Avi Loeb

I came from a background where I worked in cosmology, trying to figure out puzzles.

Most of the matter in the universe is of a substance that we don't know what it is.

We call it dark matter.

It's just to reflect our ignorance.

Nobel prizes were awarded for people who quantified how much dark matter there is, how much dark energy there is.

These are constituents whose nature is unknown.

And just think about it, giving a Nobel Prize to people who just said how ignorant we are.

We don't know what these things are.

Ordinary matter makes just 5% of all the matter in the universe.

And in this culture of cosmology, I worked in for three decades,

It was completely common to propose ideas to explain anomalies.

I mean, the dark matter is an anomaly.

You don't know what it is.

And people were rewarded for coming up with ideas, imaginative ideas that can be tested experimentally.

That's the way you make progress.

You don't know something.

You are putting on the table possibilities and then you motivate observers or experimentalists to figure out which one is the correct one.

And that was the culture.

And I think of it as the culture of chess players, trying to figure out things.

When I get to work on comets, asteroids, these objects, and consider imaginative possibilities to explain their anomalies the way I did in the context of cosmology, I encounter