Can antimatter help us find dark matter?

Daniel and Kelly look for ways that mysteries of antimatter could shed light on the mysteries of dark matter See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:52Daniel Whiteson?

  There are so many amazing colossal mysteries out there, so many parts of the universe that are hidden from us that still need to be explained. I mean, you've got dark matter, you've got antimatter, you've got dark energy, you've got exotic matter, you've got why anybody ever lives in Virginia. So many things to figure out. Figure out. And I've noticed that lots of people out there, especially those folks of you who write in to me, are drawn to the idea that some of these mysteries could be connected, that maybe you could like solve two of them at the same time. And I totally get why that's appealing. But usually it doesn't work. Could antimatter be the dark matter? No. Could dark matter explain dark energy? No. Is dark matter the reason

• 2:35Daniel Whiteson?

  people live in Virginia? Probably also no. But sometimes, very rarely, there is the chance to connect two things to help solve a mystery. And that's what we're going to do today on the show, when we answer the question, could antimatter help us find dark matter? Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.

• 3:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith, and I'm a biologist, and I'm feeling superior today because at least we know what parasites are made of.

• 3:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm hoping that dark matter is somehow made of parasites, so I can blame Kelly for not figuring it out sooner.

• 3:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  We've got it figured out, man. If it ends up in our wheelhouse, dark matter will be solved in no time.

• 3:33Daniel Whiteson?

  What about biological dark matter? Have you figured all that out?

• 3:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are you talking about poop?

• 3:40Daniel Whiteson?

  And there we are, folks. Record time from zero to poop for a biologist.

• 3:45Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, I'm surprised we made it this long with the biologist in the room. You do what you can.

• 3:51Daniel Whiteson?

  But yes, there's an enormous amount about how our bodies work and how it makes poop that we don't understand. So there's dark matter in every field.

• 3:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  You know, I would say we understand it probably much better than the dark matter in physics, but I guess your wife does a lot of biology dark matter experiments, and she might say there's a lot we don't know.

• 4:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, and she has written grand proposals making that exact pun as a veiled poo reference.

• 4:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  I can only imagine how much fun it must be to study feces. There's a lot of opportunities for jokes.

• 4:22Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right. We try to avoid crappy humor, but you know, you can't escape it.

• 4:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's so great. Sometimes you need it. All right. All right. We'll talk about physics dark matter today. How long do you think before we have that figured out?

• 4:33Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow. When are we going to figure out dark matter? You know, it's incredible because it's been decades that we've known this is a thing and not understood it. And the discovery could be any moment. We have lots of ways we're looking for it that could suddenly reveal something about dark matter. We could find a dark photon that communicates the whole new sector of particles. One of the experiments could actually see a signal. So it could be any moment. It's really impossible to predict, or we could keep looking fruitlessly for a century. The possibilities are really almost endless. It's impossible to predict. I hope we figure it out soon before I retire, perspire and expire.

• 5:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Don't exercise too hard, Daniel.

• 5:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Perspiration prevents expiration is my understanding.

• 5:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  No, that's true. That's true. It's good to perspire sometimes. Well, today we're going to be talking about a path that might help us understand dark matter. This is something I had never thought about before today, which is, you know, often true when you send me an outline for our discussions. And so today you're going to tell us if antimatter can help us find dark matter.

• 5:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. We are going to fall in the trap of trying to connect two huge mysteries of the universe together, which is something you see in pop science all the time. And I get lots of emails from folks trying to make connections between two different mysteries we presented on the show, which I love. It means that they're thinking deeply about the universe and they're trying to put the clues together. And it's very tempting to imagine you could like solve two huge mysteries at once, but it doesn't always work that way.

• 6:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Are there physicists that are working on trying to solve two mysteries at once? Or it's just like everyone admits, it's just not going to be that easy. You know, when we were talking to Thomas van Reet, I think he was saying that when you work on string theory, it pops out. Other solutions, but I guess that's different than thinking that two things are connected. It's when you study one thing and it turns out it explains multiple things. That's sort of the opposite direction.

• 6:29Daniel Whiteson?

  No, that's exactly the right example. That's the feeling you get when you think, oh, wow, maybe we've uncovered some corner of the truth because we're working on problem one. It automatically solves this other problem. We weren't even trying to solve. It tells you that you're making deep connections. So yeah, everybody wants that experience because we have this feeling like there is a true explanation for the universe. And if you just dig deep enough, we'll uncover it and it'll bring everything together into this glorious moment of insight. But, you know, getting there involves chiseling away patiently at the rock face of truth and hoping something falls into your lap. And so what we're going to talk about today is like one strategy people are using. And I think it's

• 7:11Daniel Whiteson?

  really cool because it highlights how physicists are doing everything they can to look for dark matter. We're looking for it up the wazoo, out the wazoo, to the left of the wazoo, like really everything we can imagine, we are doing to look for dark matter.

• 7:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  You've got that wazoo covered.

• 7:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, yeah. If it's in the wazoo, we'll find it.

• 7:29Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think it's possible you're looking in the wrong spot, but I hope that you find it. So antimatter and dark matter, these are two concepts that I think most people don't understand at all. So let's see what our audience thinks about antimatter helping us understand dark matter. What did they have to say about what insights we might be covering today? And if you would like to share your insights with us, email us at [email protected].

• 7:53Daniel Whiteson?

  So I wrote to people and I asked them, can antimatter help us find dark matter? Here's what people had to say.

• 8:02Speaker 04

  As far as I know, dark matter only interacts with gravitational and with antimatter and matter, both interacting with gravitational force the same as far as we can tell.

• 8:12Speaker 05

  Dark matter, we don't think interacts with matter, so it should not interact with antimatter. Since we don't really understand much about dark matter, the only

• 8:23Speaker 06

  We could observe is gravity. So perhaps we can't detect antimatter. But gravity would be the same for matter versus antimatter. Maybe that could be an explanation is why we can't see it. Since antimatter tends to annihilate when it interacts with other matter. Then maybe any sort of photon bursts. Might represent interacting with dark matter if we don't think that there's any major amounts of regular matter in that area.

• 8:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  So I was happy to see that most of the answers pretty much matched what I thought, which was, uh, I don't see how. But you are going to shine that light for us.

• 9:03Daniel Whiteson?

  I am gonna make a connection between dark matter and antimatter. And these are great answers, by the way. And they're right. Matter and antimatter annihilate, but that is not helpful for dark matter. Dark matter might only interact gravitationally, so it'd be difficult to find. Dark matter doesn't interact with antimatter any differently than it interacts with matter. So these are great answers and right on the money.

• 9:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  Definitely great answers. And I should say it expressed a lot more physics knowledge than I have. Most of those answers. So let's start with what do we know about what dark matter is? You just gave us some hints about what it is and what it isn't, but let's pretend you didn't say any of that. Start from the beginning for the neophytes of us, the dark matter neophytes.

• 9:42Daniel Whiteson?

  So dark matter is amazing because we simultaneously know an enormous amount about it. And yet we know very little about it. It's sort of paradoxical. Like we cannot see dark matter. It's something that's in the universe. It's not actually dark. It's invisible. So the name already is confusing. Like when you see dark matter on TV shows, you know, spaceship is flying through a cloud of dark matter. They show it as dark, like black, like it's obscuring your view. But in reality, dark matter is there, but it's invisible. It's transparent. And that's because light passes through it. It doesn't interact with it. The way light passes through glass, but even less so, like glass will refract light.

• 10:24Daniel Whiteson?

  But dark matter doesn't refract light, though we actually can bend it and lens it a little bit. We'll talk about that in a minute. But dark matter is more than just invisible. It's also intense. Like if you were in a cloud of dark matter, you wouldn't even notice you like pass right through it. Dark matter can like phase through walls without interacting at all. So it's this mysterious but sort of omnipresent substance that it's also overwhelmingly dominant form of matter in the universe. Like 80% of the matter in the universe is dark matter. It's not weird or rare. In fact, we are the weird and rare kind of matter in the universe.

• 11:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so it's the dominant matter in the universe, but we can't see it or measure it. So how do we know that it exists at all?

• 11:09Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, so very mysterious. We don't know what it's made out of. We only learned about it recently. And yet we know a lot about it because we have detected its contributions to the gravity of our universe in many ways. And this is something I really want to underscore carefully because a lot of people think dark matter is like a fudge factor, just something we add to the equations and don't understand just because things aren't working out. But dark matter is much more like the suspect in a mystery novel that we know a lot about, but we haven't yet fingered. We know somebody slipped the knife into the corpse at some point. We see the footprints. We see the broken window. We have fingerprints. You know, we have DNA samples. We just haven't found the suspect yet. And so dark matter is like that.

• 11:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm not a big fan of dark matter after that description. It doesn't seem like a nice thing, but it helps by holding everything together. Is that right? So I shouldn't be so negative?

• 12:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, no, dark matter is much more helpful than a murderer.

• 12:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's good. That's good. I mean, it's a low bar, but that's good.

• 12:05Daniel Whiteson?

  So let's talk about how we know that dark matter is there and what we know about it because it paints a very comprehensive picture of dark matter. So classically, we know about dark matter originally because of how galaxies rotate. You know, galaxies are a bunch of stars, but they're also spinning. And when things spin, they tend to lose stuff. Like if you put a bunch of ping pong balls on a merry go round and you spin it, you don't keep all the ping pong balls. They fly out because things tend to move in straight lines unless they're being bent into a curve. Like the reason the moon stays in orbit around the earth is because gravity is holding it in. So you can do this calculation and ask, well, is there enough gravity in the galaxy? To hold all those stars in as we spin around at this crazy high speed.

• 12:47Daniel Whiteson?

  You add up all the mass from all the stars and the answer is no, and not even close, by the way. Galaxies are spinning way too fast to hold the stars in and yet they're not throwing stars out into interstellar space very often. It does happen, but to provide enough gravity to hold the galaxy together, you have to take all the mass of all the visible stuff and multiply it by four or five. So there's a huge amount of unaccounted for gravity, right? The gravity is there, it's holding the stars together. We don't know what's providing it. That's the original evidence we have for dark matter. And that's the one that makes people feel like, oh, it's just a fudge factor. You're just adding in a number to describe what you're seeing. You don't really understand it because that's just one piece of evidence. But we have like many more pieces of evidence as well.

• 13:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  And also, I feel like if it was just a fudge factor, then it wouldn't be like times four.

• 13:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  It would be like, you know, plus five.

• 13:37Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. It's not a little tweak, right? It's a total revolution in our understanding of what the universe is made out of.

• 13:44Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so like you're saying, even if we discovered another Jupiter in our solar system, that still wouldn't explain.

• 13:50Daniel Whiteson?

  No, you got to discover five more hidden stars in our solar system. To multiply the mass of our solar system by five, Jupiter is nothing in our solar system. Yeah.

• 13:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, got it. All right, so you've told us about one piece of evidence. You're assuring us that there's more. What have been our most promising routes of research to try to discover what it is that have failed so far?

• 14:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Hmm, well, we've looked for dark matter in several ways. Essentially, we assume dark matter is some kind of particle and we look to see if it interacts with our kind of matter in any way. So for example, we have huge underground tanks of stuff like liquid xenon. And liquid xenon is very quiet. It doesn't like to interact. This stuff is underground, so no cosmic rays get to it. Basically, you have a big tank of liquid xenon and cameras in there. You say, do you ever see a flash of light? You shouldn't see any flashes of light, but if dark matter, which could penetrate through all of the earth and make it to your tank of xenon, occasionally does bump into your xenon and give it a push, you'll see a flash of light as that xenon relaxes. So you have your cameras underground on. Liquid xenon and look for flashes of light.

• 14:55Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a crazy experiment, but nobody's ever seen anything beyond what you expect from like background radiation from the rocks and all this sort of stuff. So quiet experiments looking for dark matter bumps haven't seen anything. We've tried to make dark matter in the laboratory at the Large Hadron Collider. We can smash particles together and make new kinds of stuff. If dark matter has any kind of interaction with protons at all beyond gravity, right? This would require some non-gravitational interaction. We should be able to make it at the Large Hadron Collider. And then it would appear as invisible particles. We can tell when we made invisible particles at the Large Hadron Collider, because there's like something on one side of the detector and nothing on the other side. So there's an imbalance, but we've never seen an unexplained imbalance of particles.

• 15:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  Did we expect that we would when we started the Large Hadron Collider?

• 15:43Daniel Whiteson?

  We hoped so. I was actually one of the people really working deeply on this topic. A lot of my grad students have like written PhD theses on searching for dark matter at the Large Hadron Collider. I was really hopeful because colliders are so powerful. You don't have to know what you're looking for, how to make it. It's very general search for like what the universe can do. But we didn't see anything and you know, hey, that's research. It's exploration.

• 16:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  Not the right wazoo.

• 16:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, exactly. And there's one other avenue for looking for dark matter. But let's save that for later because that's our antimatter connection.

• 16:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 16:15Daniel Whiteson?

  And I want to remind people about how else we know that dark matter is really a thing and not just like, hey, let's multiply gravity by four. And we see its effects all over the place, not just within galaxies, but between galaxies. Like dark matter is not as clumpy as normal matter. It feels gravity, but it's not sticky. So it doesn't stick together like two blobs of dark matter. If they run into each other, they just pass right through each other. Whereas two blobs of normal matter will tend to stick together. So you get like asteroids and planets forming out of matter, but you don't get planetary structures forming out of dark matter. It's like a big foamy fluff that fills the universe. It has places where it's denser and places where it's less dense, but it's much less clumpy than normal matter.

• 16:57Daniel Whiteson?

  So it extends out between the galaxies, for example, and it helps hold galaxy clusters together. Like, we cannot explain using just stars and their gravity, why galaxies orbit each other the way they do, and why galaxy clusters form. You need dark matter to explain that, too.

• 17:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you can tell that dark matter is clumpy based on the activity of galaxies, is that right?

• 17:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, great question, yeah. We can tell where the dark matter is based on the gravitational motion within a galaxy and also between galaxies. Like, we don't just take matter and multiply by four. We can tell where in the galaxy that matter is based on the speed of the stars at different distances from the center of the galaxy. Like, if you put all the dark matter at the very center of the galaxy, then all the stars would be feeling more gravity, and they'd all be going really, really fast. If you take some of the dark matter and you spread it out, then it doesn't speed up the stars that are closer into the galaxy. So by seeing how the velocity of stars varies from the center to the edge of the galaxy, you can tell where in the galaxy it is. And the same thing applies for between the galaxies. By seeing velocities of all these galaxies,

• 18:04Daniel Whiteson?

  you can make a map of where the dark matter is between the galaxies. And you can also see where the dark matter is because of its lensing. I said earlier that dark matter's kind of like glass, but it doesn't refract light, but it does bend light. Because dark matter is matter, and matter curves space, and curved space will curve the path of photons. So if you have a huge blob of dark matter between us and some other galaxy, it's going to lens that light, just like as if there was some huge lens in space. And we see this in the night sky. Like, we see sometimes two copies of a single galaxy, because its light, which shot out in two different directions, got then focused by some dark matter lens back towards the earth.

• 18:49Daniel Whiteson?

  So it looks like the same galaxy, but it's not. It's a duplication. It's an optical effect. And you can use this to map out where the dark matter is in the universe by seeing how much lensing there is in various locations. So we can tell where the dark matter is.

• 19:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  What kind of shape does it take? Does it say like, "Oh, got you, physicist"?

• 19:10Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a big middle finger.

• 19:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right, yeah. It's just lumpy and kind of amorphous.

• 19:15Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a big cosmic poop, basically. Yeah, it's a big lump. No, we can make a map and it's really fascinating, maybe not surprising. The map of where the dark matter is in the universe closely follows the map of where matter is in the universe. It's kind of like luminous matter, stars are a tracer that tell you where the dark matter is. And it's not a coincidence. The luminous matter, the stars, the galaxies are there because the dark matter is there. So, origin of the universe, things are pretty spread out. But there's little spots that are denser and little spots that are less dense, quantum fluctuations. And so, dark matter, where it was denser, it started to gather together a little bit. Doesn't stick, but still it gathers together a little bit and orbits itself and makes these big swirls. And that makes like a gravitational well.

• 20:00Daniel Whiteson?

  And the other matter, gas and dust, normal matter, falls into that well and gets trapped and forms galaxies and forms stars. And you can run simulations, if you run the universe without any dark matter, you don't get galaxies 10 billion or 12 or 14 billion years after the big bang. You just don't. It takes much, much longer. So, the only reason we have galaxies today is because dark matter has gathered together the gas and the dust and forced it to make stars and all of this kind of stuff. So, we know that dark matter has played a huge role in the evolution of what we call large-scale structure in the universe. Basically, the reason the universe looks the way it is is because of dark matter.

• 20:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  And that interaction doesn't work both ways, right? Like, dark matter can pull objects towards it, but like the sun isn't pulling dark matter in because dark matter doesn't respond to stuff.

• 20:50Daniel Whiteson?

  The sun is pulling dark matter in because dark matter does feel gravity. But what happens when the sun pulls dark matter in? You're a blob of dark matter, you get pulled towards the sun. Cool, gravity is pulling you in, you're going faster and faster and faster. Now, if you're a comet, you hit the sun, you vaporize, you interact electromagnetically, hadronically, all the other kinds of interactions, like you become part of the sun. If you're a blob of dark matter, you're a dark matter comet, what happens when you hit the sun? Nothing, you go right through it. The same way like if you dropped a ball through a hole, a tunnel that went all the way through. The earth, what would happen? It would go all the way through the center and come out the other side. The same way dark matter doesn't stick to the sun. It passes right through the sun and goes out the other side.

• 21:33Daniel Whiteson?

  That's why dark matter doesn't clump the way that normal matter does. But it definitely does feel gravity. We have lots of other reasons to believe that dark matter is there. Like, we can tackle the problem from the other direction. Some people are like, well, maybe you're just missing some of the matter. Like, are there just like big blobs of matter out there you're not seeing? You know, could you see a huge rock out in the middle between galaxies? And so people have tackled the problem in this super amazing way from that direction. We're able to calculate how much normal matter there is in the universe based on what happened in the first few minutes of the Big Bang. Wow. Yeah, it's really incredible. We look at the distribution of elements in the universe, how much hydrogen, how much helium, how much lithium, et cetera.

• 22:14Daniel Whiteson?

  And those amounts are really sensitive to the density of normal matter in the early universe. Like, the denser it was, the more you're going to get fusion in the early universe to make those heavier elements. And the less dense it was, the less likely you are. So it's very sensitive. Like, we can measure exactly what the density of quarks and protons and all those kind of normal matter bits were in the early universe by measuring how much lithium is out there in space. And so we can tell how much stuff there was very precisely. And it very well matches the normal matter we see in the universe. So that tells us like, yeah, there could be a rock in the middle of space that we didn't see, even like one the size of Jupiter or a star. But there's definitely not a huge amount, not four times the amount of normal matter missing.

• 23:00Daniel Whiteson?

  So we sort of like accounted for this problem in two different directions, and it all adds up. And then the sort of coup de grace, the thing that like really links it together, is we can look at the very, very early universe. We see ripples from the plasma of the very early universe. This is called the cosmic microwave background radiation.

• 23:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is this the thing that we thought was pigeon poop? I'm sorry to interrupt, but that's really important.

• 23:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

• 23:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 23:21Daniel Whiteson?

  This was discovered in the 60s and it's evidence that the universe was once much more dense. It was this hot frothing plasma that filled the whole universe and it glowed. And there was a moment when that plasma cooled and suddenly became transparent. So that glow, instead of getting constantly reabsorbed by itself, the way like light inside the sun is getting absorbed by the sun, and we're only seeing light from the surface, that plasma in the early universe became transparent and so that glow stuck around. And we can see that glow and we can tell stuff about that plasma. And most importantly, we see ripples in that plasma. It's not just like a constant glow, it's like brighter here and darker there. And those ripples depend on how that plasma is sloshing around.

• 24:03Daniel Whiteson?

  And how the plasma sloshes around depends on like, well, how much dark matter is there holding stuff together with its gravity? How many photons are there pushing things apart because of the glow? How much normal matter is there which feels the photons and the gravity? It's like this complex dance of all the different ingredients of the universe at that time. And those very specifically control all of those wiggles. So by measuring those wiggles, we can nail down exactly how much matter was there, how much dark matter was there, how many photons were there? And it all aligns up with our other calculations. So we have like all these different pieces of evidence that tell us how much of the universe is normal matter, how much of the universe is this weird, unexplained, gravitationally feeling, otherwise totally intangible kind of matter we call dark matter.

• 24:48Daniel Whiteson?

  So like, yeah, we got a lot of clues, but we just haven't yet found the murderer.

• 24:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we've tried to see if it's a particle, no evidence for that yet. We don't know if it could do anything other than like gravitate and pull things in towards it or respond to the gravity of other things. But when we get back from the break, you're gonna bring us to the next big unknown, which is antimatter. And we'll talk about what we don't know about that.

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• 27:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. So in the last segment, you convinced me that dark matter is probably not just because someone forgot to carry a five or something like that. So now let's move on to antimatter, which is the other thing that we need to understand to answer the question, what can antimatter tell us about dark matter?

• 27:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Right. So forget everything we said about dark matter for now, right? We're going to talk about a completely separate topic in particle physics, which is the mystery of antimatter. And then later on, we're going to connect these. But antimatter is amazing and wonderful and real. It's like something we see, something we make, something we study. It's like very pedestrian. In the collider I used to work on before the Large Hadron Collider, we collided matter and antimatter. We made protons, we made antiprotons. We smashed them together many, many times a second. So antimatter is not nearly as mysterious as dark matter. Like, we know what it is. We know it's a particle. We can make it. We can play with it. We build stuff out of it. It's amazing in science fictiony, but it's much less theoretical than dark matter.

• 28:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, you sounded a little bit defensive when you said antimatter is real, but I guess you were just trying to clarify that we've actually seen them.

• 28:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Was I protesting too much? Well, I think some people are confused because they read about it in science fiction. It seems sort of like bizarre and mystical, but it's actually something we play with all the time in real physics. It's also just kind of a name we give things that reveals something deep about the universe, which is that the universe has these beautiful symmetries. Like, basically antimatter is a statement that every particle out there has a partner. So you have an electron, it's a particle, it has negative charge. There's another version of that particle, the positively charged version. You have a muon, it's negatively charged. There's a positively charged version of that. You have a quark with charge two-thirds. There's a negative two-thirds charged version of that.

• 29:23Daniel Whiteson?

  Whatever the universe can do when it makes a charged particle, it can also do something very similar with the opposite charge. So it's actually this kind of beautiful symmetry in the matter that we see out there in the universe.

• 29:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm kind of feeling like we should have saved this topic for the Valentine's Day. It feels a little lovey dovey, but okay. All right. Good to know the universe has symmetry.

• 29:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, they have a very explosive relationship because what happens when an electron and positron meet is they don't live happily ever after. They annihilate. And popular science tells you they annihilate into pure energy. Really what happens is they annihilate into a photon, which and a photon is nothing but energy. That's true, but it's not this like abstract form of energy. It's like, it's another kind of a field that's rippling and making us a particle.

• 30:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, it's just as some parasites get divorced too. So I'm seeing connections here.

• 30:11Daniel Whiteson?

  And this is just an example of the kinds of symmetries we see in the universe. We notice that there's not just like 42 different particles and they're all different. There are relationships between them. There are patterns between them. And often the patterns work in just this way. There's like several versions of the same particle. So there's an electron and there's the positron, which is just like the opposite version of the electron. Don't think of them as separate particles. Think of them as two halves of the same coin. But the electron is also one half of other kinds of coins. For example, the electron has another version, the muon. The muon is the same as the electron, just heavier. The tau is just the same as the muon in the electron, even heavier.

• 30:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like the coin analogy is breaking down here. Maybe we're talking about a Dungeons and Dragons dice or something.

• 30:55Daniel Whiteson?

  And we think that the electron participates in even other symmetries. There's this whole theory called supersymmetry, which says that every particle has this weird partner particle. So the electron would have the selectron and quarks would have the squarks. And we haven't discovered those. We don't know if it's true, but it's sort of a theme in particle physics that every particle has reflections, other copies of itself.

• 31:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  This might be the first time where I've thought, oh, physicists are doing a good job with naming something though. Cause like the squarks, that's both cute and it sort of tells you what it is, you know?

• 31:24Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. Yeah. I like the supersymmetric names. And it's also kind of arbitrary, like what is matter and what is antimatter? Well, the universe is very symmetric. The laws of physics are almost the same for matter and antimatter. So they are opposite each other in the sense that they have opposite charges, but it's not like antimatter is like against building stuff. You could build a universe out of antimatter, we think.

• 31:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  But antimatter is the rare thing that we don't see a lot of. Right. And so what causes that asymmetry there?

• 31:51Daniel Whiteson?

  Boy, do I wish I had the answer to that question because I would be talking to the king of Sweden, shaking their hand and getting a million dollars. Nobody knows.

• 31:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  Would you still podcast if you got the Nobel Prize?

• 32:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Of course, absolutely. I podcast more often. Absolutely.

• 32:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Nice. You'd remember the little people.

• 32:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, you're the little people, right? Is you sit in front of your shelf of awards over there.

• 32:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  The shelf is out of the screen.

• 32:16Daniel Whiteson?

  If you won the Nobel Prize, your biggest problem would be like where to put it on your shelf, otherwise crowded with prizes.

• 32:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, you're making me feel really nice, but that's definitely overselling. But thank you.

• 32:27Daniel Whiteson?

  But you're right. It is a big mystery because if it's true that the universe treats matter and antimatter the same way, why are we made of matter? Why is the earth made of matter? The galaxy made of matter? We think most of the galaxies near us are made of matter. That's an asymmetry and that doesn't seem to add up. Because if the universe made the same amount of matter and antimatter in the very beginning, when it was filled with frothing energy, which then cooled into these fields, then that matter and antimatter would annihilate. And that's mostly what happened when we made matter and antimatter in the early universe. It annihilated and the universe was mostly filled with photons for a little while, which must have been, you know, brilliant. But there was a little bit left over because there wasn't a perfect symmetry

• 33:08Daniel Whiteson?

  between the matter and antimatter. And we don't know why. We don't know, was there more matter made in the early universe? Or is there some process in the universe that produces matter more than antimatter? There's definitely some asymmetry there because as you say, there's more matter and less antimatter. But I also just want to emphasize like antimatter, we name it antimatter because it's the one that's not made as often, not because it's against anything.

• 33:34Kelly Weinersmith?

  You said that we don't know of universes that are made of antimatter. Could there be universes of antimatter? Or like a chunk of antimatter out in the galaxies or whatever that we haven't seen yet?

• 33:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, it's tempting to say, oh, let's look up at the night sky. We see galaxies out there. How do we know they're not made of antimatter? Because antimatter would produce photons the same way matter does. And that's true. But we can tell if some of those galaxies are made of matter and antimatter because. Galaxies don't just produce photons, they also produce charged particles. Like the sun produces lots of photons, you can see it, but also lots of protons and electrons. And so antimatter is much rarer in our solar wind. We're shooting matter out into the universe. And if a neighboring galaxy was shooting antimatter out into the universe the same way as you would expect, then between them, there would be this like ribbon of collisions.

• 34:24Daniel Whiteson?

  This like interface where our solar or galactic winds were hitting their solar galactic winds and annihilating, making these bright flashes.

• 34:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  I bet that would look awesome.

• 34:33Daniel Whiteson?

  It would be amazing. I hope it's real. We've looked for that and we haven't seen it, which means either the whole universe is just matter, or if there are antimatter galaxies, they're too far away for us to see. Now that doesn't rule out that like, we live in a vast pocket of matter, 90 billion light years across and beyond the edge of the observable universe, there are vast pockets of antimatter. Maybe even most of the universe is antimatter for all we know. But in the region we can see, we can't spot any antimatter galaxies and we can't spot any interface between matter and antimatter. So as far as we know, the universe is mostly matter. And we've been studying antimatter for a long time, and so we have some ideas for like, what might explain this asymmetry.

• 35:15Daniel Whiteson?

  We found some ways the universe prefers to make matter over antimatter. There's some like little particle physics processes, which if you run them forward in time, will make more matter than antimatter. But they're very small effects. They go under the name of CP violation. We can dig into that in another episode, maybe. And so we have found some ways that the universe is not symmetric and prefers matter. But it doesn't explain it. Like, if we run our models and you start from a perfectly symmetric universe, you don't get the huge asymmetry that we see today. You just can explain a little bit. So there's definitely a big mystery out there that remains. We cannot figure out yet why the universe seems to be filled with matter and not antimatter. And you know, there are some intriguing clues out there, like some particles don't have antiparticles.

• 36:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, you know, the electron has the antiparticle, the positron. What's the antiparticle of the photon? The photon doesn't have a charge, so you flip its charge. You just get a photon. So some people say the photon is its own antimatter, or another way to say that is that there is no antiparticle.

• 36:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is that the only particle we know of that doesn't have an antiparticle?

• 36:20Daniel Whiteson?

  No, there's a few, like the Z boson, which is the equivalent of the photon, but for the weak force, that doesn't have an antiparticle. It also doesn't have a charge. The Higgs boson has no electric charge. There's no anti Higgs boson. And something we still don't know is whether neutrinos are their own antiparticle or not. Neutrinos have no electric charge, but they do have a weak charge. We talked about that recently on the podcast. And you can flip those. We don't even know if anti neutrinos are actually different or if they're just neutrinos. We still have to figure that out. Neutrinos are so difficult to do experiments with that it's very tricky to understand their behavior. And so there's a lot we still have to learn about what antimatter is. But we can make it in the lab. We have these amazing experiments we've done at CERN,

• 37:03Daniel Whiteson?

  where we've built like anti hydrogen, where you have an antiproton and an antielectron. You get them to bind together to make hydrogen and to emit light. And so we can like study in detail, does antimatter actually follow the same laws of physics? So far, it does. They did this incredible experiment recently to try to answer what sounds like a dumb question, but turns out to be a really deep question, which is, does antimatter fall up or down in a gravitational field?

• 37:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 37:31Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. I see you going, oh, oh, wait a second. I don't know the answer to that. Because on one hand, you think, oh, it's a kind of matter. Matter falls down in a gravitational field. It attracts, right? But that's assuming that it feels gravity the same way. And gravity is not something we fundamentally understand. According to Einstein, it shouldn't matter. But we think Einstein's probably wrong when it comes to the gravity of particles. And wouldn't it be amazing if antimatter fell up?

• 37:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 37:56Daniel Whiteson?

  And it might be amazing to you that we don't know the answer to this question already. And the reason is that gravity is super duper weak and antimatter, we can make it, but it's hard to make large quantities of it. And you really need like a large quantity of something in order to study its gravity. We've never measured the gravity of a single particle. The smallest thing we've ever measured the gravity of is like milligram. Which is huge number of particles. So they're doing these experiments to try to isolate every other kind of force on these anti hydrogen molecules to see, can we see them falling up or can we see them falling down? And initial findings suggest that antimatter falls down, which is kind of a bummer because boy, wouldn't that be cool? And then we could make our hoverboards finally and all sorts of stuff.

• 38:41Daniel Whiteson?

  I know, I know. I've been promising kids hoverboards for years and have not delivered terrible parenting.

• 38:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Physicist. Wouldn't a hoverboard made of antimatter just like vaporize or explosively combust when you jump on it?

• 38:54Daniel Whiteson?

  No, you need to isolate the antimatter underneath somehow to provide that levitation. And in magnetic bottle, I mean, there's some engineering details that other people would figure out. Once we have the essential bits understood.

• 39:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  Got a symmetry question for you. So some particles have a symmetric partner and some don't. If tomorrow someone was to say, okay, have this new particle that you we've never heard of before. Could you predict if it would have a partner or not? Do we understand when you get partners or not?

• 39:25Daniel Whiteson?

  I would say if it has a charge, then it's going to have a partner. Because that's an inherent property of a quantum field. Like the reason the electron has the partner is because the electrons field can wiggle in a way to make an electron. And the things that allow it to do that wiggle also allow it to do the opposite wiggle to make the anti electron. So electrons and anti electrons are wiggles in the same field. So if you discover the Kelly on, okay, now there's a Kelly field in the universe. If it can make a Kelly, then it can make an anti Kelly.

• 39:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think we should name it Wiener Smith because that's more distinctive and funnier. But anyway, I like where you're going with this.

• 40:00Daniel Whiteson?

  But another question is if you discover a new field with two particles, one's positive and one's negative. Which one do you call the matter and which one do you call the antimatter? That's kind of arbitrary. There's nothing mattery about one or the other, except do you find more of it in the universe? Right? So like you could flip those definitions and you could flip them arbitrarily. You could keep the electron as matter and the anti electron as antimatter. You could say, well, for muons, we're going to call the anti muon. Matter now, and it makes no difference, right? So they're sort of arbitrary labels. So whether the Wiener Smith boson or the anti Wiener Smith boson is the matter or antimatter, it matters not.

• 40:40Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, man, we've had wazoo's and dark matter and Wiener Smith bosons. This is maybe the best episode we've ever done. And on that note, let's take a break. And when we get back, we will answer the question, can antimatter help us find dark matter?

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• 43:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, we're back. So this is an episode of Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe. So I'm guessing the answer to can antimatter help us find dark matter is going to be something like, maybe?

• 43:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  But I love that as an answer. It's at least informative and honest. So let's see, what is the answer going to be today? Where do we start with this, Daniel?

• 43:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, the answer is maybe. And it's an example of like, hey, physicists trying to be clever and finding any possible way to observe dark matter. And everything we're doing to find dark matter particles to understand like, is dark matter made out of a particle? And what is that particle? Rests on a really big assumption that we can't actually justify, which is maybe dark matter feels something other than gravity. Like, we know it feels gravity. We invented the idea to explain gravity we couldn't otherwise explain, and it's really important to do that. But none of those explanations require that it ever feels any other kind of force. It's possible that dark matter is some particle out there that only feels gravity and has no other charges. That's a possibility.

• 44:15Daniel Whiteson?

  That would be really frustrating because gravity is very hard to use on particles. It's so weak, we might never understand the particle nature of dark matter in that scenario. So we hope, we pray, we assume that dark matter has some other kind of interaction, maybe some force we haven't figured out yet. And that would allow us to interact with it on a particle level more powerfully than gravity. And we need to make that assumption in order to see it, basically. So we make that assumption and we move on. It could be totally wrong, and that might be the reason we've never seen dark matter. But we kind of got to do it.

• 44:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, like, if you guys finally figured out gravity, would that help?

• 44:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or would that not solve the problem? You wouldn't need to hope anymore.

• 44:55Daniel Whiteson?

  I love the tone there, like, have you guys finally figured out gravity? It's like, have you finally shoveled the wok? Did you finally take out the trash?

• 45:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. Have you cleaned your room, Daniel?

• 45:05Daniel Whiteson?

  It might be, you know, if we understood quantum gravity, we might figure out a way to enhance it or to manipulate it in such a way that it was more powerful for particles. Like, if it turns out that there are extra dimensions to the universe and gravity appears to be weak because most of the gravity is leaking out into those other dimensions, then we might be able to manipulate it and make it more powerful. For example, people hope that exactly that is happening. When you smash particles together at the Large Hadron Collider, you're overcoming that extra dimensional reduction in the power of gravity to make miniature black holes, which would reveal the nature of quantum gravity. So, yeah, it's possible if we got off our butts and figured out quantum gravity, that that would help us find dark matter.

• 45:46Kelly Weinersmith?

  I never know where conversations are gonna go with you. I didn't expect it to be like, well, if there's another dimension, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Now we've got extra dimensions while we're trying to answer this question? But anyway, okay.

• 45:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Let's put that aside for now. And so we're assuming that dark matter feels some other kind of force that matter also feels, because that would allow us to see it. Like, those big tanks of liquid xenon underground, they're assuming there's some kind of force that dark matter feels and xenon feels. So when dark matter flies through xenon, they can bump on each other, because otherwise it's hopeless. So if you make that assumption, you also are allowed to assume that sometimes dark matter can bump into its anti-dark matter and annihilate and turn into something which can then turn into normal matter. Right? So if there is some new kind of force, it's got a particle, call it the dark photon. So now maybe sometimes dark matter annihilates with anti-dark matter

• 46:39Daniel Whiteson?

  into a dark photon, which then turns into normal matter, like an electron and an anti-electron, or a muon and an anti-muon.

• 46:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, so we've got dark matter, which we can't see. Now we need to find anti dark matter, which we probably have also not seen.

• 46:55Daniel Whiteson?

  That's right.

• 46:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  And then what would a dark photon look like? It would annihilate a real photon, right? Is that how you'd know it existed?

• 47:01Daniel Whiteson?

  No, no, dark photons and real photons wouldn't interact. You're thinking of an anti photon, which also doesn't exist. So there's two directions to think about here. Anti matter and dark matter, which are two separate concepts, right? But now we're combining them. We're imagining what if there's anti dark matter that can annihilate with the dark matter, produce some new kind of weird version of the photon, a dark photon, dark matter's equivalent of a photon. And that dark photon can then turn into normal matter. So if that's possible, which is a big assumption, no justification, we're only assuming it because otherwise this whole line of research doesn't work.

• 47:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  I can't believe you guys get grants funded, but all right, go ahead. Why parasites have to exist before I get to study them?

• 47:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Being brutally honest about this, because I don't want to mislead people and otherwise people will write in and be like, but how do you know? And I want to be straight up like, we don't know.

• 47:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  I appreciate that.

• 47:48Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah. And so if that's happening, then what you can do is say, well, where is dark matter dense in the universe? Okay, centers of galaxies, we think a lot of is collected there. Let's look in the center of galaxies and see if dark matter is smashing into its antimatter and producing unexplained pairs of particles like an electron and an anti electron or muon and anti muon. And here's the antimatter angle. It's rare to see antimatter in the universe. So if there's an unexplained source of antimatter, it might be due to dark matter annihilating and turning into matter and antimatter. So we look out there in the universe for unexplained sources of antimatter, which

• 48:29Daniel Whiteson?

  might be due to dark matter annihilating with its own kind of antimatter and turning into normal matter and normal antimatter.

• 48:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, that's exciting. Have we found that?

• 48:39Daniel Whiteson?

  We actually do have some really tantalizing signals of that. People have looked out into space for all kinds of antimatter. We look for positrons, which are rare, but not super rare. And there are some things out there in the universe that make them like pulsars. We look for anti protons, which are more rare than anti electrons. We look for anti deuterium. We also look for anti helium. Or anti-heliom three, which is even rarer in the universe. So the bigger stuff, the bigger, fatter, juicier antimatter particles are rarer, which makes them a clearer signal. So we have a bunch of fun experiments looking for antimatter in space, basically, as a hope that if you see it, it might be an indication of dark matter. And there's an experiment on the space station.

• 49:23Daniel Whiteson?

  It's called AMS, which stands for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Basically, it's a big particle detector and a magnet in space. The magnet shows you the particles bending, which tells you their charge. So you can tell whether they're matter or antimatter. And it's just basically like this particle experiment that's stuck on the space station. It's run by Sam Ting, who has already a Nobel Prize. And they see a bunch of positrons, anti-electrons, that they can't explain, that nobody can explain. So they see all these weird particles, these antiparticles actually in space, that nobody can explain. And people have long wondered, like, is this a signal of dark matter? Are we seeing dark matter? And it's exciting, but it's also very indirect. Like, yeah, you're seeing antimatter.

• 50:06Daniel Whiteson?

  And antimatter is rarer in the universe than matter, but it's not that rare, especially anti-electrons. Like pulsars do make a lot of anti-electrons and fling them out into space and are famously hard to understand. So it's possible that the signal they're seeing is just pulsars or something else weird out there in the universe that makes antimatter. Right? Anti-matter, again, weird, but not weird enough that the only way to make it is dark matter. So it's like, if you see it, it's kind of indirect.

• 50:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  So it'd be helpful if we understood more about how antimatter is made.

• 50:40Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes, absolutely. The biggest challenge in astronomy is that most of the universe is doing weird, funky stuff we don't understand. So when you see something you don't understand, you're like, well, is this the thing I was looking for? Or something totally weird and new that we didn't understand anyway? Like, we're looking for signals from the center of the galaxy. And you might ask, well, do we understand the rest of the center of the galaxy? What's going on in there and all the other signals we might see? And the answer is definitely not. Like, there's a huge amount of stuff going on in the center of the galaxy. We don't know what's in there, what it's doing, how it's interacting. It's hidden by gas. Dust, it's a big question mark. So we're looking for a little weird signal on top of a big weird thing. We don't understand. It's like listening for a whisper inside a rave in a language you don't understand. We're doing the best we can.

• 51:25Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's a daunting task as someone who doesn't like areas with lots of people. That also sounds very overwhelming. Okay, so we've got an experiment on the space station. Are we trying to collect data on this in any other way?

• 51:37Daniel Whiteson?

  We are absolutely. There's a bunch of people looking for cosmic ray antimatter. One of the really exciting experiments is called GAPS. This is a huge balloon experiment that's going to fly over Antarctica. They like build a particle detector, then they attach it to a weather balloon and they just fill it with helium and then just let it float up and circulate according to the winds around Antarctica. And it'll be up there for days, weeks, months, depending on the experiment. And like, these are really nerve wracking experiments because sometimes they crash, you know, it's weather and it's winds and there are storms and they lose it. And so imagine you're a graduate student, you spent like four years building this very delicate piece of equipment. Now you just send it up into the skies and hope

• 52:21Daniel Whiteson?

  that it doesn't just like get obliterated. And so this would be a really cool experiment because it's very sensitive to antimatter. It's hoping to trap anti particles. So like slow them down and trap them inside the experiment. So they they form an exotic atom bound between like matter and antimatter. So imagine you have like anti deuterium or anti helium three comes into your experiment, gets slowed down and then like bonds with some silicon atoms. So you have this weird atom that's like two kind of nuclei bound together, one matter, one antimatter. And they're going to emit a bunch of weird light as they relax down and then eventually annihilate and make a big flash. And by the pattern of those

• 53:05Daniel Whiteson?

  annihilations, they can tell exactly what kind of antimatter it was. So this is a future experiment they're working on. Somebody's out there right now, like building this thing and preparing it for launch over Antarctica. They've been saying for years, it's like about to go. And the last I heard, it's going to fly in 2025. So. This might tell us something about antimatter cosmic rays, antimatter from space, which might be a clue about where the dark matter is and if there's anti-dark matter annihilating with the dark matter to send us messages about what it's doing.

• 53:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  And do you know if that was part of the justification for getting this project funded? Or was this more a question about antimatter?

• 53:42Daniel Whiteson?

  No, this is definitely one of the motivations for this experiment directly is like understanding antimatter cosmic rays. Cosmic rays, an enduring mystery anyway. Like, we don't understand what's making them and especially the very highest energy. So GAPS can do lots of different kinds of physics, not just look for dark matter signals. But I think the signal from AMS is very tantalizing and inspires lots of follow-up experiments. And, you know, when you see something you don't understand, you try to explain it and then you do follow-up experiments, say, "Well, if that's true, then we should also see it over here. And let's do a different kind of experiment, see if that also spots it." Because like with dark matter, what you want is a coherent story. You don't just want one unexplained data that you can fudge away with some factor. You want a total story that when you poke

• 54:25Daniel Whiteson?

  at it from lots of different directions, it's always telling you the same story. And that's the thing about dark matter. No matter how we study it, we can tell it's matter, it's there, it has gravity. And so what we want is to complete that story by understanding its interactions with normal matter and maybe with anti-dark matter. And so that's why GAPS is like a very different kind of experiment from AMS, not just like a repeat of it, to hope to get like a different angle on the mystery. And maybe it'll see something and confirm it, and then we'll all can be convinced that we're seeing antiparticles from dark matter. Or maybe it'll see nothing. Or maybe it'll see something else totally weird that we didn't expect, the way astronomy often does.

• 55:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  So if they could afford it, and I know this would be a much more expensive experiment, would it be better to put that detector outside of Earth's magnetosphere because some of those galactic cosmic rays sort of get stopped? Or are you at Antarctica because they get shuttled to the poles?

• 55:20Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, great question. There's sort of just different traditions in physics, ways people figured out to make physics work. And definitely launching stuff into space is one of them. But wow, that's expensive and slow, and then you Got to get in line and you can cancel it any minute after 10 years of work. And so sort of an intermediate approach is like, hey, we just need a big balloon. We don't have to go all the way into space. We can just go like, go to the top of the atmosphere. And the winds around Antarctica actually tend to propel things in a circle. So you can sort of like float in circles and do these loops around Antarctica. So there's a long tradition of these balloon experiments around Antarctica. Really amazing science and really brave, you know, like I'm so impressed by these people who risk everything for these balloon experiments and have to go to Antarctica to launch them and recover them.

• 56:06Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, for some people, they get to go to Antarctica. It's like really exciting for them. But for me, I'm like, yikes.

• 56:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  I agreed. Yes, I have a friend who's excited because he got to go to Antarctica. But for me, it would be, I have to go to Antarctica, but I don't love being cold. We got four inches of snow and that is the right amount and it'll melt next week and that's perfect.

• 56:26Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly. And that's one of the things I love about science, you know, it takes all kinds. It takes normal people who don't want to go to Antarctica and crazy people who do want to go to Antarctica. And we're all grateful for them.

• 56:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Something for everyone.

• 56:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Exactly.

• 56:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, so what do you think, Daniel? When the results of the GAPS experiment come in, are we going to have an episode just about what they found? Unless it crashes?

• 56:47Daniel Whiteson?

  Let's do it. I definitely want to know the answer and I want to share the answer with everybody. And I'm just really hoping that dark matter is interesting and complicated and has some kind of interactions. You know, that would make sense because our kind of matter does. It's not just like gravitational, it interacts in all sorts of complicated ways. And we have lots of different kinds of normal matter, all these different particles. It would be really weird if dark matter, which is most of the universe, was also really simple, like just one kind of particle and one kind of interaction, gravity. It would be unusual, but then, you know, the universe is not afraid to surprise us and confuse us. So it could be that dark matter is kind of sterile and boring, but I suspect that it's not.

• 57:28Daniel Whiteson?

  I suspect there's lots of different dark matter particles and they're all doing some weird funky dance out there. It's certainly possible that that's the case and that's the universe I hope we live in because it would be much more discoverable. If dark matter is just gravitational, it could be a long, long time or ever before we figure it out.

• 57:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, let's hope we have the answer before we retire, perspire, or expire. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you.

• 57:53Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Thanks, everyone. And so sometimes, you see, there are connections between the mysteries of the universe. Dark matter and antimatter might dance together to make themselves explainable.

• 58:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Here's hoping. Until next time.

• 58:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 58:18Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 58:24Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 58:31Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 58:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 58:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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