Dark Matters

Tuesday, June 12 was our first talk at the 2012 Cheltenham Science Festival. As usual, especially for talk early in the day, there were plenty of grey heads. There was a lovely couple in front of us; an elderly man, and his 8-year-old son. You could see how proud he was of his grandson and how much they were enjoying both the talk and being with each other. I hope that young lad grows up to understand how lucky he was to have such a wonderful granddad!

This talk will be quite hard to review, because it wasn't actually a talk like so many of the other lectures. It was given by Tom Whyntie and Andrew Pontzen, former Famelab alumni. It was more of comedy sketch show then a lecture!

Perhaps I should review that aspect first. Between the two of them they acted out scenes from the past developments in dark matter.They played the roles of astronomers and physicists both contradicting each other as well as agreeing each other. There were some particularly funny scenes.

For instance they sat facing each other going through all the possibilities of what dark matter could be, and then dismissing them. Gas? It would have to be cool and ionised and there wasn't enough that. Tiny stars? Really tiny? Too small to see? Yes, probably not that either. Black holes! Yes! They are invisible so they could be dark… No wait, they aren't invisible, we can see them through microlensing. Their concluding question was how do you find something that you can't see, touch, smell, taste, or hear!

They illustrated how excited people got about finding dark matter by incorporating the word darks matter into some famous advertising slogans: “I can't believe it's not dark matter!” There was also rather amusing parody of a researcher called Doctor X to protect the identity of the people involved.

Amusingly they played the parts of a scientist being interviewed by the press. All the names of the journalists were rather funny, my favourite being Betty de Kay from Cosmo.

Through their humour they manage to convey a clear understanding of why we think there is dark matter out there, why it is important to find it, and also the question of when do we stop looking.

The laughter aside we did manage to learn a lot. They answered questions at the end that filled in any of the gaps during their presentation. They touched on things such as the difficulty in finding funding for anything other than dark matter. Andrew suggested that it was easier to get funding for something mainstream and then do the blue sky thinking and fundamental research on the side in your own time.

They explored the other theories that could explain the missing matter in the universe including the modified Newtonian dynamics theory as betrayed by Doctor X but cracks were found in that theory due to the requirement of a change in scale to measure the gravity. They explained that something was found at Gran Sasso, the lab that found faster than light neutrinos. Although this was found 10 years ago no other lab has been able to replicate it, so people don't believe that this is dark matter. Crest, another lab, has found something recently to but again it contradicts the Italians and also hasn't been replicated.

Tom explained that he felt that rather than try to replicate dark matter at facilities such as CERN, it might be better to try to detect dark matter in the underground labs, which is what he is now doing, despite his former position at CERN and his PhD paper on it.

Tom pointed out That science is done by people and it takes courage to go against the main ideas. At the moment dark matter explains things better than any other theory, so until a new theory comes along its the best we have. Perhaps that young 8-year-old boy sitting in front of me will be the one to come up with a new and different theory if no dark matter is found either at CERN or in the direct detection labs.