Belinda Smith

speaker

2,440 appearances 25 recordings 4 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 5d ago

Belinda Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 25 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.

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The Science Show · Looking inside cells, and how seals hear so well underwater · 31 Jul 2026 podcast

A WIMP is a weakly interacting massive particle.

WIMPs are thought to have been created shortly after the Big Bang.

But we don't really know how massive WIMPs are, assuming that they exist.

They could be heavier than a proton, or lighter.

At this stage, we just don't know.

Not too far down the hall, we find an experiment called Deep 3600.

Deep 3600 uses a tank filled with 3600 kilograms of liquid argon.

As Sean Daugherty explains, we can't see dark matter, but if a dark matter particle jostles the target material ever so slightly, we'll know it was there.

Given that there are different teams of scientists here, all looking for dark matter using different kinds of experiments, I was curious if there's a kind of friendly rivalry between the groups.

After all, the first unambiguous detection of dark matter is almost certainly going to score a Nobel Prize.

But the way Doherty sees it, there's so much we don't know about dark matter that it just makes good scientific sense to try a variety of different approaches.

While dark matter is the number one mystery, it's not the only puzzle.

They'd also like to know why the universe that we see around us is made of matter rather than antimatter.

Our current models of the Big Bang suggest that in the first moments of the universe's existence, there ought to have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter.

So what happened to the antimatter?

One possible solution relates to our old friend the neutrino, the ghostly particle that this lab was named after.

But in spite of the discoveries made here in the 1990s and early 2000s, there's still a lot about neutrinos that we don't know.

That's where an experiment called SNOWplus comes in.

SnowPlus actually uses the same detection chamber that was used decades earlier to study neutrinos.

Back then, the chamber was filled with heavy water.

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