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.


Episoder(419)

294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life

294 | Addy Pross on Dynamics, Stability, and Life

Erwin Schrödinger said that the important characteristic of life is that it "goes on doing something... for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to keep going under s...

28 Okt 20241h 11min

293 | Doyne Farmer on Chaos, Crashes, and Economic Complexity

293 | Doyne Farmer on Chaos, Crashes, and Economic Complexity

A large economy is one of the best examples we have of complex dynamics. There are multiple components arranged in complicated overlapping hierarchies, out-of-equilibrium dynamics, nonlinear coupling ...

21 Okt 20241h 11min

292 | Jonathan Birch on Animal Sentience

292 | Jonathan Birch on Animal Sentience

It's not immoral to kick a rock; it is immoral to kick a baby. At what point do we start saying that it is wrong to cause pain to something? This question has less to do with "consciousness" and more ...

14 Okt 20241h 10min

AMA | October 2024

AMA | October 2024

Welcome to the October 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pat...

7 Okt 20244h 29min

291 | Venki Ramakrishnan on the Biology of Death and Aging

291 | Venki Ramakrishnan on the Biology of Death and Aging

Aging and death happen to the best of us, but there are increasing efforts to do something about it. That effort requires that we have some reasonable understanding of why aging happens, and what proc...

30 Sep 20241h 20min

290 | Hahrie Han on Making Multicultural Democracy Work

290 | Hahrie Han on Making Multicultural Democracy Work

It's a wonder democracy works at all -- a collection of people with potentially different interests have to agree to abide by majority vote even when it goes against their desires. But as we know, it ...

23 Sep 20241h 15min

289 | Cari Cesarotti on the Next Generation of Particle Experiments

289 | Cari Cesarotti on the Next Generation of Particle Experiments

As an experimental facility, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva has been extraordinarily successful, discovering the Higgs boson and measuring multiple features of particle-physics interactio...

16 Sep 20241h 21min

288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today

288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today

It wasn't that long ago, historically speaking, that you might put on your tuxedo or floor-length evening gown to go out and hear a live opera or symphony. But today's world is faster, more technologi...

9 Sep 20241h 6min

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