next time,

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