96 | Lina Necib on What and Where the Dark Matter Is

96 | Lina Necib on What and Where the Dark Matter Is

The past few centuries of scientific progress have displaced humanity from the center of it all: the Earth is not at the middle of the Solar System, the Sun is but one star in a large galaxy, there are trillions of galaxies, and so on. Now we know that we're not even made of the same stuff as most of the universe; for every amount of ordinary atoms and other known particles, there is five times as much dark matter, some kind of stuff we haven't identified in laboratory experiments. But we do know a great deal about the behavior of dark matter. I talk with Lina Necib about why we think there's dark matter, what it might be, and how it's distributed in the galaxy. The latter question has seen enormous recent progress, especially from high-precision measurements of the distribution of stars in the Milky Way.

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Lina Necib received her Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently a Sherman Fairchild Postdoctoral Scholar in Theoretical Physics at Caltech, and will be an Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT starting in the fall. Her research spans issues in particle physics and astrophysics, especially concerning the nature and distribution of dark matter, as well as techniques for detecting it and constraining its properties.


Jaksot(415)

53 | Solo -- On Morality and Rationality

53 | Solo -- On Morality and Rationality

What does it mean to be a good person? To act ethically and morally in the world? In the old days we might appeal to the instructions we get from God, but a modern naturalist has to look elsewhere. To...

1 Heinä 20192h 5min

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

52 | Frank Lantz on the Logic and Emotion of Games

Games play an important, and arguably increasing, role in human life. We play games on our computers and our phones, watch other people compete in games, and occasionally break out the cards or the Mo...

24 Kesä 20191h 4min

51 | Anthony Aguirre on Cosmology, Zen, Entropy, and Information

51 | Anthony Aguirre on Cosmology, Zen, Entropy, and Information

Cosmologists have a standard set of puzzles they think about: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, whether there was a period of inflation, the evolution of structure, and so on. But there are a...

17 Kesä 20191h 31min

50 | Patricia Churchland on Conscience, Morality, and the Brain

50 | Patricia Churchland on Conscience, Morality, and the Brain

It's fun to spend time thinking about how other people should behave, but fortunately we also have an inner voice that keeps offering opinions about how we should behave ourselves: our conscience. Whe...

10 Kesä 20191h 12min

49 | Nicholas Christakis on Humanity, Biology, and What Makes Us Good

49 | Nicholas Christakis on Humanity, Biology, and What Makes Us Good

It's easy to be cynical about humanity's present state and future prospects. But we have made it this far, and in some ways we're doing better than we used to be. Today's guest, Nicholas Christakis, i...

3 Kesä 20191h 54min

48 | Marq de Villiers on Hell and Damnation

48 | Marq de Villiers on Hell and Damnation

If you're bad, we are taught, you go to Hell. Who in the world came up with that idea? Some will answer God, but for the purpose of today's podcast discussion we'll put that possibility aside and look...

27 Touko 20191h 11min

47 | Adam Rutherford on Humans, Animals, and Life in General

47 | Adam Rutherford on Humans, Animals, and Life in General

Most people in the modern world — and the vast majority of Mindscape listeners, I would imagine — agree that humans are part of the animal kingdom, and that all living animals evolved from a common an...

20 Touko 20191h 38min

46 | Kate Darling on Our Connections with Robots

46 | Kate Darling on Our Connections with Robots

Most of us have no trouble telling the difference between a robot and a living, feeling organism. Nevertheless, our brains often treat robots as if they were alive. We give them names, imagine that th...

13 Touko 20191h 6min

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