Dark matter and the end of answers
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Why is dark matter considered the biggest mystery in the universe?
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Take a look around you. Wherever you are, the table, the TV, your own body. At a basic level, it's the same stuff as everything else. And everything you see if you look out the window, or even further out, the ocean, the rest of the planet, the sun, the stars. It's all matter. We can see it, we can feel it, but all of that stuff is just fifteen percent of all the matter in the universe. The other 85%, 85% is something called dark matter, this kind of invisible, untouchable matter. But we don't know what it's actually made of. Scientists have been trying all kinds of things for decades to try and figure out what it is. But so far, they've got nothing. So, what does it mean for science if we can't find it?
If we can't answer, arguably, the biggest mystery in the universe? Today on Unexplainable, I'm gonna talk to a physicist who spent years looking for this stuff and then realized he couldn't do it anymore. So we quit. Because he started asking questions that went way beyond what he initially thought science was for. And stick around to the end of the episode for an update on some dark matter news.
Joseph Hallett. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. So uh you are you are a science writer now. You used to be a physicist. What made you want to be a physicist? Like what got you so excited about it in the first place?
Yeah, I mean, I I always like these kind of big questions, like um, the questions humans have always asked, like, how'd we get here? What is stuff made of? I had that instinct always to go deeper, right? Like if you're in chemistry class, you hear that. Everything's made of atoms. And then you hear that atoms are made of electrons swirling around a nucleus. Then you hear that the nucleus is made of protons and neutrons. And then you ask, Well, what are those made of? They say you have to take physics. Right. So if you do this enough times, you end up with a PhD in physics. And then you very quickly learn that there's a lot of things that we don't know. And you run favorite stuff. Exactly. The unexplainable.
And when you actually become a working scientist, that's the stuff you work on, right? Um, so the decision I had to make is which of those questions to work on. Yeah. And for me it was obvious that it was gonna be dark matter. At least like when I heard that everything I had been learning about is only one sixth of everything, at least for the picture I had of what science is supposed to do, uh, that came as a real shock.
So it's been a while since we've talked about it on the show. We had our first episode of the show on dark matter, but what is dark matter and and why did you get so excited about it?
Yeah. So dark matter is a thing that we know is there, but we don't know what it's made of. Um Really, it's thanks to Vera Rubin. In the 70s and 80s, she cataloged how fast stars are moving around their galaxies. So she looked at all the stars they're orbiting the center the same way we're orbiting our sun, right? But the problem with every galaxy is that all the stars are moving way too fast, especially the stars on the outside. Compare it to like a race car on a racetrack, right? If a car is going around the track and it speeds up. Yeah. Yeah. And when Vera Rubin looked at all the stars and all the galaxies, she was like, They're all going way too fast. Like they should all They should all
fly off into space.
Everything, including our sun, should be flying off into space because there's not enough stuff inside to be holding it at the speed that it's going at, right?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why is dark matter considered the biggest mystery in the universe?
0:01–5:08
2
How did Joseph Howlett become a physicist and why did he choose dark matter?
5:08–8:59
3
What evidence did Vera Rubin provide that led to the dark‑matter hypothesis?
8:59–13:42
4
How do underground detectors attempt to capture dark‑matter particles?
13:42–20:34
5
What happened when the large dark‑matter experiment in South Dakota reported an unexpected signal?
20:34–26:02
6
Why did the experiment’s results not confirm the existence of dark matter?
26:02–31:41
7
How did the failure to detect dark matter change Howlett’s view of science and meaning?
31:41–36:05
8
What does the future look like for dark‑matter research and why keep building bigger detectors?
36:05–36:26