Dr. Brian Keating

So Albert Einstein said the following.

He said, actually, we shouldn't think of gravity as this kind of force that pulls on things, invisible ropes that are pulling on things.

We should think of it as the effect of mass that causes the actual fabric of space and time to warp.

like a bowling ball and a trampoline.

And in that way, he proposed that you actually have to change the laws of gravity to account for the peculiar properties of the planet Mercury.

At this time in 1915, Mercury, like Neptune, had this weird behavior.

It was orbiting in this strange way.

And in fact, the same guy, his name is Le Verrier, a French astronomer,

who proposed the existence of Neptune, i.e.

dark matter, to explain the peculiar properties of the planet Uranus.

The same guy proposed, well, I can do the same thing for Mercury.

And he proposed there was a new planet that you couldn't see because it was closer to the sun than Mercury.

And it was called Vulcan.

And so for many years, astronomers couldn't see it because it was so bright next to the sun.

But they postulated, well, this guy's pretty smart.

He must be right.

So he said,

look for a planet closer to the sun than Mercury, and it was never found.

So instead, so dark matter succeeded with the case of Uranus, and it failed in the case of Mercury, and what was needed in Mercury's case was to change the laws of physics.

So today, my colleagues work on these problems, and I work on them too.