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)

18 | Clifford Johnson on What's So Great About Superstring Theory

18 | Clifford Johnson on What's So Great About Superstring Theory

String theory is a speculative and highly technical proposal for uniting the known forces of nature, including gravity, under a single quantum-mechanical framework. This doesn't seem like a recipe for...

15 Okt 20181h 12min

17 | Annalee Newitz on Science, Fiction, Economics, and Neurosis

17 | Annalee Newitz on Science, Fiction, Economics, and Neurosis

The job of science fiction isn't to predict the future; it's to tell interesting stories in an imaginative setting, exploring the implications of different ways the world could be different from our a...

8 Okt 20181h 11min

16 | Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future

16 | Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future

Aging -- everybody does it, very few people actually do something about it. Coleen Murphy is an exception. In her laboratory at Princeton, she and her team study aging in the famous C. Elegans roundwo...

1 Okt 20181h 4min

15 | David Poeppel on Thought, Language, and How to Understand the Brain

15 | David Poeppel on Thought, Language, and How to Understand the Brain

Language comes naturally to us, but is also deeply mysterious. On the one hand, it manifests as a collection of sounds or marks on paper. On the other hand, it also conveys meaning – words and sentenc...

8 Sep 20181h 24min

14 | Alta Charo on Bioethics and the Law

14 | Alta Charo on Bioethics and the Law

To paraphrase Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, scientists tend to focus on whether they can do something, not whether they should. Questions of what we should do tend to wander away from the pristine bea...

8 Sep 20181h 8min

13 | Neha Narula on Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and the Future of the Internet

13 | Neha Narula on Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and the Future of the Internet

For something of such obvious importance, money is kind of mysterious. It can, as Homer Simpson once memorably noted, be exchanged for goods and services. But who decides exactly how many goods/servic...

8 Sep 20181h 6min

12 | Wynton Marsalis on Jazz, Time, and America

12 | Wynton Marsalis on Jazz, Time, and America

Jazz occupies a special place in the American cultural landscape. It's played in elegant concert halls and run-down bars, and can feature esoteric harmonic experimentation or good old-fashioned foot-s...

4 Sep 20181h 1min

11 | Mike Brown on Killing Pluto and Replacing It with Planet 9

11 | Mike Brown on Killing Pluto and Replacing It with Planet 9

Few events in recent astronomical history have had the worldwide emotional resonance as the 2006 announcement that Pluto was no longer considered a planet, at least as far as the International Astrono...

27 Aug 20181h 17min

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