[Music]
If darkness is our oldest friend and if we return to it again and again,
it's because it was with us around us and in us before we emerge into the day's divinity.
When we search for origins, for the seminal priority of first principles,
we venture into the depths of a metaphysical night that extends far beyond Earth's
nocturnal shadow, onto the source of all sources. Look up at the night sky,
all those stars and all ordinary matter make up only a small fraction of what's out there.
The rest is dark upon dark. Stay tuned friends, a show on the evidence of things unseen, coming up.
[Music]
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions coming to you from the studios of KZSU on the Stanford campus.
And if it pains you that I'm fading out Julie Cruz's interstellar voice singing the world spins,
sit tight because I'll play the song in its entirety at the end of today's show.
Who said angels don't exist?
I'm joined today by Maria Elena Monzani, one of the world's pioneering investigators
of what goes by the name of dark matter.
Maria Elena is a lead scientist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator or Slack as we call it around here.
And one of the leaders of the Luke's Zeppelin Dark Matter experiment with the Cavley Institute for
Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology.
In 2005 she received a joint PhD in Astroparticle physics from the Dunidit Hall University of Paris,
Parissette and the Univertitad de Listudie Di Milano in 2005.
She received the Excess Scale Science Application Award in 2019 and NASA's Group Achievement Award
in 2010. It's a real pleasure to welcome her to the program. Maria Elena, thanks for joining us
today on entitled opinions.
Thanks for having me in the catacombs.
Yes, we are in the deep dark.
Speaking of which, in my intro I mentioned this phrase "The Evidence of Things Unseen"
and it's a phrase I actually borrow from the epistle to the Hebrews, which contains a famous
Pauline definition of faith, "The substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen."
But today we're going to be talking about a very different kind of evidence in the epistle
to the Hebrews had in mind with that definition. But let me put my first question to you about
dark matter in a roundabout way. I know you're a lover of poetry, so here's a poem by WH Auden
called "The More Loving One." It's rhyming coupleists give a veneer of playfulness,
yet I think a very earnest intent lies under the Sing Song surface.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well that for all they care I can go to hell.
But on earth in difference is the least we have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it? We're stars to burn with a passion for us we could not return.
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.
At my earth as I think I am of stars that do not give a damn, I cannot now I see them say,
"I missed one terribly all day." We're all stars to disappear or die. I should learn to look at
an empty sky and feel its total dark sublime, though this might take me a little time.
So the first thing I would remark is that we're all stars to disappear and die. The sky would not,
in fact, be empty, far from it. All the stars in the universe, as you know better than I do,
as well as all ordinary matter, make up only 5% of the universe's total contents.
The other 95% consists of dark matter, 27% and dark energy, 68%.
Dark matter and dark energy are the unseen forces that determine our cosmic destiny.
Yet the existence of dark matter has never actually been confirmed since no one so far has been
able to detect any dark matter particles. And here is where you come in because you, Maria Elena,
are at the forefront of a worldwide project that seeks to find hard scientific proof that dark
matter in fact exists. We have every reason to assume that it does exist. Yet it remains very elusive.
And why is that? What is it about dark matter that makes it so hidden from us?
So I'm going to give us a little tour of the fundamental forces of the universe in order to answer
this question so that we get a sense of what the order of the magnitude are. So as far as we know,
we, there are four fundamental forces that rule the fate of the universe. And when I say as far as
we know, it's important because those are the forces that affect our bodies, the earth, the sun,
which means these are the forces that affect protons, neutrons, and electrons, which is the stuff
you and I are made off the table, the chair I'm sitting on etc. So those forces are in order of
strength, the nuclear strength force, strong force, the electromagnetic force, the nuclear weak force,
and gravity. We have experience of most of them in our daily life. The weakest of those is gravity.
Gravity is the reason why I am firmly planted on the chair right now and I'm not floating through
the room. And we all experience gravity at all times. Gravity is the weakest, but it's the one that
has the biggest effect on the large scale because it's always addictive or it only has one sign and
the sign is always attractive. So basically if the universe was made by two protons for gravity,
they would eventually find each other and fall on each other. So then gravity,
accryts, things, things get bigger, the bigger they are, the more gravity they exert on each other.
Now we can go up on the one that we have an experience of which is electromagnetism.
Electromagnetism has positive and negative so it can be attractive or repulsive.
And basically its range is usually very limited because atoms tend to be neutral. So my body
as a whole is neutral, which again is why I'm not flying off the chair and sticking against the wall.
We don't have a charge. You know, we're doing a radio program so we're using electromagnetic waves
but I think the most cogent experience of the strength of electromagnetic force, which is how we know in
our daily life that is stronger than gravity is the chair is holding me up. The chair is solid
and this happens because the electrons in the atoms of the chair and the electrons in the
atom in my body repel each other repels each other. This is why the earth is very big but I'm
not falling through the chair. The chair is not falling through the ground. The building is not falling
to the center of the earth. So basically electromagnetism is what keeps things solid.
Thank goodness for electrons. Correct, yes. So then you can go the strongest scale I said earlier is
the nuclear strong force. That's what keeps the nuclei in a tone prevents them from decay,
from falling apart. So for example, the carbon in our bodies, which is in our DNA,
in our skin pretty much everywhere, is made of six protons, six neutrons, and six electrons. Usually
it can have one or two extra neutrons. The protons are, you know, six of them that would repel each
other because they have all positive charge and they are confined in a space of 10 to the minus
15 meters. The atom is about 10 to the minus 10 to the minus 15 is one million to the
billion to the meter. Sorry, I'm not saying this in miles. Forgive me, I want to call in Europe.
So it's a very small space in which you have a lot of charge that would repel each other.
So then you will need something that is stronger than the protons that then they repassion to hold
them together. And you know, it's a glue and we use the work glue for the carriers of the strong force.
This gives you an idea of how much stronger the strong force is compared to the electromagnetic force.
Then we have the weak one. The weak force with don't experience in daily life.
This is what allows for types of nucleot to the transforming to each other.
I think the glimpse of how weak the weak force is, we can get in two places. One is from nuclear waste.
When we have a nuclear reactor, we produce waste, the waste is around 400 or 1000 years or
million years. That is because those atoms settle using the weak force. And one way to say
weak is very slow. So it takes a very long time for those atoms to go back to stable state and not
be radioactive or we call radioactive. Another thing that is more common to our bodies is a small
fraction of our carbon because we breathe air that is affected by cosmic ray and a small fraction
of our carbon is carbon 14. And that stays around for a long time after we die, which is why we
can use carbon to date leaving organisms in archaeology. So it takes about 5000 years for the carbon
to go away. This isn't very indirect way to get the glimpse of how weak weak interaction is.
I don't have a more direct one because normally our atoms don't decay and so we don't see that
in regular life. So this is a premise of what the fundamental forces are.
Now we can ask, okay, dark matter and dark energy, how do they relate with the fundamental forces?
And please keep in mind those are the forces that we're subject to, but there might be other
things out in the universe that don't have these forces that interact completely independently
and by definition we will not be able to interact with them. So can I ask a clarification question?
Are the four forces fundamental forces of the universes that apply only to ordinary
baryonic matter? Namely the matter that we know stars and that five percent that I was talking about?
That's the perfect question I was about to get into this part of the of the conversation.
So dark energy which makes out makes up 70 percent of the matter energy density of the universe.
It's very weird to explain what dark energy is, is what is accelerating the expansion of the universe.
We think that it is a property of the metric that defines the universe, a problems, an intrinsic
property of space time. I know this is a very strange thing to say, but in other words it's a property
of gravity itself. So dark energy being a property of space time, it's a property of gravity,
and being a property of gravity it feels gravity, but if it's the gravity in the opposite,
we write it out in the equations as a negative pressure because you know gravity is what makes things,
the expansion of the universe slow down, makes things pile on each other, but dark energy is
doing the opposite effect. So in a way that can achieve the weakest, even though there is a lot of it,
and we say it's the weakest because it only shows on the scale that is beyond galaxy clusters.
It only shows in the global scale of the universe, and that's one of the reasons why it's so hard
to measure because the way we look at it is we see the expansion of the universe as it is now,
and then we can go back and look at the further subjects, and then we say, "Ah, you know,
10 billion years ago, galaxies, the universe was expanding more slowly than it is now,"
or we can look across directions and say, "Is it the same in every direction, etc., etc."
So then dark matter, I'm going to say something that's incorrect, but please bear with me,
is a little more intense than dark energy because we see it on a smaller scale.
So we see dark matter on a variety of scales, the smallest one of which is the galaxy,
we see it very clearly in cluster of galaxies in several different ways,
and we see its fingerprints on the universe. We see it in the
a spectra of the cosmic wave background, we see it in the primordial composition of the atoms that
came out of the Big Bang. So excuse me, but when you say we see it, are you speaking metaphorically?
Because what does it mean to see dark matter? I thought we don't have any actual,
scopic evidence for it. Fantastic, we can measure its effects.
Right, okay. So for example, they do turn on fraction from the primordial,
from the Big Bang. You know, the composition, the primordial composition of the universe was fixed
in the first 20 minutes after the Big Bang event, and you know, we know that matter, we would have
75% hydrogen, 25% helium by mass, but instead we have traces of duturon in there,
and we think that this happened because dark matter was so abandoned in the durley universe
that it diluted dutur on a bit. So not all the dutur burned up in the
Big Bang and turned into helium. So is that one of the biggest effects that people point to
for the existence of dark matter? Not really. This is one of the one of the effects that cannot be
explained by modified gravity. Okay. That's one of the interesting ones. The biggest ones that we
all know and that, you know, have been observed more or less for a hundred years is the dynamic of
large scale objects in the universe, such as the galaxy or clusters of galaxy. So for example,
if you take a photo, it's not a photo recording of how things rotate in a spiral galaxy, such as
Andromeda, such as the Triangolong, which is where it was originally measured by Virrobin in the 1970s,
you see that the galaxy kind of rotates like a solid object, but there is a near-linaf mass to
explain the rotation in that way. So that is the original evidence for dark matter. This is on
the galaxy. A hundred years ago, it was sort of guessed by Fritz Suki who came up with the name
Dungkele Materia, Dark Matter in German. And so that's the dynamic of how things rotate around
shows that there is a lot of matter that we cannot see. Now, dark matter is not really dark,
it's more like transparent. It's more like a viscose substance in the universe, like molasses,
the slow things down. That's the fact that we observe. And they say transparent because it doesn't
shine and it doesn't shade. So I'm hoping the most of us would have observed in Milky Way and
night at least once. And you see a big dark streak in the middle of the Milky Way. That is
interstellar gas. That is the dark stuff. And we see it in a way. Even with our eyes, we see it as a
shade. Dark matter is not dead. It's not something that prevents the-- it's between us and the light
and absorbs the electromagnetic radiation. Dark matter is completely unaffected by electromagnetic
radiation. Does it make light? Does an absorb light? The interesting bit here is I've talked about
the gravitational effects of Dark Matter. We know for sure that he has the gravitational interaction.
But very tantalizing. Let's say it's circumstantial evidence from the dynamics of the big
bank and how the universe cool down in the first few seconds is that Dark Matter may or might
have the weak interaction. So that's what we're going after because if he has the weak interaction,
we can make it interact with our nuclei, nuclei now, detector, nuclei, inazics, etc., etc.
We know that this is extremely rare, but that's what some of the experiments are chasing because
it's the joke about the drunk person looking for their keys under the lamp. Why are you looking
there? Because I can. Yes. So we're looking with the weak interaction because we can,
most of all, but also because if you rewind the move of the big bank to hit the density that
would explain the amount of Dark Matter that we see right now, we hit a range of temperature,
which is the characteristic temperature of the weak interaction. So basically Dark Matter would
have the couple from the primordial universe, same time as the neutrino, so around second one from
the big bank event. So that's the reason why we go after it with the weak interaction.
So if I understand properly, the Dark Matter was generated as a result of the big bang like
ordinary matter. Correct. Yeah. And Dark Energy also owes its genesis to the big bang.
So maybe we can break out the order if that is interesting. Sure. So first, very, very first
fraction of the big bang was what we think this phenomenon, which is inflation, which is where space
time unraveled. Space time has property gravity and therefore dark energy. So dark energy was
there from second to the monastery of the universe. Second, 10 to the monastery, second is where
physics break down. But in the very first distance, dark energy was there. Then the universe up to
10 to the minus 12 seconds from the beginning. Again, I'm saying very small numbers was a quark
glue on plasma. So strong forces the first one that decoupled and then by second one,
electromagnetism and weak force had decoupled from gravity from other forces from each other.
Let's say or from the vacuum, which is a whole other thing, but that's when they show up.
And so in the first second, the photons is created the electron, the neutrino, and the dark matter
particle if there is such a thing. And I didn't explain what we're looking for a particle,
but because we see a gravitational effect that is attractive, this thing has mass and has mass
the way, you know, I have mass and I'm not flying around the room now.
Okay, so if it has mass, is it here with us? Is it in the studio? Is it coming between us? Or is it
even in our bodies without it interacting with the ordinary matter? Where is its location?
Correct. So it's in the galaxy. It's what is holding the galaxy together. Now this sun is
rotating around the center of the galaxy at around 150, 160 miles per second, I'm going to say.
And so we're slamming against a wind of dark matter, which is going through us.
In a standard model of dark matter, it is about a particle per liter. So, you know, three to five
particles are going through our head at any given second. And they go quite fast, so it's about a
billion per second to go through our bodies at any given time. Of dark matter. Of dark matter.
And they don't bother us because they don't, they're completely indifferent to
to our ordinary matter. So that is the question, how in different are they to ordinary matter?
Do they have a weight on track with us through the weak force? Which then would mean, you know,
maybe one particle of dark matter will interact with the nuclei of my body through my entire life.
Okay. Order of magnitude.
And it's that possibility that there is one particle even, you know,
astray, almost impossible to find. But I gather that your research is focused on trying to locate
those particles and certify that they are actually interacting there in the whimp, the weak,
weakly interactive massive particles. And if there is a detection of dark matter,
the particular particle of dark matter, it would be the whimp in the whimp force, right?
So that is what I'm looking for. My team is looking for. There are other models that are harder to
look for. Let's say that if dark matter has any type of interaction with regular matter,
we can rewind to the conditions close to the big bank event. So then you can do three things.
You can have regular particles called light and I late create other particles, one of which
could be dark matter, which is what the people at CERN are trying to do, make dark matter in the lab.
Or you can look at very dense regions in the universe, such as the center of the galaxy or the center
of the sun, and observe the opposite event, which is two particles of dark matter annihilating
two regular particles or photons. And then there's a third wave, which is the Skederex
experiment, which is Billier Ball, basically two things hit each other and they change trajectory,
they exchange momentum, they exchange velocity. One thing that we don't think of when we play
Billier and the balls hit each other, this is an exchange of electromagnetic force,
it's still the electrons that repel each other. Otherwise the balls will go through each other,
they will be transparent to each other. So same thing with dark matter and nuclei in a detector,
we want them to scatter an exchange of momentum or energy or velocity between them.
And so, sorry, what was the question again? Well, the detection of the particle,
it sounds like you have to get very lucky if you're going to detect such a particle of dark matter.
Is that not the case? That's correct. So we have been looking at, we've taken the cross-section that
we expect from the beginning of the universe and build the detector around that cross-section.
And basically we kind of treat it like a neutrino, so something that you make a big detector
and it will interact extremely rarely. And so three, four, five, depending how you count,
generation of detectors have not seen evidence of these collisions. The experiment that we're
running now, which is the Luxx Zeppelin, has 10 tons of liquid xenon, a liquid xenon.
And I can say a few words about why liquid xenon in a second, but we waited for several months
and we know that there are 10 billion of particles going through the detector every second
and none of them have interacted with my nuclei of liquid xenon in a three-month observation.
Now we're going to do a three-year observation and then, you know, the more you go down in sensitivity,
the more you know about the type of interaction that you might have.
So in three years you're hoping maybe to get one or two interactions.
Maybe like a dozen, couple dozen, if nature cooperates.
And if you do get a dozen, will that prove the existence of dark matter?
In my view, we already proved the existence of dark matter based on its effect.
The detection will prove that he has the weak interaction and that it's a particle
and it will give us an idea, a feel for the mass of the particle, of the mass range of the particle.
Yeah. Don't you find that we live in a very bizarre universe, from our point of view,
human ordinary matter point of view, where we look out and see, I mean endless galaxies with the
James Webb telescope now, it's just staggering and overwhelming how many
super clusters of galaxies, how many galaxies, how many stars, it's countless.
And yet we're told that that's just a side story and a very minor side story and that the real
Agon is between dark matter and dark energy, which are again relatively indifferent to us.
And if the universe is going to end in some kind of thermal death, it's going to be because of the
triumph of dark energy over dark matter or if we can postpone however long,
you know, that final thermal death is going to be thanks to the effect of dark matter.
And I think that more people know about this story, this invisible story, the more I think we would,
I feel like I have to align myself with dark matter against dark energy.
Because dark energy is the force of entropy, I don't know if I'm using these terms in a proper
scientific sense, but there is something entropic about dark energy, which is trying to
push everything apart to the point where the center does not hold.
Yeah, so there are two comments that I will make to your question. The first one is what you
call bizarre, I call job security. And I'm like deadly serious here, although it's a joke,
because when I was in grad school for particle physics, I was in between my masters and my doctorate.
So we have this model that I described earlier, it's called the standard model of particle
physics that describes all the particle, all the interactions, etc, etc. And this is one of the great
intellectual triumphs of 20th century, it explains everything is very accurate. So I was going
to school for particle physics and I was told there are a couple of twinks that we need to put
to the standard model, but we're almost there. Physics is very close to complete.
And one of the questions was the density of the universe. That was a big question in the late 90s,
because it's the parameter that tells us what the universe will have at thermal death,
expand forever, or have a big crunch. So we made the measurement in 2001 by the way this was led by
Professor Jerome, by any Italian lead group. And they made the measurement, we didn't know the
order of magnitude of the density and they came out, this is a hundred plus or minus two, which was
amazing. And then they were like, oh, and by the way, 95% of this stuff, we don't know what it is,
we don't know what it's made of, we don't know where it comes from. That was a very good time
to start the career in particle physics, because throughout school I've been told,
and there is very little to figure out, and now I'm like, now most of it we don't know what it is.
Is this thing with like the sciences or anything in reality where you're like, all more almost there,
it's like hiking, you're at the peak and then you get to the peak and you're like, oh no,
that's not where I was going, there is a whole another valley and then all another peak.
So I like this part of the universe in which it's playing with us a little bit not on purpose.
So that's...
No, I know. Yeah, it's perfectly fascinating if you're in the business of discovery and in the
business of adventure and venturing into the unknown in particular, and there seems to be a lot of it,
a lot of it out there.
And then, sorry, I'm interrupting you, but the other side of your question about dark matter
is that dark matter seeded the density fluctuations very early in the universe, in the first
thousands of the universe that allowed for large scale structure formation, and then on that was built,
you know galaxies and stars.
Everything were made of except for the hydrogen was made inside of a star.
The iron in our blood which allows us to break was made in a supernova explosion.
None of those things would happen without dark matter because the universe doesn't have enough
regular matter to counteract basically the violence of the explosion of the big bank.
So this is a very moving thing to me that, you know, there is this thing we don't interact with.
We don't know what it is, we don't know where it comes from, but without it, we wouldn't be here
to have the conversation in a way. And, you know, this is to agree with you that dark matter is better
than dark energy for like what we are concerned.
As far as we're concerned, yes.
So now I'm going to ask a very speculative question, which I'm assuming you are not going to be able to
answer scientifically, but if you think of the big bang as an inflation invent, was dark energy,
the prime mover of the big bang?
No dark energy was a product. Now we are speculating a little bit between container and content.
Yeah. So dark energy is a property of the container and everything that we are is the content,
including photons that is light. But so we believe or believe is a strong word, but we
hypothesize that the universe, the big bang was a quantum fluctuation. Now there is a very
interesting-- Can you explain what is a quantum fluctuation?
There is this very interesting concept in quantum physics, which is the word vacuum. Vacuum is not empty.
It is a sea of potentiality to use the Aristotelian expression. It's like looking out at a
column lake that is flat, but you know, if there is wind, you're going to see very big waves.
So basically what we know is that they fear means. So all the particles they were made of
are represented in quantum physics by harmonic oscillations. The ground state of their
harmonical oscillations is not zero. It's half a particle. So if we have the vacuum, which is the place
where all the forces exist and all the particles exist is a big word. But is the place where the
rules of physics exist? Then it's not empty because it has half a particle of every possible
particle in every point. And the particles pop in and out of existence continuously,
and that's-- Even before the big bang. That I don't have an answer to. But it is possible,
so I'm going to say what remains that they pop in and out of the existence continuously,
and then we can go back to the big bang. There is a formulation of the uncertainty principle,
which is energy and time. Energy in certain tune energy and uncertainty of time is always bigger
than a certain number. That means that you can give whatever energy you want as long as you take away
fast enough. So basically this is the concept of virtual particles. Particles popping in and out of
the void and dying so fast of the vacuum and dying and going back so fast that you can violate
the laws of physics basically. You can violate conservation of energy if you do it fast enough.
That's what the quantum fluctuation is. If you give enough energy, the particle becomes real. It's
really extracted from the void. We say it's the marshal, and that's how the colliders work. Basically,
you know, you annihilate particle, you produce a bunch of energy, send it into the vacuum,
and they will extract existing virtual particles and make them real. It is possible that
that's what happened at the big bang event. That there was a vacuum with fields that was
probed with enough energy to bring something of the marshal, made something real, which was the
entire universe. And I know this sounds very esoteric, but I don't know how else to explain.
I'm assuming that you relate to the universe with a certain wonder and awe. It's very difficult not to
have a sense of awe and wonder. But at the same time, the more I learn about how these forces work
and how stars are born and what nuclear fusion is, the more
in a matchably violent is this universe that we live in. And I almost go back now and I'm
seduced by the Mannequi in worldview, which is that a universe that is the product of this extreme
collisions that are happening all the time. And the annihilation of antimatter by matter and the
annihilation of particle by another particle and one kind of molecule turns into another molecule.
All this is the result of an extraordinary violence and the Mannequi and ideas that this
created world cannot be created by benevolent God. It has to be created by some other
demonic force. Sometimes in my darker moods, it seems to me that this universe has a very,
very violent character that doesn't seem to conform to the notion of it's certainly not
Dante's universe of the perfect circular motions and the utter serenity of the heavenly spheres
where everything is nestled and embedded one sphere into the other and it's all moved by the
love of the creator and the creator, you know, Lamorca,
more of the love that moves the sun and the other stars were far from that kind of
universities days. And it seems like the more we learn about it, the more violent it gets.
So the violent is paradoxically very hospitable to life and it's something that we don't
understand at the fundamental level. I mentioned it earlier, I run the mix up the hemoglobin of my
blood is what allows us to breathe. It was made in a supernova explosion. That is the most violent
event in the universe that we can think of. I think even worse is the neutrinos, the neutron stars,
which if the heavier elements and iron come from these incredible collisions of neutron stars,
even worse. I was about to get there, right? If all the iron in our blood comes from a supernova,
that to me is very moving, that we come from something very violent. And you know, when the sun
dies in four and a half billion years around the same time, the Milky Way will merge with the
Andromeda galaxy. So it will kick off new star formation and you know, maybe the whatever comes after
the sun will be in a binary system and maybe next round my iron will get to be gold and maybe in
10 billion years there will be a life form which is silly conveys instead of carbon based and it will
use gold for breathing. That to me is mesmerizing and it's violent but not in a way that I perceive
as hostile. Well then if we're a little part here, you know, because we're a tiny little part is
someone that almost every Italian has in his or her blood, he's the great pessimist of the 19th century.
And he's, if he were here with us here in the discussion, he would ask, will it have been worth it
when our blood is made of gold and not a virus? Is life itself not a horrible mistake of the universe?
In so far as for all that's miraculous, tensions is a condition essentially of suffering and of
exposure to peril, to risk, to collision, conflict and the perpetual possibility of annihilation
that threatens every living thing. So if one were to take a layo-parrity and pessimistic
view of things then perhaps the price is too high to pay. Now we're getting off topic here
in another sort of speculative space but it's based on what we know of the fact that nothing happens
unless there is some kind of explosion, some kind of collision, some kind of annihilation. I mean
it seems like there's no birth without the violent death. So if we ask the question of where all this
comes from and not just from a technical point of view how we can explain what the big bang is,
I find it that I'm a bit in a state of perplexity about is it indeed all contingent
and accidental and...
So maybe I have two things to say to that. One is where the universe knows in itself
that is what makes it worthwhile. There is a Pascal quote that I don't remember of the top of my
head but it's something along those lines of all the bodies, the planets, the fear, momentum,
no worth, the smallest intelligence because the smallest intelligence knows the bodies and knows itself.
And so there is this idea of knowledge is what makes the universe worth it and the suffering that
comes with it. It's yeah, that was a good point. Now because I'm a practice.
Okay but now before the next one I want to hear about the practicing but Pascal because he also is
famous for his dictum Lucid al-Sétéd-Nél de Césésésésésésésésésésésésésémfé néméfé. The eternal silence of these infinite
spaces terrifies me. That was the new world, the post-copernequin world that he was reacting to.
So there's a terror and all that we have to also keep in mind for invoking Pascal. Please continue
your second point. No, I agree with Pascal. Now we know that the universe is not silent,
it's hamming in gravitational waves. So that's a little more comforting if you wish.
And also like the word awesome means both meanings, scary and exciting. Now I'm a practicing
Catholic and so for example if you think about evolution, evolution works because there is death.
Yes. It's not great, it's not a great mechanism. I don't know why God chose the mechanism of
evolution to get two beings that were self-aware and capable of good and evil capable of
loving God. I don't know why he went that route. But yeah. Well the question
for a practicing Catholic is whether you believe that God is the creator of the universe, whether he's
in the universe or whether the universe is a faithful reflection of his essence or nature or whether
on the contrary it's a disfigure and disfiguring reflection of whatever we mean by God when we use it.
I think that the universe is a sign which is the sign does not contain the significant
outside of the sacraments for those of us who are Catholic or outside the person of Christ who was
God incarnate. So it tells us by an analogy what God is like. So I'm going to say another
autobiographical thing. I have heaped disease, I've had 13 surgeries so far. First time I had
surgery I was eight years old, I was out of the second grade. I had surgery spent the summer of my
grandparents' deck and every day I watched the sunset and you know I had to be sitting in the
summer and not playing around with the chilli other children to watch the sunset every single day
and they noticed that the position where the sun was setting was slightly different, it was moving
and you know as an eight years old in Italy I observed with my own eyes the rotation of the earth
which was marvelous and that to me the fact that the earth rotates around the sun is very regular,
it's very predictable and eight years old can watch it and eight years old can know where the sun
is going to be the next day with my experience of being recovering from surgery and you know
feeling lonely because my friends were playing outside this predictability of the universe is very
tied to my experience of suffering in a way the two things go together and they're comforting
and you know I'm not saying anything new it's I'm telling you my experience of the book of job
which is 3000 years old but there is a comfort that comes from looking outside of us.
No that I agree it's a comfort that comes from a sense if I understand you correctly of stability
and permanence which is a condition that doesn't pertain to us because we are
evanescent we are temporary and our lives are characterized by a great deal of instability
and impermanence. The universe was that eternal permanent stable place and of course
from a terrestrial point of view of one human lifetime it still is relatively permanent because
as far as we know the earth is still going to rotate in the same way around the sun for the foreseeable future
but when you look at the moon which is also rotating you know around the earth and then you find out
what is the origin of the moon it was like a horrible collision I mean a terrible body
extra you know terrestrial body that slammed into the earth and took one third of the body of the planet
and that one third comes out there and it eventually becomes the moon so all those poems to the
moon and the beauty and yeah it seems to have stability but its history is very unstable and we know
that you know the earth could be slammed at any moment and its rotation you know and the fact that
we have seasons is actually I think a product of that collision if I'm not mistaken no the fact that we
have seasons and they are not completely devastating on our climate so they'll moon is what
fixes their rotation angle of the earth to 23.5 degrees plus or minus 5 degrees all the other
planets go randomly between 0 and 90 during their orbit there is nothing that holds them there
and so like the moon is one of the main this violent event is one of the many reasons that keeps us
alive right and this is what I'm trying to say is that the irony is that you you can sit out there
and look at the at the moon at the you know the sunset every December you see that the earth is
rotating it it's an amazing and there's beauty everywhere you look in the in the cosmos and yet
the meaning of it is all absurd in a certain you can say from a certain point of view
that you ask what is the purpose where is it going well it's death thermal death things like it's not the sort of
narrative that you get in Christian catholic catechism like you and I had it is a very ironic
and maybe even tragically ironic disconnect between the sheer beauty and sense of transcendent grace
of the created world with the sort of seemingly purposeless ongoing
interaction of the four forces leading us into what Nietzsche called the great unknown X of
you know it is certainly paradoxical I agree with you that we are here because of violence
the cosmic scale at the same time if you think about the big bank or any of these violent events
it reminds me that we didn't have to be here because the universe the fact that he had the beginning
reality didn't have to be there and you know I don't want to make it therefore there is a
creator but the fact that I'm here if I look at the universe is very non obvious and so even paradoxically
it makes me a little bit great for for the supernova that made the iron that allows me to breathe
because it didn't have to to happen that way so does your work as a scientist
fortify your catholic faith or is it too completely separate domains that don't touch each other
I think they inspire each other in a way that's analogical it's not you know an
at least it's not right it's not analytical it's not even philosophical if you want but it's like
you know my love for poetry enforce my work as a scientist and my work for scientists shines a new
light on the stuff I read you know they all didn't think that you read I'm like oh this is beautiful
but that's not what's gonna happen to the earth they all go together and they method of
the method of curiosity are the same method for every field of knowledge including
faith or including biology right that's what's right and you know why do we know at all
why do we even want to do science that's not the question that can be answered with
science and all of my colleagues would give their life to find out what that matter is but why would
they that matter doesn't explain that so that's how they go together for me that's beautifully
put that that's great I you know I I'm reminded now of the end of a television series
true detective season one maybe some of our listeners have seen it and
it's a very dark show it's about evil and nihilism and and the
again focusing on the on the meaningless the absurdity of the University of life and
the unredeem quality of it but and yet at the end in the very last episode
at the for the conclusion Nik Pizzo lato he's another Italian he's from Louisiana but
I tell you I know how it's like brilliant degree in philosophy it's very strange because he the
ending is that the detective there's a pair of detective and it's been shot and he had a near
death experience in fact he seemed to have gone down for a while into the dark of death
and he comes back and he's in the hospital and his partner comes to see him and take him to the car
and
Russ one of the two the wounded one one to a near death experience looks he says you know when I was up
there in that hospital room I was looking out at the sky every night and I and I realized that
there's only just one story and Marty
says yeah and what's that it's light against dark
the partner looks up at the sky he says I don't know about Alaska because Russ also grew up in Alaska
but it looks to me like the dark has a lot more territory
and then he takes him to the car and then Russ says yeah but you're looking at it all wrong
said okay how's that well in the beginning there was only darkness and so it seems to me like the
light is winning okay that's a very edifying way to end a program it also has a Christian kind of
a Christian message if you want that it's good against evil and that you know there's a
victory of light against dark and that it might be indeed the case that the future will redeem
all the violence and suffering of the past but we know from what you told us about dark energy
that in the final analysis it might be that you know that dark that dark matter can put up a
heroic resistance but it seems like dark energy is winning the game and that there's going to be
eventually a lot more darkness in the sky than light simply because the further away the galaxies
get from us the more its light is shifted into the you know the red the red shifting and the more
the sky is going to become dark rather than light so it's a very edifying ending but at the same
time it opens up some questions that are at the heart of the topic that we've been discussing today
about these two forces that are controlling our cosmic destiny
right and this says that our time in the universe is finite yeah because darkness will win
and that's not a bad thing no talking talks talks about death as the gift of mortal
two humans he says you know it's a bitter gift well in fact the the notion of a beginning
has to imply death and if a universe had a beginning you know it has it has to have its death and
Natality is the what we get in exchange for mortality so and darkness I don't think is necessarily
bad at all and even rust the character in true detective knows that because he tells earlier he
tells his partner that when he was there in in you know very close to death and even cross the line
he felt this darkness and that there was a he says it's there was a darkness under the dark and
it's like a warm substance and what he felt in that substance was love his daughter his father
his you know the his dead daughter and that there is a sense that in that darkness is not the
nihilistic nothingness but some other kind of almost in concealable love that that he was feeling so
he's in a certain sense betraying his own insight in his statement that the light is winning because
maybe you know the as you say it darkness is not an unhappy ending for the story
Maria de Naut Monzani has been a pleasure talking to you today on entitled opinions about dark matter
and much more besides I think that we have to have a follow-up discussion if you're willing to
come back and join us thank you this was very fun okay i'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions
thanks for listening
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