Lifeboat Foundation

Why is there something rather than nothing? And what does ‘nothing’ really mean? More than a philosophical musing, understanding nothing may be the key to unlocking deep mysteries of the universe, from dark energy to why particles have mass. Journalist John Hockenberry hosts Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, esteemed cosmologist John Barrow, and leading physicists Paul Davies and George Ellis as they explore physics, philosophy and the nothing they share.

This program is part of the Big Ideas Series, made possible with support from the John Templeton Foundation.

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What is dark matter? Does it even exist, or do we just need an adjustment to our theory of gravity?

What is dark matter? It has never been observed, yet scientists estimate that it makes up 85% of the matter in the universe. The short answer is that no one knows what dark matter is. More than a century ago, Lord Kelvin offered it as an explanation for the velocity of stars in our own galaxy. Decades later, Swedish astronomer Knut Lundmark noted that the universe must contain much more matter than we can observe. Scientists since the 1960s and ’70s have been trying to figure out what this mysterious substance is, using ever-more complicated technology. However, a growing number of physicists suspect that the answer may be that there is no such thing as dark matter at all.

Scientists can observe far-away matter in a number of ways. Equipment such as the famous Hubble telescope measures visible light while other technology, such as radio telescopes, measures non-visible phenomena. Scientists often spend years gathering data and then proceed to analyze it to make the most sense of what they are seeing.

Berkeley Lab Researchers Record Successful Startup of LUX-ZEPLIN Dark Matter Detector at Sanford Underground Research Facility

An innovative and uniquely sensitive dark matter detector – the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment – has passed a check-out phase of startup operations and delivered first results. LZ is located deep below the Black Hills of South Dakota in the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) and is led by the DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

The take-home message from this successful startup: “We’re ready and everything’s looking good,” said Berkeley Lab senior physicist and past LZ spokesperson Kevin Lesko. “It’s a complex detector with many parts to it and they are all functioning well within expectations,” he said.

Would you like a warning before the world ends?

Well, it’s now possible. Extraluminal is an Internet of Things (IoT) device that will notify you an hour before the Earth is about to be destroyed by a supernova.

A supernova refers to “the cataclysmic explosion of a massive star at the end of its life. It can emit more energy in a few seconds than our sun will radiate in its lifetime of billions of years.”

It was once thought that gravity and quantum mechanics were inconsistent with one another. Instead, we are discovering that they are so closely connected that one can almost say they are the same thing. Professor Susskind will explain how this view came into being over the last two decades, and illustrate how a number of gravitational phenomena have their roots in the ordinary principles of quantum mechanics.

Leonard Susskind is an American physicist, who is a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. His research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics, and quantum cosmology.

This could be the first step to studying the oldest explosions in the universe.

New research shows a direct interaction between dark matter particles and those that make up ordinary matter.

A new paper, published in the *Astronomy and Astrophysics* journal, discovered unexpected characteristics for the elusive dark matter that likely goes against our best theory of the universe — the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model.

What is dark matter?

We’re only days into James Webb’s scientific operations, and the giant infrared observatory has already broken its own record for the most distant galaxy ever observed.

Last week, a team unearthed an observation of a galaxy that existed 400 million years after the Big Bang. This week, a new analysis revealed a galaxy a mere 235 million years after the Big Bang. It is located 35 billion light-years away from Earth.

James Webb peers further into the universe than ever before

Continue reading “James Webb breaks its own record for the most distant galaxy ever observed” »