3 May 2008
Flacco - Dark matter
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Transcript
This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.
Flacco: A question I often ask myself is this; does dark matter matter? It is said that at least 90% of the energy in the universe is dark, so I'd like to light a little shed on the matter...no, sorry, shed a little light on the matter. Now, what is this matter made of? Well, when the universe was young it was smooth and featureless. Ah, weren't we all! Some suspect that dark matter was made of neutrinos. It is a fact that more than 50 trillion neutrinos pass through the human body every second. It's a good thing they don't itch! But it would take a lot of neutrinos to make up the mass of dark matter.
Others propose this matter is made up of black holes, but how do you fill empty space with holes? It makes no sense. You'd have nothing but a big hole in the whole hole, and lumps of nothing travelling at the speed of light is still nothing, it's just the speed of light moving around. We should be looking for objects moving at the speed of dark. So instead of looking for them we should be listening for them, because obviously, stumbling around in the dark, they will have evolved phrases like 'excuse me', 'pardon me', 'my mistake', 'didn't see you there'.
You see, I firmly believe the entire universe is filled with common courtesy moving at the speed of dark. So what we need is to set up something akin to a giant Hubble microphone in space to pick up the 'pardon mes' of all this dark matter colliding with itself. But then, apart from all this speculation, at the end of the day...well, it gets dark. And at the end of the universe it is proposed that, depending on the fabric of this dark matter, the universe will either dwindle away into an eternal emptiness or compact into a big crunch. Either way, that should put an end to the matter.
Robyn Williams: Well, I hope that's sorted. Flacco was once drumming in the topless bar with Richard Feynman.
Guests
Paul Livingston
Presenter
Robyn Williams
Producer
David Fisher
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