David Wong - Mike Disney - Carlos Frenk - Horizon TV - Jim Al-Khalili TV - Death of the Universe TV - Morgan Freeman TV - Hubble: The Ultimate Telescope TV - Lawrence Krauss - Star Trek: Voyager TV - Alan Guth - Stephen Hawking TV - Michio Kaku - Avishai Dekel - Mordehai Milgrom - The Universe TV - Extreme Universe TV - How the Universe Works TV - The Entire History of the Universe 2021 - Universe Unravelled with the Stephen Hawking Centre 2020 -
Scientists talk about dark matter, the invisible, mysterious substance that occupies the space between stars. Dark matter makes up 99.99 per cent of the universe, and they don’t know what it is. Well I do. It’s apathy. That’s the truth of it; pile together everything we know and care about in the universe and it will still be nothing more than a tiny speck in the middle of a vast black ocean of Who Gives a Fuck. David Wong, John Dies at the End
The whole thing is held together by entities which we don’t know exist at all and they have no real physical basis. Professor Mike Disney
It is in these clumps of dark matter that galaxies like the Milky Way would have formed ... The dark matter is the skeleton of the universe. Professor Carlos Frenk
When Dark Matter is discovered I think the whole jigsaw of our universe will fall into place. Carlos Frenk, Durham University
Hot dark matter makes the clusters of galaxies far too big to match the observable universe. It was bad news. The other alternatives weren’t as attractive as the already observed neutrinos. So if hot dark matter wasn’t the answer, what was? 1984 was the year of cold dark matter. Horizon: Of Big Bangs, Stick Men and Galactic Holes, BBC 1991
There’s something weird out there in the universe ... Something we can’t see is pulling the strings of the universe. The alien stuff, if it exists, needs to fill a very big hole because 96% of our universe is unaccounted for. Horizon: Most of our Universe is Missing, BBC 2006
[Fritz] Zwicky was a difficult man to get along with. So his scientific work had sometimes been overlooked. But his forgotten ideas about Dark Matter were a godsend for Ostriker and Peebles. ibid.
Science had uncovered a puzzle. There was something missing. There wasn’t enough mass in the universe to provide the gravity to hold it together. And yet there the universe was – obviously not falling apart. But science had also provided an answer. Peebles and Ostriker’s Dark Matter made everything work. And thanks to Vera [Rubin] it was suddenly very popular. ibid.
Dark Matter was headline news. There was only one small problem – no-one had actually found any Dark Matter. ibid.
The gas was orbiting just as fast as the stars. Even the hydrogen gas was being manipulated by a mysterious force. It seemed that Dark Matter would have to exist as a huge all-pervading halo surrounding a galaxy and everything in it including us here on Earth. All the evidence pointed towards one slightly unsettling thing: Dark Matter is not made of atoms like us and everything we know. ibid.
The amount of energy needed to cause the acceleration was hugely significant. Because energy is proportional to mass it accounted exactly for the missing 75% of the universe. ibid.
Finally none of the universe was missing. It was made of 4% atoms, the stuff we’re familiar with, 21% Dark Matter that no-one could find, and a whopping 75% made from brand-new whizzy Dark Energy that nobody could understand. Cosmology’s standard model was born. ibid.
A new generation of Cosmologists are questioning our basic understanding of the universe. They are beginning to wonder if there is a greater reality. Could it be that everything we think we know about our universe is wrong? Horizon: Is Everything We Know About the Universe Wrong? BBC 2010
Somewhere out in the universe there seems to be a disturbing force that we can’t explain. A force of astonishing power that appears to have bent trillions of stars to its will. Gripping not just galaxies but whole clusters of galaxies spanning billions of light years’ of space. And it’s dragging everything And it’s dragging everything to a single point. This mysterious phenomenon is known as Dark Flow. And it shouldn’t be happening. ibid.
For all its intricate mathematics the standard model has flaws. Built into it are a series of theories designed to explain observations that don’t make any sense. Theories that are incomplete and unproven. ibid.
Big Bang theory says that the universe was created in an explosion. But an explosion would produce a universe that was lumpy and messy. With patches there were at vastly different temperatures from one area to another. The real universe is nothing like this. In all directions the temperature appears to be almost exactly the same. ibid.
The explosion hasn’t stopped. The Big Bang is still banging. ibid.
Guth thinks our universe is part of a bigger structure; we’re in a small piece of it. A bubble created by Inflation. It could mean that Dark Flow is evidence our universe is not alone. ibid.
Dark matter outweighs it six to one. Horizon: How Big is the Universe? BBC 2012
Cosmologists don’t know what Dark Energy is, they only know what it does. When gravity pulls, Dark Energy pushes. ibid.
Dark Matter is fighting a losing battle. ibid.
The entire observable universe is saturated in Dark Energy. ibid.
Nowadays our understanding of the birth of the universe is extremely detailed. Horizon: Dancing in the Dark – The End of Physics, BBC 2015
These theoretical Dark Matter candidates are called WIMPS. ibid.
The hunt for Dark Matter has so far proved to be the world’s most least productive experiments. ibid.
We’re looking for a new particle. ibid.
The LHC has been switched off for two years while it’s been upgraded ... twice the energy it did before. ibid.
There are other cold dark matter candidates. ibid.
Galaxies it seemed could not have formed from ordinary matter alone. Normal matter just wasn’t made of the right stuff to clump together and produce galaxies quickly enough after the Big Bang. Another strange type of material must have been at work as well. But unfortunately it didn’t seem to shine like normal matter. Which meant nobody was able to see it. So imaginatively it was called Dark Matter. In short to explain how galaxies came about scientists had to call on a new type of exotic material – dense enough to help galaxies form yet inconveniently invisible. Professor Jim Al-Khalili Lost Horizons: Big Bang, BBC 2008
As for Dark Matter – it remains elusive. ibid.
Since the 1930s astronomers had seen disturbing hints of something much stranger. Stuff that was both completely invisible and completely unexpected. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Light and Dark: Dark, BBC 2013
There is four times as much dark matter as there is normal matter. ibid.
And so the hunt for dark matter has turned from the incredibly large to the unimaginably small. ibid.
The Big Crunch theory was a result of scientists interpreting that Dark Matter is the dominant force. But astronomers now suspect that Dark Energy might be much stronger. Death of the Universe, National Geographic 2008
If Dark Matter is the victor, the universe might collapse. If dark energy rules the cosmos, it could rip to shreds. ibid.
A form of matter so strange that many scientists once doubted its very existence. But in 2009 an incredibly sensitive particle detector caught the first glimpse of it. Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s1e8: Beyond the Darkness, Science 2013
Every galaxy Vera [Rubin] looked at gave her the same seemingly crazy results: all the stars all the way to the edge of the galaxies were moving at the same speed, completely different from the way the solar system works. ibid.
Carlos [Frenk] has shown that galaxies should form when filled with dark matter. ibid.
Everywhere astronomers look they are starting to sense the heavy presence of dark matter. ibid.
In the past century physicists have worked out that all matter is built from about twenty sub-atomic particles ... But they also suspect other more exotic particles exist. ibid.
Scientists have another name for the dark matter particles: weakly interacting massive particles: WIMPS for short. ibid.
Hubble deduced that every galaxy in the universe is actually hurtling away from us. ibid.
In just over five years Saul [Perlmutter] and his team spot thirty-eight different stars in thirty different galaxies called supernova. ibid.
There’s something hiding in the shadows. A type of matter we can’t see or touch but it’s all around us. Scientists agree it has shaped our universe. But they have no idea what it is or what form it takes. Could this mysterious matter have produced stars and planets of its own? And could this dark cosmos one day come crashing into ours? Is there a shadow universe? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s5e6: Is There a Shadow Universe? Science 2014
Two forces of dark matter are moving toward one another: what happens when they collide? ibid.