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June 24, 2007 - Art Bell

02:36:53

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Dark Matter and Hubble - Richard Massey

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	From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's prolific time zones, each and every one covered by this, the largest program of its kind in the world.
	What a cool claim.
	It's Coast to Coast AM.
	I'm Art Bell, escorting you through the weekend.
	My honor and privilege to do so.
	Well, all right.
	We'll look at the world news tonight.
	There is one thing the cam shot tonight is the three of us.
	The three ABs.
	Aaron Bell, Asia Bell, Mark Bell.
	All together accomplished by putting a camera on a bookshelf, setting it, and then running into position.
	That's on my webcam which is in the upper left hand side of the front page of coast2coastam.com.
	New arrest in Ohio pregnant woman case.
	Everybody's watching that one.
	A former classmate of a man suspected of murdering a pregnant woman arrested Sunday on a related obstruction of justice charge, according to the FBI.
	Miesha Farrell arrested one day after the body of 26-year-old Jessie Davis found in Cuyahoga, I guess it is, Valley National Park, still carrying Her dead, nearly full-term fetus.
	The Summit County Medical Examiner on Sunday confirmed the body was Davis's, uh, was in fact Davis's.
	Sheriff's deputies and FBI agents arrested Farrell after breaking down the door of her apartment and searching the home.
	Senators are pushing hard on immigration, but we'll see.
	Senators pushing a new immigration policy appealed Sunday to wavering supporters ahead of renewed debate on securing the borders and dealing with 12 million undocumented immigrants.
	A fragile compromise pulled from the Senate in early June, then resurrected after bipartisan negotiations with the White House.
	The bill awaits a crucial test vote this week with several senators distancing themselves from the proposal.
	The outcome is simply too close to call.
	The U.S.
	commander of a new offensive north of Baghdad, reclaiming insurgent territory day by day, said Sunday his Iraqi partners may be too weak to hold on to what he gains.
	The Iraqi military does not even have enough ammunition, according to Brigadier General Mick Benidark.
	They're not quite up to the job yet.
	His counterpart south of Baghdad seems to agree, saying U.S.
	troops are too few to garrison the district's newly rid of insurgents.
	It can't be coalition U.S.
	forces.
	We have what we have.
	There's got to be more Iraqi security forces, said he.
	President Hugo Chavez.
	Boy, he's gonna be a pain, isn't he?
	Urged soldiers on Sunday to prepare for guerrilla-style war against the U.S.
	Says Washington is using psychological and economic warfare as part of an unconventional campaign aimed at derailing his government.
	Dressed in olive green fatigues and a red beret, Chavez spoke inside A fort, Venezuela's military nerve center, before hundreds of uniformed soldiers standing alongside armored vehicles and tanks decorated with banners reading, Fatherland, Socialism, or Death.
	We will be triumphant.
	A video recording released Monday shows kidnapped British journalist Alan Johnston wearing a An apparent explosives belt of the type that suicide bombers use, and warning it's going to be detonated should somebody try to help him escape.
	Once relatively indifferent to government affairs, Google, Google Inc., is seeking help inside the Beltway to fight the rise of web censorship worldwide.
	The online giant is taking a novel approach to the problem by asking U.S.
	trade officials to treat internet restrictions as international trade barriers, similar to other hurdles to global commerce like tariffs.
	Alright, that's the world news.
	It's never all that encouraging, is it?
	It's never all that uplifting.
	I guess it's just the way of the world.
	We report negative news.
	In a moment, we'll look at some of the rest of the news.
	Alright, in a few moments we're going to do unscreened, open lines, and that means you just go straight on the air, no screeners.
	So, here's the deal.
	When I say you're on the air, that really means you're on the air.
	There is a delay system, so the moment I answer the phone and I say that, turn your radio off right away, or you will be confused because your own voice will be coming back to you 10 or 12 or 14 seconds later, whatever it is.
	West of the Rockies, 1-800-618-8255.
	That's 1-800-618-8255.
	I don't really have to say the 1, do I?
	East of the Rockies, 800-825-5033.
	First-timers, we've got a special line.
	8255 I don't really have to say the one do I east of the Rockies 800 825 5033
	first-timers we've got a special line you've never called the show before area
	code 818 501 4721 wildcard line area code 818 5014 109 and finally outside
	the country no problem 800 893 0903 I wish my stories were a little
	cheerier but they're not six scientists from some of the leading scientific
	institutions in the US have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the
	world civilization itself is threatened by global warming They also implicitly criticize the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, for underestimating the scale of sea level rise this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.
	Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimeters, as the IPCC is predicting in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several meters by 2100.
	That is why they say planet Earth today is in imminent peril.
	In a densely referenced scientific paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, some of the world's leading climate researchers describe in detail why they believe humanity can no longer afford to ignore the gravest threat of climate change.
	Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth very close to dramatic climate change that could run out of control with great dangers for humans and other creatures, say the scientists.
	Only intense efforts to curb man-made emissions of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases can possibly keep the climate within or even near the range of the past 1 million years.
	In an email to the Independent, Dr. Hanson, Said, quote, in my opinion, among our papers, this one probably does the best job of making it clear that Earth is getting very close to climate change that could run out of control.
	The unnatural forcing of the climate as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatens to generate a, quote, flip in the climate that could spark a cataclysm in the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland.
	Dramatic flips in the climate have occurred in the past, but none has happened since the development of complex human societies and civilization, which are unlikely to survive the same sort of environmental changes should they occur now.
	A new federal regulation calls for upgraded driver's licenses to serve as a new universal ID.
	Some states, though, say no.
	And the loser in the confrontation between the states and the feds may be you.
	Me.
	Beginning as early as May of 2008, if you live and work in the U.S., you're going to need a federally approved ID card to travel by air, open a bank account, apply for Social Security benefits, or use many government services.
	The REAL ID Act, signed by the President in 2005, is going to require every state to recertify driver's license and ID card holders.
	With a May 11, 2008 compliance date, it's part of the war on terrorism some of the 9-11 attackers had managed to apply for and get state IDs.
	Sounds reasonable enough on its face, but it has some states in open defiance, others poised to join the fray.
	Matter of fact, five states, Idaho, Washington, Montana, Arkansas and Maine, Have enacted legislation informing the federal government they're not going to do it.
	They're not going to comply with the REAL ID Act.
	In addition, 13 more states have passed legislation in one chamber of their legislatures to refuse compliance.
	Nevada, my state, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Missouri, Minnesota, Georgia, South Carolina, West Virginia, Vermont, and New Hampshire.
	And Massachusetts State Senator Richard T. Morris filed a bill seeking to stop implementation of the REAL ID Act in that state with Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley firmly in his corner.
	Their argument, the measure would create a false sense of security, lead to a lucrative black market for real, well, make that fake REAL IDs, and increase the risk, increase the risk, mind you, of ID theft.
	Well, as you know, The bees are vanishing.
	The die-off, now in 35 states, has crippled beekeepers and has threatened many crops.
	It expected to see mites or amoebas.
	Dennis Van Engeldorp's microscope, that is, as he looked through it.
	Pests, perhaps, of bees.
	Instead, what he found was internal organs swollen with debris and strangely blackened.
	This is the first I've read of this.
	The bees' intestinal tracts were scarred.
	Their rectums were abnormally full of what appeared to be partially digested pollen.
	Dark marks on the sting glands were telltale signs of infection.
	The more you looked, the more you found, he said.
	His examination of the bees in November was one of the first scientific glimpses of a mysterious honeybee die-off that's launched an intense search for a cure.
	So far...
	Nothing.
	So the bees are going, going, gone.
	Now the birds.
	I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago.
	Last week the Audubon Society released a new report describing the sharp and startling population decline of some of the most familiar and common birds in America.
	Several kinds of sparrows, the northern bobwhite, the eastern meadowlark, the common grackle, And, uh, many other common birds, the, uh, churn, for example, the average decline of the 20 species in the Audubon Society's report is, brace yourselves, 68%.
	Forty years ago, there were an estimated 31 million bobwhites.
	5.5 million from 31 million to 5.5 compared to the hundred some condors presently in the wild 5.5 million bobwhite sounds like a lot of birds but what matters is the 25.5 million that seem to be missing and the troubles that brought them down are all too likely to bring down the rest of them too so this is not extinction But it is how things look before extinction occurs.
	The word extinct somehow brings to mind the birds that seem like special cases to us.
	You know, the dodo, or the great auk, or the passenger pigeon.
	Most people would never have had a chance to see dodos and great auks on the Their remote islands, before they were decimated in the 17th and 19th centuries, what's hard to remember about passenger pigeons isn't merely their once enormous numbers, it's the enormous numbers of humans to whom their comings and goings were a common sight, and who supposed erroneously that such unending clouds of birds were indestructible.
	We recognize the extraordinary distinctness of the passenger pigeon now because we know its fate It's been killed off largely by humans, but we have moralized it thoroughly without ever really taking it to heart.
	The question is whether we will see the distinctness of the field sparrow, its number down from 18 million 40 years ago to a current 5.8 million only when the last pair is being kept alive in a zoo somewhere.
	We just love to finally care when the death watch is on, don't we?
	It makes us feel so very human.
	To some extent, what are called chemtrails, this is from Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country, anytime I see anything on chemtrails I keep it, are caused by global warming since the stratosphere where planes fly is getting colder.
	Now the greenhouse gases are trapping warmth in the troposphere just below it.
	This causes jet contrails to freeze so they remain visible for longer periods of time instead of dissipating harmlessly.
	Some of them fall to Earth as large blocks of ice.
	So look out!
	Reflective particles are also sometimes sprayed into the sky in an anti-terrorist effort to peer around the curvature of the Earth.
	But the researchers who study chemtrails are not fully satisfied with either one of these explanations.
	A massive block of ice fell to earth again recently, this time in Scotland.
	In the Courier, Liz Fowler reports what she calls an ice meteor crashed right through the roof of a house at a speed of hundreds of miles an hour.
	She quotes local police as saying, there have been instances in the past when things like this have happened.
	An aircraft flying through a cloud will pick up moisture which can then freeze as it descends, it can D.I.C.E., and in this instance, a block has dropped off.
	I've heard of this happening perhaps 15 or 20 times.
	But then there's this.
	You may recall, every time I report this, people want hard copy.
	Last May, a family in Iowa contacted the office of Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, from Iowa to report the constant crisscrossing of chemtrails in
	the sky above their neighborhood.
	They received back from the Senator's office a GAO report on military chaff, a material
	safety data sheet for aluminum-coated fiberglass fibers being spread seven days a week for
	several hours every day in the skies above their home.
	The chaff is spread by pilots learning how to mask planes or sending false radar images.
	It was reported that the military also has lead-based chaff, but is not being used at this time.
	Chaff was used in the military in World War II, and according to the GAO, has been used in training here at home since the 1950s.
	Once chaff reaches the ground, it breaks down into particles small enough to inhale.
	Though military spokespeople insist chaff is not harmful, they say.
	The GAO report concluded that health effects are unknown and more studies are needed.
	That's interesting, isn't it?
	It's not harmful, but they're not sure and they need more studies.
	So how can they say it well, anyway?
	Regardless, some members of this family are sick.
	On May 23rd, after a hard rain the day before, They noticed this glittering substance and a pinkish-colored powder substance on the roof of their house.
	Then they noticed the glittering substance on many surfaces, even the dashboard of the family car.
	Both substances were collected and sent to a lab for analysis.
	That doesn't happen very often, but they did it!
	Among the substances found to be in the samples were several that simply should not be there, to say the least.
	What the report said is, in this we found six bacteria, including anthrax and pneumonia, nine chemicals, including Acetylene chloride, 26 heavy metals including arsenic, gold, lead, mercury, silver, uranium, and zinc, four molds and fungi, seven viruses, two cancers, two vaccines, and two sedatives.
	God.
	So, if you're wondering what's in your sky, there is somebody who took the time and trouble To actually send some in and find out exactly what it was.
	Maybe you're better off not knowing.
	I don't know.
	Can you imagine getting a report back like that?
	Can you imagine?
	New York has decided that people who... ...plog adult-ranked computer games to minors... ...should be sent to jail for life.
	Hmph.
	While you do not get jail for life for selling crack to kids... ...or beating one up...
	By a very strange quirk of the U.S.
	justice system, apparently selling a game to a kid could get you locked up until you drop.
	Lawmakers have decided that selling such games is now a very serious crime.
	But over the pond, they call a felony.
	Since New York has three strikes, you know, three strikes rule when you're out, right?
	Which was upheld in 2005.
	It means that if you commit three felonies, however important or not they are, you go to jail.
	for the rest of your natural life.
	Well, all right. There is so much more news that I have here.
	Oh, stem cells.
	Stem cells are seen as the future of medicine, but the current administration's opposition to creating
	them from human embryos has caused scientists to get creative.
	creative.
	Now, Ian Wilmot, who cloned Dolly the Sheep, remember him, over 10 years ago, says that animal embryos can now perform the same function.
	Wilmot thinks the solution is to inject human DNA into an animal egg cell.
	A nucleus from a diseased person's cell would be placed into an animal egg, from which the nucleus has been removed.
	In LiveScience.com, Dave Mosher writes, although the ethical issue is not completely resolved, as human tissue would be growing In an animal egg, Wilmot is confident about the proposed procedure's advantages.
	He quotes Wilmot as saying, although barriers to producing embryos and embryonic stem cells with this process could be large, so too are the lessons that could be learned.
	As a matter of fact, we tried to save the stem cells at Asia's birth.
	There just was not enough cord blood to have it done.
	We were all prepared to do that.
	As it turned out, there wasn't quite enough cord blood.
	Anybody out there in the business of having a baby?
	Consider it, because stem cells are getting to be more and more useful for everybody's lives.
	Anyway, from the high desert and the great American Southwest, unscreened open lines are coming up after the break.
	How in the world are we going to kill each other anymore?
	Here in the U.S., they're trying to ban guns.
	In England, they've already really done that.
	Violent crime, though, is on the increase in the U.K.
	And so now, people are writing that maybe they ought to get rid of kitchen knives.
	Big, pointy kitchen knives.
	They say they're used in as many as half of all the stabbings in Great Britain.
	Many assaults are committed impulsively and prompted by alcohol and other drugs.
	And a kitchen knife makes an all-too-available weapon in such circumstances.
	That there is no reason for long, pointy knives to be publicly available at all, having little practical value in the kitchen, argue the authors, who consulted the top ten chefs from around the UK.
	None of the chefs felt such knives were essential, since the point of a short blade was every bit as useful as...
	When a sharp end was needed, a short pointed knife may cause a substantial superficial wound if it's used in an assault, but unlikely to penetrate to inner organs, whereas a long pointy blade pierces the body, like cutting into a ripe melon, say the authors.
	So if they ban long pointy knives, I suppose people will have to take to rocks.
	We'll be right back.
	Well, I'll tell you what, you're going to have to rip my long, pointy knife from my cold, lacerated hand.
	Let's go to the phones.
	First time caller line, you're on the air.
	Hello.
	Hi, this is Greg from Iowa.
	Hi, Greg.
	Nice talking to you.
	And to you.
	Well, I'm sure you enjoyed your shows for all over these years.
	I'm a little, well, I'm no better than the next guy, but the thing is that I'm involved with a company who has come up with a gasoline replacement based on vegetable.
	Oh.
	What kind of vegetable?
	Well, basically, there's a number of different ones, but I disagree with using food for fuel.
	Then why are you involved in a company that's doing that?
	I'm sorry?
	Why are you then involved in a company that's doing exactly that?
	Oh, no.
	We can use plants that are not used for fuel right now.
	Well, like what?
	I mean, can you tell us, or is it a trade secret?
	Well, some are secrets, but the thing is that some can be grown here in the United States, but aren't being grown here yet.
	But only in certain areas, and that's one of the things that needs to be addressed also.
	You're not exactly opening up with me here.
	Okay, there's certain plants that are known but are not grown in the United States yet, but the thing is that they grow them in other parts of the world.
	I mean, the thing is that, here's the difference between, say, the way that Biodiesel is made now.
	That uses heat.
	We don't use a heat process.
	We use a chemical process.
	Okay.
	So it reduces the amount of pollution and it also reduces by about 30% the cost of processing whatever plant matter or product or oil that we're processing.
	Tell me what you're using.
	Let's say that we bought some rancid soybean oil.
	Rancid soybean oil?
	Right.
	That you couldn't use for human consumption.
	Right.
	All right.
	We could process that into fuel that you could burn into a vehicle right now.
	No changes in the engine?
	Well, we've got actually... Let me back up here.
	I apologize.
	I'm a little... Nervous?
	I'm sorry?
	Nervous?
	Yeah, I'm a little nervous.
	Back up.
	Okay.
	We've got basically three configurations of fuel that work in diesel engines.
	Okay.
	One is for off-road with no road tax, one is for a diesel engine with no modifications, and one is for diesel engines with modifications.
	Okay.
	Which means heat so that changes the viscosity of the fuel.
	Okay.
	It thins it out so that it can work correctly.
	And we've got some fleets working on this fuel for two years now in practice or in service for two years.
	We'll have the results of these trials probably within the next couple of months.
	But I've approached some people who are doing the E85 alcohol stuff, and they're interested in bringing this along at a later date as an adjunct to what they're doing now.
	But the thing is that we've got a number of patents on these things.
	What is the purpose of your call to me?
	What is it you're trying to say?
	Yes, I understand.
	Well, I'm confused as to where I can go to actually make a pilot plant, get the financing for it, and actually implement it into this country without going to another country, say China.
	Well, I don't have that answer for you, of course.
	I don't know.
	Anything like this takes a lot of money.
	And then, of course, you know, there's the other problem.
	Even if you've got a good fuel, you've got to have an infrastructure set up to, you know, distribute the fuel.
	Right.
	I understand.
	Now, we've got a fourth fuel in the laboratory.
	It replaces gasoline with no modifications in your regular vehicle.
	The gasoline engine.
	Really?
	Yeah.
	And that's 100% vegetable fuel.
	A hundred percent, and no mods in the vehicle at all?
	Yes, correct.
	Alright, look, here's what you better do.
	If you would, please send an email to me.
	I'm easy to get hold of and I'm very interested in all of this, of course.
	I want to know.
	Maybe there is a way I can help.
	I'll do what I can.
	Get me an email.
	I'm artbell at A-O-L dot com or artbell at mindspring dot com.
	That's A-R-T-B-E-L-L at A-O-L dot com or artbell at mindspring dot com.
	And I'll see what I can do.
	I mean, if it's a legitimate replacement and it's easy to do and doesn't take away from our food crops, then I say by all means.
	West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
	Hi.
	Hi, Art.
	How are we doing?
	Pretty well.
	Thanks for taking my call.
	I wanted to make a few comments on the interview last night with Dale Brown.
	I would say that I agree pretty much with everything that he said as far as our strategy with the Middle East.
	Also, I've seen a couple of programs on cable very well, and I did a little bit of background research on them also about the ties to the radical Islamists.
	They've been around a long time, so I definitely agree with them that we need to make that point very, very clear.
	I also agree with you 100%.
	There definitely has been some very good work, and I probably would assume a little bit of luck, in that we haven't had any attacks here in the U.S.
	since 9-11, and it's mostly good work.
	There has to be a lot of what would be considered illegal activity out in the public realm For us to be able to combat radical Islamists, because they have no rules.
	So, of course, we have to do things that would normally go against the Constitution.
	I can't see any other way to do this if we're going to protect our people and our cities.
	So, I wanted to call and comment on that.
	Also, I wanted to suggest Mexican football, American style, for Border Patrol.
	You want to hear the idea?
	I'm not sure after that little pre-statement about it, but go ahead.
	Okay.
	Let's use the ones that are already here to help us protect the border.
	And what we do is we assign a team, you know, to cover like a two-mile area.
	Maybe a quarter of the team, let's say there's 50 of them, and then... When you say 50 of them, you mean illegal aliens?
	Of the illegal aliens, right?
	We'll go ahead and hire them to do two things.
	Watch the border as a part of the team construct the wall.
	No, I can't get next to that idea.
	I'm sorry.
	Look, an illegal alien is an illegal alien, and I think they're being hired, in essence, by the government to prevent what they just did is somehow just doesn't work in my brain.
	I'm sorry.
	It was an illegal act in the first place, and that's that.
	I mean, the law right now says that if you want to come into the U.S., there are prescribed ways to do that.
	They're lengthy and they're difficult, but it can be done.
	And, you know, our borders should be protected.
	Now, as far as Islam is concerned, we are definitely at war with extreme Islam.
	The thing that I'm not sure about, and I don't think that I've heard any real figures, I don't understand how much of the Islamic world is radicalized.
	You know, we say we're at war with the Islamic extremists.
	Well, how many does that mean?
	In the U.S.
	we don't really, I don't think we understand, we don't comprehend how much of Islam hates our guts.
	Certainly a great deal of people in that religion do not hate our guts, don't hate anybody's guts.
	But it's unclear to me how much extremism there really is in Islam.
	And I think we need to understand that so we understand the magnitude of the problem that we have in front of us.
	And that's what I haven't seen in the press.
	What percentage of the Islamic world is radicalized or hates us?
	We know some, but how many?
	You never see stories about that, do you?
	East of the Rockies, you're on the air, hello.
	Hi, my name is Tanya Beatty.
	Okay, Tanya, we don't allow last names on the air, so I had to dump that, and we're going to have to start all over again.
	Your name is Tanya, right?
	Tanya, yeah.
	Yes, okay, and where are you?
	Sheridan, Wyoming.
	I'm in Sheridan, Wyoming.
	Me and my fiancé are driving west.
	We're moving to Seattle.
	Yes, I hear him prompting you in the background.
	Yes, he probably wants to say something to you as well.
	Okay, go ahead.
	Hello, how are you today?
	Just fine.
	I'm in the middle of driving.
	I apologize.
	I was really interested in the show that was aired last night.
	I don't know if that was a repeat or not.
	But you said you were going to have another episode with this gentleman.
	He's a pretty smart man.
	He was talking about, I guess, the exponential problems that are going to arise if we just continue to use the fuel that we're using.
	Yes.
	And a suggestion, I wish you would bring it up with him, about Perendev model, perpetual motion generators based on electromagnetic repulsion.
	Okay, I'll bring it up, but as far as I know, there has not been scientifically demonstrated anywhere, ever, perpetual motion.
	Yeah, but that's just what they call it.
	That's just what they label it.
	It's not exactly perpetual, but it kind of, you know, kind of acts as a good prime mover.
	Okay, but if it's not exactly perpetual, then it's not perpetual.
	Yeah, what we're talking about is just an alternative to fuel right now, you know.
	If we look at some of the things they're doing, I believe Switzerland is contracting them for a city car that uses their principles Um, along with a, it's a hybrid of that and an electric car.
	Something about putting the signal back into an electric coil and then sending the signal back into the, the engine itself.
	I don't know how valid this is, but I find it fascinating and any, any kind of feedback on that would be wonderful from you.
	All right.
	I appreciate the call.
	I'm fascinated by the whole field, but I, you know, I've said this for years.
	Send me a toy.
	Send me a little toy.
	That runs perpetually, and I'll be a believer.
	Just a little toy, anything at all, that runs perpetually, that draws its energy from the atmosphere, from the ozone, from anything at all, from zero point.
	Any of these claimed, eternally moving, free energy machines, if they're really out there, bring it on.
	I'll tell the world.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
	Hi, Art.
	Hello.
	Hi, this is Mike from Evansville, Indiana.
	I was calling in to talk to you about the story you're running about they're trying to ban knives in England, is it?
	Yes.
	That's just insane.
	Now, I've had some martial arts experience.
	I wonder how many of these lawmakers really understand what they're actually accomplishing when they pass laws like this because... Long, pointy knives, sir.
	Even a short, like a three-inch knife, can cause serious damage.
	They're actually more fatal than guns within their range.
	Well, the world is insane.
	You know, I mean, it's behavior.
	For as long as people want to kill people, they're going to find a mechanism to do it.
	Banning guns, and now knives, and probably big rocks, and God knows where they're going, you know.
	Yeah, well the fact is, when they ban weapons, Criminals tend to be encouraged by that, it seems.
	Well, as the saying goes, when they take away our long, pointy knives, then only the criminals will have long, pointy knives.
	Well, if you take away the long, pointy knives, the criminals are still going to have guns, which they already have.
	That's exactly right.
	Looking back at the Virginia Tech shooting that happened a while back, I wonder how closely that person followed the news that that campus had banned all weapons from their campus less than a year before.
	I think that he probably factored that into his plans.
	Tens, hundreds of thousands were killed with machetes in Africa.
	Look, people will find a way.
	Exactly.
	So it's, thank you very much, it's human behavior that has to be modified.
	Not the means, not the gun, not the knife, not the rock, not the machete, or whatever else people will come up with, but the intent.
	Wild Card Line, you're on the air.
	Is this Art Bell?
	It is indeed, yes.
	This is Art Bell?
	Yes, once again, yes it is, Art Bell.
	Okay, I'm sorry, I've got a little, kind of a miracle story I'd like to tell you.
	When I was a kid, when I was 5, 6, 7 years old, I used to go over to my uncle and my
	cousin's house and I had a cousin my age and we were the best of friends but we'd always
	end up in a fistfight every time I went to his house.
	You know, competition over video games and stuff like that.
	We had one of those kind of, you know, kid relationships.
	And so, usually after we'd end up in a fistfight, his house was like two houses from the corner of the street that he lived on, and he was out in the country a little bit.
	I would take a walk down the street and there's like a hill, and I would walk down the hill, and this happened to me more than once, I would walk down the hill, and when I got down to the bottom of the hill, I would turn around, and I would be in a completely different place.
	And so I'd walk back up the same hill, and my uncle's house would not be there, I'd be in a completely different country area.
	So what I do is I get scared and I turn back around and I walk back down the hill and I turn back around and then I come back up the hill and then I'd be back, uh, you know, back in my, back in my uncle's neighborhood.
	And, um, I am not like a crazy insane person.
	I've never had a delusion.
	I've never seen a ghost, anything like that.
	But this has stuck with me since childhood because this happened to me, uh, at least three times.
	Um, you know, so I guess I'm wondering, uh, What you think of that, and also I wanted to tell you quick, I did have a recent miracle lately.
	Recently, I'm an ex-alcoholic, and I've been clean about a month and a half now.
	I went to the hospital about a month and a half ago, and my blood pressure when I first got there was actually 210 over 140, which is really dangerous.
	Oh yes.
	So I'm praying and praying and praying.
	And I ended up not having a heart attack.
	And so they released me from the hospital, whatever they put in my system.
	And I go on about my business.
	And five days later, I start feeling sick and chest pains again.
	I go to the hospital.
	Now, mind you, I hadn't touched alcohol or anything.
	Very quickly, this hour is about up.
	Okay.
	My blood pressure was 180, but 130.
	And I made it through again.
	Bottom line, that's the miracle.
	What I'm telling you, I believe the Lord stepped in even though I didn't feel any kind of a miracle situation.
	I didn't feel anything come through my body or nothing like that.
	Well, that's her and leave the bottle on the table.
	As for your prior experience, you know, one day we're going to do a show.
	I'm convinced there are these areas that you can walk through and suddenly you can be somewhere else now.
	I don't exactly know what it is, but I certainly know what he's talking about.
	I've had a very similar experience.
	From the high desert in the great American Southwest, we'll be right back.
	Here I am indeed.
	Coming up next, Richard Massey, who is a senior postdoctoral scholar in astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.
	He obtained a PhD from Cambridge University in England, and in fact is moving back to the UK at the end of this year.
	He's been using, I love this line, he's been using the Hubble Space Telescope to look at invisible dark matter.
	That's going to be the first question, Professor.
	How do you do that?
	He's also working on designs for future spacecraft that will eventually replace Hubble in the next decade.
	But that line, I love it.
	He's been using the Hubble Space Telescope to look at invisible dark matter.
	Now, I'm sure there's an explanation for that line, and we'll hear it in a moment.
	Professor Massey, welcome to Coast to Coast AM.
	Hi, thank you very much.
	It's great to have you, and I presume, judging from the phone numbers I see here, we're reaching you in Great Britain, yes?
	Yeah, that's right.
	I'm on vacation at the moment.
	I see.
	All right.
	Well, I love that line, that you're using the Hubble to observe invisible dark matter.
	Yeah.
	Please, before we proceed, was that meant to be in there?
	You actually are observing with Hubble?
	You're seeing dark matter?
	Not directly.
	Ah.
	There's plenty of things that you can't see directly, but we still know are there.
	It's like looking at the wind.
	We know the wind is there, just because it moves things around.
	It moves those leaves around.
	Good point.
	Now, we can't see the wind directly.
	We just have to look at things that it affects, and then we know it's there.
	Something similar is going on with the dark matter.
	We can't see it directly.
	It's invisible.
	But we can look at other things that it affects.
	All right.
	Can you tell me what dark matter is?
	Sadly, no.
	Not yet.
	That really is the million-dollar question that we're all trying to find out.
	And this is the exciting new frontier that we're trying to explore.
	What we do know about dark matter is that it's somewhat 86% of the total mass in the universe.
	Everything that we know about, all of the stuff that we can touch and feel and breathe, that's really a very small amount of what's out there.
	We know that there's this, or we're now finding that there's this extra stuff, which we're calling dark matter because it's invisible.
	And that we're really just in the process of finding out what it is.
	But we know that for every neutron or proton or electron, every sort of particle that's in the Standard Model, really everything that science knows about until now, for every one of those is about six times as much of this dark matter.
	So we know that there's a lot of it, and it's very important for life, for sort of creating the universe around us.
	We don't yet know quite what it is.
	Okay, Professor, well you said And you're right, you can't see the wind, you simply know it's there because you observe the effects of the trees and the vegetation moving and when it's strong enough, houses coming down and all the rest of it.
	So that's a good point.
	How do you fit that analogy into dark matter?
	In other words, what do you observe that makes you know dark matter is there?
	So there are a few ways in which we can observe it.
	The most successful at the moment is by a process known as weak gravitational lensing.
	Now, this is convoluted, I'll get into that in a second, but the idea is that we can't see the dark matter directly, but we can see ordinary galaxies.
	There's billions of those all around us in the night sky, very, very far away.
	And if we look at these galaxies, which are very far away, they sort of form a wallpaper, a background wallpaper, all around the edge of the universe.
	Right.
	And crucially the light from those galaxies has had to travel a long way across the universe to get to us.
	Right.
	They have to travel through interstellar space and past any dark matter.
	Now it turns out that the dark matter affects the light from these galaxies.
	It actually bends the light rays coming from these galaxies and rather like looking through a wobbly sheet of glass or a magnifying glass or something, it actually distorts the shape of these background galaxies.
	So you look at a background sheet of galaxies, A sort of background wallpaper.
	They're ordinary galaxies, but they appear distorted to us because the light from them has had to travel through dark matter on its way to get to us.
	Well, alright.
	Does dark matter have any gravitational aspects to it?
	In other words, we know that certain things, black holes for example, can bend light, right?
	Right, that's exactly it.
	So the dark matter doesn't reflect or shine in any way, but it's through its gravity that that's how this sort of process works.
	And I say it's like looking through a wobbly sheet of glass, that sort of distorts, there the light rays are distorted because light travels at different speeds in glass and air.
	The light rays coming from these different galaxies are also bent.
	It produces the same sort of effect, but it's through a completely different physical mechanism.
	This is all done through gravity.
	And that's the sort of crucial thing that we're finding out about this dark matter,
	is that it has some gravity.
	There's lots of it out there, and it doesn't interact in any way.
	It doesn't shine, you can't touch it, you can't feel it, except through its gravitational
	influence.
	And we know that it's there because it exerts this subtle gravitational influence on everything
	else around it, and on the light coming from behind it.
	And that's how it bends the light.
	If you like, we've sort of done some budgeting in the universe, that normally things fall
	together, or an apple falls to the earth, or the moon orbits around the earth, because
	they're pulled together by gravity.
	Because they have some mass, and they're pulled together by gravity.
	Bye.
	And in this case, things fall together more quickly The more mass there is.
	So the gravity is stronger wherever there's more mass.
	Where there's less mass, there's less gravity.
	Where there's more mass, there's more gravity.
	And we've just done the budgeting, calculated sort of the totals at the end of the day, and found out that in fact, in the universe as a whole, there's actually more gravity, it seems, than all the mass we can see.
	And we can only see all the stuff made of ordinary material.
	But because there's more gravity, we said, oh well, OK, there has to be some more mass out there somewhere.
	And it is invisible, so we've called it dark matter.
	But because it has gravity, and we therefore think it's got mass, we think there's lots of it.
	Do you believe, Professor, that it's uniform?
	Or do you believe there may be areas of space that have more dark matter than others?
	Yeah, and that's very lucky for us actually, that there are indeed regions of space, vast regions of empty space, which contain completely nothing.
	No ordinary matter, no dark matter, absolutely nothing.
	Really?
	Yeah, this all really strikes me as, you know, there are places of the universe that, you know, you think it's a long way to drive across America and, you know, there's empty tracks of land where there's nothing to see for a long way.
	Driving across the universe is a heck of a long way and there's These patches of land that would take millions, well, billions of years to drive across at the speed of light, and there's absolutely nothing in them at all.
	Okay, then how should we think of dark matter?
	Should we think of it as kind of, you know, a fog, which you'd be very familiar with in Great Britain, that sort of comes and goes?
	In other words, patches of dark matter?
	If it were visible, Do you think we would see patches of dark matter?
	How did you know actually?
	I'm just guessing!
	So in between these voids there are clumps of dark matter and it really does make up a sort of a blobby filamentary distribution.
	In fact there are very long thin poles of dark matter, rods, where All the dark matter is concentrated in big, long lines, and this makes up this sort of criss-crossing, interconnected web of where the dark matter lies.
	Oh, now this is the very first time I have ever heard this, Professor.
	I always had heard from people that dark matter was consistent, was all around us, and was virtually everywhere, but you're saying no.
	It is around us, and the thing is that it's around us, because we don't happen to live in one of those empty regions of the universe.
	Wherever in fact there's ordinary matter, there is dark matter as well.
	They interact via their gravity, which just means that they fall together, so we end up in the same place.
	And wherever there's ordinary matter, like us for example, There is dark matter as well.
	Oh!
	Okay, so is it fair to say that, and I think you just said it, that mass, like planets and whatever other masses out there, attracts dark matter as the Earth attracts the Moon and holds it captive in the same way.
	So dark matter tends to associate itself with larger masses.
	That's exactly right, yeah.
	I'd probably say the other way around, that dark matter attracts normal matter just because there's more of it.
	But that's, yeah, that's completely true.
	And in fact it's very important for us because, well it's very important that it's that way around and that there's a lot of dark matter, because this actually forms first into this sort of web of, it looks like scaffolding if you like.
	of criss-crossing strings of dark matter.
	And this was vital for life to form, because the dark matter formed first into this scaffolding, and then later on, when the ordinary matter sort of got its game together, that started falling into the dark matter scaffolding and growing up, getting closer and closer together, so there's lots of ordinary matter in the same place, this started building galaxies and stars and planets inside this dark matter scaffolding.
	So the dark matter was first?
	Yes, it was, actually.
	It started to collapse.
	So the universe started out as this smooth soup just after the Big Bang, where everything was almost uniformly mixed together.
	You do believe in the Big Bang, right?
	I do, yes.
	Was dark matter present prior to the Big Bang, do you think?
	Well, we have no idea what happened prior to the Big Bang.
	Sorry, I had to ask.
	So, we don't know that.
	The dark matter could have appeared along with everything else.
	It seems to have been there all the time throughout the history of the universe.
	No more, no less of it now.
	It's there, it's just got more clumpy.
	And crucially, it started getting clumpy and forming these structures out of the soup.
	It started forming them first.
	Are we sure that there is dark matter?
	Or are there other theories that might explain it?
	In other words, are we absolutely certain there is dark matter?
	There are still skeptics, I have to say.
	So all the evidence for it is from its gravitational effect.
	And that's just because it only interacts, it seems, through gravity.
	It doesn't want to know anything about the other forces in the universe.
	of physics. It only interacts with gravity, so of course all the evidence we have for it is via
	gravity. Now, most astronomers are saying that, oh well in that case, if we know how gravity works,
	then there must be more mass, because we know this link between mass and all mass causes gravity.
	So we're all saying that there's some extra mass and this is dark matter, but some, there are some
	sceptics who go away and say, well actually maybe we've got the theory of gravity wrong,
	that there's just all the mass that we can see, but we're interpreting our observations of the
	the gravity wrongly because we don't know how gravity works yet.
	So there are still sceptics who say there's no dark matter, but maybe we should think about changing our theory of gravity, which is Einstein's general relativity.
	Gravity is just something that comes along with mass, yes?
	Yes, yep.
	And the problem, well, I mean, the problem with trying to make up a new theory for how this works is that, well, you know, Einstein was a really clever guy and his theory of gravity explains so many, many different phenomena working in many different regimes that To try and make a new theory of gravity which explains all of these and the new ones ends up being phenomenally complicated and actually sort of less complicated than just adding dark matter in.
	And so Einstein still gets my bet for the moment and in that case, if he's right, then we need some dark matter.
	All right.
	If we are able to finally discover and pin down dark matter, what good will it do us?
	Sadly, the practical aspects or the sort of uses of this are rather limited just because you can't do anything with it because it doesn't interact with you.
	You can't bottle it because it'll just flow out of the bottle and run away.
	It doesn't interact with the bottle.
	If you lean against the wall of dark matter, then you just fall over, because it doesn't push back.
	It's rather useless for us, in any practical sense.
	It is an odd world, though.
	It is an odd world, Professor.
	If you can bottle some dark matter for me, I guarantee you I can sell it.
	Someone would buy it, wouldn't they?
	Sorry again.
	You pretty much obviously think that dark matter is real.
	Why is it important?
	It forms this scaffolding, is one thing, that it starts to collapse first and form these structures first, but there just isn't enough ordinary matter to have done that.
	So we're grateful that there is a lot of dark matter out there that will form this scaffolding that we can later grow up inside.
	But the other thing it does is it just acts as a sort of glue for the universe.
	So gravity ties things together.
	It ties the Moon to the Earth.
	It ties galaxies together.
	Because galaxies, if you like, are spinning.
	And as we all know, if you try to spin something around, then you get this centrifugal force and things slosh out.
	As you spin something faster and faster, or as you spin yourself around faster and faster, Things get bigger, and things try to fly apart.
	Now, spiral galaxies are like this, that they're just spinning disks, and it turns out that they're spinning really, really fast.
	Vera Rubin was the first person to discover this in the 70s, that galaxies are spinning so fast that if they're held together by the mass and the gravity of all the stars in them, then there just aren't enough There just isn't enough mass in those stars to hold these galaxies together.
	They're spinning so fast that they ought to fly apart.
	Except for the dark matter.
	Yeah, except there's this extra stuff that sort of acts as this glue, if you like, a gravitational glue.
	Just because there's a lot of dark matter and it has gravity, it holds these spinning galaxies together.
	And so it really is the glue which holds together galaxies and, in fact, You can even look on larger scales. Clusters of galaxies
	actually orbit around each other very fast, and you'd expect galaxies to fly off into outer space.
	So actually...
	The universe as a whole, everything is held together by dark matter.
	Okay, so actually it should be possible to make the, certainly we can figure out what the mass of something is, and the speed at which it's, as you point out, spinning, and we can say to ourselves, alright, at this rate of spin, there's not enough gravity to be holding all of this together, so it has to be dark matter or something, as you put it, a glue, holding it, holding everything together.
	Yeah, that's exactly right.
	That's what it is.
	Dark matter is the glue of the universe, if you like.
	But what I'm saying is, we can prove that mathematically, yes?
	Oh, yes, yes, yes.
	There are really very simple equations you can do to work out... I mean, you can observe how fast something's spinning, and then it's very simple equations to work out how much mass you need, assuming our theories of gravity are right, to hold that together.
	So, either the theory of gravity is wrong, or there is dark matter and it's doing the glue job, keeping everything together.
	Exactly.
	Spot on, yes.
	Fascinating.
	Is it going to be possible, dark matter for example, are we going to be able to create it in a particle accelerator?
	I know that we're getting ready to fire one up, right?
	Yeah, we are.
	This is going to be very exciting.
	Over the next few years there's going to be some really interesting interplay between astronomy, which has done very well at getting to dark matter until now, and particle physics, who hopefully in the next year or so will have a big new particle accelerator.
	And one of the things that they're hoping to do is to create some dark matter.
	OK, maybe not bottle it, but create some and try to pin down What it might be, some of its properties.
	How would you create it, as a matter of interest?
	What would you, in the accelerator, what would you do to attempt to create it?
	So you can create anything you like, if you smash things together hard enough.
	This is the fun of particle physics, is you get to smash things together and throw things around the lab.
	So they want to smash fundamental particles, protons, together.
	From the inside of atoms.
	And they do this.
	There's a giant ring about five and a half miles across.
	And it's 100 meters underground.
	It's underneath Switzerland.
	It's somewhere underneath the Geneva Airport.
	But there's this giant circular tube underground.
	And the idea is that you can accelerate particles, accelerate protons in this.
	And come next year, there'll be protons whizzing around.
	And some protons will be going around in one direction, some will be going around in the other direction.
	And then occasionally, of course, they collide with each other, smash into each other really, really, really hard.
	And the whole E equals mc squared thing comes out here, that if you smash things together with enough energy or fast enough, then you can create anything out of them.
	And this new accelerator is going to reach such speeds that they're hoping that at least some of these candidates for dark matter will be created in these collisions.
	All right, Professor.
	Hold it right there.
	We're at a break point.
	Professor Richard Massey is my guest, and we're talking about some pretty dark stuff.
	Here I am.
	A lot of people are wondering, why does dark matter matter?
	And I'm one of those people.
	It may go to some of the very elemental important why-we're-all-here questions, or perhaps not.
	Maybe it doesn't really matter.
	But still, scientists are curious, and we've got a curious one on our hands here, Professor Richard Massey, and he'll be right back.
	All right, Professor Massey, that's a pretty good question.
	Why does dark matter matter?
	I mean, if you're talking to the average, you know, the average person out there, which you are right now, why is dark matter important?
	So, I mean, you can go to all the big sort of, why are we here, type questions, and I've said how it makes life possible, it makes it possible to form galaxies and make life exist over the history of the universe.
	It's changed that and made everything possible.
	But really for me, it's not really that, it's just that it's really exciting.
	We've found this new frontier, we've found out that we don't actually have any idea at all what most of the universe is made of.
	So it's just curiosity as much as anything else.
	It's the new frontier.
	It's the new Wild West.
	It's great that physics hasn't come to a dead stop and we've basically explained the world around us.
	It's exciting.
	It's not really scary at all either.
	It's exciting that we can still find out more about the way the world works.
	And this dark matter is most of the universe.
	It's really exciting to me that we can go and explore this new frontier.
	And can you explain to me the difference between dark matter and dark energy?
	So yeah, we're getting a bit, we're catching on with the names here a bit.
	Astronomy is rather good at advertising and catching good names.
	So they're very different things.
	Dark matter is kind of familiar, in a way, in that it clumps and it attracts things to it through the force of gravity.
	In that way, it's rather like ordinary matter.
	It's very different stuff to ordinary matter, but at least behaves in some senses rather intuitively, and in a familiar way.
	Dark energy, on the other hand, is really weird, I have to say.
	It's very odd stuff, and we don't really even have a concept of exactly what it is yet.
	But what it seems to do is that is something that pervades the entire universe and it's fairly uniform.
	And rather than attracting things to it, it's actually repelling things in a way.
	It's making the universe larger and larger.
	So dark matter attracts things and makes things fall to it under gravity.
	This dark energy is actually pushing things away, making the universe bigger and bigger all the time.
	So would you say it's the opposite of dark matter?
	Well, there's a sort of giant tug-of-war going on to decide what the eventual fate of the universe is going to be.
	Dark matter is trying to collapse everything, make everything smaller and bring it together in a big crunch.
	Dark energy is trying to rip it apart and make everything bigger.
	So they're at opposite ends of a tug-of-war, but they're not entirely opposite.
	So I said earlier, if you lean against a wall, and if it's made of ordinary matter, then It pushes back and you stay up and you're very happy, you're leaning against a wall.
	If you lean against a wall of dark matter, it doesn't interact with you, so you just fall through it, fall on your face and it's all very embarrassing.
	So that's the dark matter.
	If you lean against the wall of dark energy, if you could ever imagine such a thing, then not only would you actually fall through it, it would actually suck you in a little bit.
	It wouldn't push back, it would actually pull you through and make you fall on your face Slightly faster, actually.
	No, no, no, wait a minute.
	You're confusing me because you said dark energy is pushing things away.
	Ah, right.
	Right?
	Okay, maybe that's not a very good analogy.
	Um, okay, so... It sort of, it acts in the opposite sense to ordinary matter.
	That I've got, all right.
	I've heard that the eventual fate of the universe is that we will be alone, that things are going to move away from us, so that in the deep dark, millions of years away, billions of years away, you'd be able to look into the night sky, and other than perhaps the planets close by, you're not going to see the night sky we've got today, because it's all going to be away from us.
	Right, yes.
	And don't worry, this is not going to happen anytime soon, this is billions of years away, It doesn't affect any of us.
	Doesn't that mean that Dark Energy is winning the battle?
	Well, we're not quite sure who's winning the battle at the moment.
	It seems to be a very finely tuned battle that they're really competing and we're not exactly sure.
	We keep getting sort of better and better measurements about which one's winning.
	But we're still not, the jury's still out on which one's going to win eventually and what the universe is going to do.
	In fact, the universe had to be like that.
	If any one of them had been a lot stronger than the other, then the universe would have already ended.
	If there had been so much dark matter that it had completely dominated, it would have won very early and the universe would have ended.
	It would have collapsed.
	If there had been loads and loads of dark energy, that would have been really strong.
	Then the universe would have already been torn apart.
	The fact that the universe has hung around for 13 billion years so far means that it's a pretty finely balanced race.
	And yet things are moving away, right Professor?
	Or does that end out?
	No, things are moving away.
	It just depends exactly how fast they're moving away or how much they're accelerating away from us.
	We're not quite sure who's going to win in the end.
	All right, I've heard it said that things are accelerating away, meaning slowly perhaps, they're actually accelerating faster and faster.
	Is that true?
	That's true, yes.
	It's not necessarily run away yet, but it could be.
	In other words, there could come a time when it reaches a kind of a limit and there's not enough traction still there and...
	Off she goes.
	Yep.
	We end up with the scenario that you said, that we don't see anything in the night sky.
	In fact, space just gets so big it possibly even gets ripped apart eventually.
	So that's just one of the possible fates of the universe.
	Wonderful.
	You see, we're exploring.
	We don't know what this is yet.
	This is science, so it's exciting.
	It is exciting.
	How much do you think this, we were talking about the particle accelerator, how many answers are we going to come away with, do you guess?
	The particle accelerators are trying to decide what dark matter might be, which is the first thing that we want to know about it.
	Theoretical particle physicists have come up with loads of different options or different candidates for what the dark matter might be, given that if we say we know that it's there, and we try to speculate what it might be, then the particle physicists have come up with all this whole array of options of these different things, basically because they've had no data for a long time, and we know that it's there, but we don't know what it is, so they've had a long time to think about it, and well, the more ideas you come up with, the more research grants you get.
	We really are in desperate need of some data to try and rule out some of the options.
	And that's hopefully what the particle accelerators are going to do, is cut down the different possibilities that it might be.
	I take it when that thing cranks up and goes, some careers will accelerate while others will collapse.
	Yeah.
	Yes.
	Yeah, lots of careers.
	It takes an enormous amount of people to run these things.
	There are thousands and thousands of people involved in that, because it's such a huge project, and just the engineering is tremendously difficult.
	Well, I'm talking about the theoretical physicists, some who will no doubt have their careers accelerated, and others who will have to go and rethink everything.
	Oh, yeah.
	Some people are going to be very happy, and some Some are going to have to think of different ideas.
	Do you believe that the accelerator will perhaps verify string theory or smash it into small particles?
	Small strings, yes.
	The problem with string theory is that it starts making predictions that even this accelerator can't reach.
	That's the main objection that everyone has against string theory.
	It's very useful, and it's done all sorts of things.
	In fact, not just in particle physics, it's had impact on various branches of math that have spun off it.
	But it's very difficult to test, and that's the problem with string theory.
	There are other questions, or other candidates, that the dark matter might be.
	Many supersymmetric particles.
	Particle physics has this nice standard model they call it.
	It's this zoo of particles that sort of makes a nice complete whole and that we think we've got everything because wherever there's something with a left hand or something with a right hand and everything sort of matches and there's all these symmetries but everything's elegant so far.
	But there's one speculation that there's this extra symmetry in the universe and that for everything that we know about there's a super symmetric partner And this might be the candidate for what dark matter is.
	Some extra, some exotic new particle in supersymmetry.
	And that might be what dark matter is.
	Are we absolutely sure that when they fire up this accelerator and they begin smashing things together, something unpleasant will not happen?
	Well, yeah, I know there are people worried about what might happen, might black holes spring out of this or something.
	Yes.
	The answer to that is just that, unfortunately, nature got there before us, that there are these high-energy particles whizzing around the universe, even bombarding the Earth.
	We call them cosmic rays.
	This happens all the time.
	And if it were the case that when you smashed very high energy particles together that you got black holes that would eat things up, then it would have already happened, that nature would have already tried that, and we would know about it because there'd be black holes everywhere.
	So we can rest assured that we haven't done this before, but nature already has, and nothing went wrong then.
	Okay.
	So you feel completely safe?
	Yeah.
	Good.
	We are discovering a lot of extrasolar planets now.
	In fact, there was a story recently of one that was, they decided, very Earth-like.
	I'm sure you're quite familiar with the story.
	Right, yeah.
	So this is very exciting.
	I mean, this is the sort of other sexy subject, if you like, in astronomy.
	Sexy, all right.
	Yeah.
	And the extrasolar planets are really exciting to find them, obviously.
	In fact, there are so many nowadays that just the discovery of a new planet doesn't make news, it has to be special in some way.
	And this particular one was very exciting because it happened to be Just in the right place in its solar system.
	It's not too hot, it's not too cold.
	It's just right, like the Earth, for water to be in the liquid form.
	If it was too cold, if it were a bit further away from its sun, the water would freeze and you'd end up just with ice everywhere.
	If it were too hot, it would all boil away.
	But this one is just in the right place, it seems, for water to exist on the surface.
	And what we certainly know is that all life on Earth, at least all terrestrial life, needs Well, indeed, and that is very exciting.
	to survive and it was a crucial ingredient in the development of life.
	So this is one of the big candidates for where we might find some life outside our own planet.
	Yes, well, indeed, and that is very exciting.
	You could perhaps take a human being, transport them to that planet,
	and they'd find temperatures in the mid-70s or so.
	They'd probably find running water, probably find foliage, and perhaps life at some level.
	Yeah, who knows?
	Probably not.
	I don't know.
	I'm skeptical about the idea that there's going to be advanced life anywhere in the... Oh, are you?
	Why?
	So there might potentially be very primitive life.
	All of them might be very advanced life, I'd suggest, but I'm very skeptical about the idea that there would be anything around our own level of advancement that would be sort of an interesting interaction for us.
	Now, are you talking about this particular planet that was discovered?
	Not this particular planet, I mean just in general.
	In general?
	Yeah.
	I wonder why, Professor.
	I mean, there are so many.
	At the rate we're discovering extrasolar planets now, obviously you can start to do the numbers.
	There are going to be many, many, many, many of them.
	So, if that's true, why wouldn't you suppose that some of them would be, if not at our level of development, then either close or ahead of us or a little bit behind us or whatever, but out there?
	Right, well it's the close thing that I object to mostly, and that's just from a time point of view, just because the universe has been around 13 billion years so far, and we would think of somebody close to us as maybe within the last thousand years, even if you met somebody from a thousand years ago, you could get along eventually and then figure out what was going on, but if you meet somebody from 10,000 or 100,000 years ago, then you really Well, then you have nothing in common.
	And 100,000 years, or 10,000 years, is absolutely nothing in the lifetime of a galaxy.
	It's a blink of an eye.
	And so the chances are, or the chances of finding another civilization just in that same blink of an eye as us, that is remote.
	Even with lots and lots of planets.
	Now, we might find somebody who's got very primitive forms of life that never made it up to our stage.
	We might find very advanced forms of life, but then we would have already seen them.
	You say we would have already seen them?
	Yeah, well, I guess you've already had shows on this, so... Well, yes, but no, let's just stay with this for a moment.
	Is it your theory, is it your feeling, that life out there is common or uncommon?
	Certainly, I generally think uncommon, certainly advanced life anyway.
	And that just leads me to feel more how precious our planet is itself.
	Why do you feel that way?
	Why do you feel life is uncommon?
	Just because we would have already seen it if it were advanced.
	It would take, again, a blink of an eye to explore the galaxy.
	And they would have run into us by now.
	The universe is very, very, very old.
	We'd be talking about a race of beings that would be able to travel, or would have to be able to travel, faster than light to get here, certainly, right?
	Probably not traveling faster than light, but even at more mundane speeds, in the blink of the eye, relative to the lifetime of the galaxy, they'd have already been here.
	That's very interesting.
	So you think life is... Do you think it's uncommon to the point that it may not be out there at all?
	It may not.
	It may not.
	Certainly rare, I think.
	But then this is wild skepticism.
	Wild... Well, that's all right.
	That's what this program is all about.
	Feel free.
	So we could be the only ones.
	We could, but then we'll know eventually, and that's the exploration that is science.
	Well, certainly they've been searching with radio telescopes and as yet have found nothing.
	Right.
	I don't know, in a way, Professor, it would be kind of sad if we were it, because I just You know, I look around at what we're doing to our planet right now, and I read stories every night about the way, you know, our bees are disappearing, our birds are disappearing, we're polluting just about everything we have, our atmosphere and our climate is beginning to change, all of these things that point to the fact that we may not be around very much longer.
	Yeah, it really makes you feel that the Earth is a very precious place that we ought to look after.
	It may be foggy here in Britain today, but it's certainly getting warmer and warmer as the years go by.
	There's no snow, certainly, these days in winter.
	Well, hang on.
	Some ocean currents change and it could really get quite chilly there, actually.
	Yeah, that's the worst thing about global warming for the UK, that it actually goes the other way around.
	Well, that's true.
	So, back to dark matter and energy.
	Dark energy is interesting because we have lots of energy problems.
	Is there any theoretical possibility that dark energy could in some way be harnessed?
	That's an interesting one, actually.
	Yeah, well, the problem is we don't really know what it is yet.
	I don't know if I could give you a definitive answer one way or another.
	It seems to be some sort of property of space that it likes to, it just intrinsically likes to expand, and that's what's driving the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
	Oh, that's energy!
	That's energy, yeah.
	The problem is, it's only really apparent on very, very large scales.
	It's only become apparent on the late times, when there's lots of empty space in the universe, when all these voids, where there's nothing, Once these have appeared, and there's lots of empty space together, then the dark energy, all its effects are apparent.
	Because there's lots of empty space, so as it all expands, it has a big and noticeable impact.
	There doesn't seem to be very much energy in any small patch of space.
	Got it.
	All right.
	Professor, hold on.
	We're at the top of the hour.
	Take a break.
	We'll be right back.
	From the High Desert and the Great American Southwest, I'm Mark Bell.
	I've been thinking about that.
	What if we are all alone?
	We're all alone.
	Well, how does that make you feel?
	Special?
	Sad?
	I think that if we're the only ones, I would feel both.
	I would certainly feel special on the one hand, and awfully sad on the other hand.
	But as I said in the movie Contact, Good Lord, what a great waste of space it would be.
	Back with Professor Richard Massey in a moment.
	Whenever we have a guest on the air, we have a certain set of questions, you know, that are sort of suggested by the guest to be asked, and I rarely follow, but I do occasionally ask them.
	This one's interesting, number 13 it would be.
	Lots of extra solar planets are being discovered at the moment.
	Could the dark matter Be planets.
	And that's so interesting, I'll ask it.
	Could the dark matter, instead of being planets, could it be dark matter that we're seeing?
	Is that what you're saying, Professor?
	Well, that was a question.
	It's not, it seems.
	The dark matter isn't made of planets.
	There was one hypothesis That the dark matter wasn't anything strange and exotic at all, but it was basically large lumps of rock, which you might call planets, wandering around the galaxy.
	And these would be faint, so you wouldn't necessarily see them at first glance, but eventually the idea was that you'd be able to find them.
	Well, we tried that.
	This is the good thing about science.
	You come up with a hypothesis, you go out and try and test it, and it seems that there aren't enough.
	There just aren't enough big lumps of rock whizzing around.
	In the dark matter, there is six times more dark matter than there is ordinary matter, so there'd have to be a lot of these things.
	And it seems there aren't enough of them.
	So no, dark matter isn't made up of cold lumps of rock.
	It really is something different.
	These extrasolar planets, it is my understanding, are being discovered...
	By, not by seeing them exactly or straight on, but rather by the little wobble effect as they pass in front of a star associated with that system, yes?
	Yeah, that's right.
	In fact, that's really, that's kind of interesting as a nice sort of parallel to dark matter here, that neither the planets nor the dark matter themselves necessarily visible.
	The dark matter because it's invisible and the planets because they're very, very faint.
	So neither of them are visible intrinsically, but you see them through their gravitational influence on something else, something that you can see.
	In the case of the dark matter, it's through galaxies behind it, and in the case of the planet, it's the star that it's orbiting around and making a wobble.
	Okay, so they definitely are planets, just to get that out of the way.
	They're definitely planets, and they're around other stars.
	It's just to make six times as much mass as there is in the stars, there'd have to be a lot of lots and lots of planets.
	And not just around the stars, around, you know, whizzing around through interstellar space, too.
	Now, how are we discovering these planets?
	Are we using the Hubble Space Telescope?
	Does it account for the majority of the recent discoveries that have been headlined around the world?
	Or is it Earth-based telescopes?
	All sorts of things.
	I think most of them are Earth-based telescopes, actually.
	Really?
	Because, yeah, you just need to look at the same stars many, many times to watch them over time and detect these wobbles.
	And the Hubble telescope is just very over-subscribed.
	Everybody wants to use it.
	I take it you had time on the Hubble?
	Well, yeah.
	So, yeah, we were very lucky.
	We managed to get a very large survey with the Hubble to map out the dark matter.
	Over a very large patch of sky and make a map, basically, of where this dark matter is.
	If you like, if this is a new frontier of science and we're exploring this wild, wild west, then the first thing you want to do when you discover something new and strange is to map it out.
	So that's exactly what we did.
	We took the Hubble Space Telescope and pieced together over a couple of years A large, large image of a large patch of sky and mapped out where the dark matter is in it.
	And so that's how you know that the dark matter is in essence patchy and surrounds other more dense matter.
	Yeah, because we've observed that.
	That's exactly right.
	We've gone and found regions of the universe which are completely empty, and found these strings of dark matter criss-crossing in between it, and then all the ordinary matter, the stuff that we can see, that happens to lie inside these strings.
	Okay.
	The Hubble Space Telescope currently is on the fritz, right?
	Yeah, this is really heartbreaking actually.
	The timing is terrible.
	Just as we figured out how to do this technique and get a glimpse of the distribution of dark matter in the universe, it sadly failed.
	The power supply broke in January of this year.
	Oh, my God.
	The main power supply for the Hubble?
	Not the main power supply.
	So it's just for the one camera.
	So it's working with some of it.
	There are four instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope doing various different things.
	Now, unfortunately, it's the main camera that broke, that takes all the pictures.
	So that's not working at the moment.
	There is an older camera on the telescope, too.
	And so that's still standing in for the time being.
	But the main one is currently broken.
	Can it be fixed?
	Yeah, so the big plan is to send up the space shuttle Atlantis, which I gather landed successfully this morning.
	Sorry, I'm not sure what time it is.
	The shuttle Atlantis landed.
	Well, that's hopefully going to be turned around and in September of next year, go back up to the Space Telescope and see if they can, as well as updating it, repairing various parts and refuelling it, see if they can fix this camera.
	It's the advanced camera for surveys.
	And so we've got our fingers crossed that they're going to be able to do something about that because this camera has been incredibly useful from its sort of perch above the atmosphere.
	It's been tremendous in advancing many, many aspects of science, of astronomy, and it would be really nice to have it back.
	There was a big debate about whether it should be fixed or allowed to just burn up In the Earth's atmosphere, and I guess those who wanted it fixed prevailed.
	What was the argument?
	Money?
	Well, it's expensive to fix it.
	You have to send up a space shuttle to go and get it, and it's very expensive, and also, of course, has some risks for the astronauts.
	Now, I think that the scientific possibilities sort of went through, but I'm a scientist, I'm biased.
	But it's great news that we are going to get it fixed.
	There are various successes being planned, but with cutbacks going to Mars and all that jazz, they're not going to happen in the near future.
	So if the Hubble Space Telescope were to be taken down, then all this exciting run of discoveries, all these advances that we're making, just would stop.
	The Hubble Space Telescope has been tremendous to advance our knowledge of the universe, to find out about the dark matter, it really discovered dark energy.
	And so without that, we wouldn't be anywhere.
	Great.
	So, the Hubble is what discovered and mapped out dark matter?
	Yes.
	So, the technique that we use to look at this background wallpaper of galaxies on the sky really requires the Hubble Space Telescope to be done.
	Just because you need to look at very, very distant, very faint galaxies.
	And if you look through the Earth's atmosphere, then they're all blurred out and smudgy.
	You just can't see them, the galaxies which are far away.
	We need them to be far away because they have to be behind any of the dark matter that we're looking at.
	So you can really only do this from space.
	And the Hubble was crucial in doing this.
	Is the Hubble, Professor, going to be, once it's repaired, you would know more about what they're going to do than I certainly would.
	Is it going to be that much better when it's repaired and updated?
	And if so, what might we do with it that we have not yet done?
	So there are a few new experiments or cameras being put onto the Hubble Space Telescope.
	The problem with it was really the timing, at least from the perspective of dark matter, is that we've made a map, which is still only actually a relatively small patch of sky, it's about nine times the size of the full moon, so we've mapped out the dark matter in that, and we've found one example, it's known as the bullet cluster, where the dark matter is behaving in a peculiar way that helps us to Learn a bit about his properties.
	We can basically carry on making some, we've just started making these good discoveries and had a tantalizing glimpse of what they might offer.
	Alright, back up a little bit.
	What is the Bullet Cluster?
	Okay, so this is really, really exciting for astronomy because what, I mean, the particle physicists get to smash stuff around in their labs.
	They get to move and interact with things we don't.
	We're limited to staring through the end of a telescope and we can't interact with anything.
	All the very romantic aspects of astronomy, but it's the infuriating bits that we can't get there and play around with it.
	But the Bullet Cluster offers us this chance to see what happens when you smash things together.
	And just like the particle physicists who smash atoms together and see what comes out to learn about the properties of those things, the Bullet Cluster is actually two clusters of galaxies which have recently collided into each other, smashed, and the bits have flown out in different directions.
	And these two clusters of galaxies, they each contain three ingredients that basically contain a load of galaxies, a cluster of galaxies.
	So there's a load of galaxies, there's a load of hot dust swirling around in between these galaxies, there's about six times more dust than galaxies.
	And then there's a load of dark matter associated with them as well.
	Again, there's about six times much more dark matter than there is gas.
	So there's these three ingredients, there's the galaxies, there's the dust, and then there's the dark matter.
	But these two things have collided into each other.
	They've smashed in a giant cosmic fender bender.
	And the three ingredients have behaved in different ways.
	And by the way that they've behaved, we can see what they're made of or what their properties are.
	So the dark matter, the gas, which was one of the ingredients in these two clusters, The gas just collided into each other.
	The gas from one cluster and the gas from the other cluster collided together and ended up basically stopping.
	Because, as we all know, this is made of ordinary matter and when you smash things together they slow down and stop.
	And they've ended up fairly close to the point of impact.
	But the dark matter, because it's completely different stuff, it doesn't interact in any way, even with itself, that just kept going.
	And so it went through the collision, didn't even notice the collision, kept going and went on and is now in a different place.
	It's further away from the collision than the ordinary matter.
	So it didn't stay with the ordinary matter?
	Exactly, yeah.
	And because it behaved differently, it ended up in a different place.
	That's how we know that it's something very different from ordinary matter.
	But it's... Boy, I'm trying to wrap my mind around this.
	So the dark matter just...
	It kept going.
	I would assume that previous to observing that, you thought the dark matter would remain associated with the regular matter.
	Well yeah, on the whole, if we sort of stand back and look at the big picture, look at the universe as a whole, as we've done in this sort of large map of the dark matter, we see that on the large scale, then sure, everything, all the ordinary matter and all the dark matter appear in the same place, because they just fall together.
	And they grow up in the same place, so they're associated with each other.
	But this one small patch of universe happens to be very interesting because it's undergone this collision, and the dark matter and the ordinary matter have been made to behave in different ways.
	It's a strange small portion of the universe where their properties have really been tested by having them just do different things, and they've ended up not quite in the same place.
	Well, Professor, if your theories about dark matter and its association to regular matter are correct, then with the dark matter just continuing on after, as you put it, the fender bender, shouldn't the regular matter begin to behave in a very different way than we observe generally?
	Well, so what's going to happen as this sort of process carries on is that the dark matter is going to go a little bit further away from the collision, but eventually the dark matter and the ordinary matter are still relatively close together, and they're still going to attract each other.
	So there's been a collision, they've gone apart a bit, and that's how we see it right now, but then eventually they'll start slowly falling back towards each other and end up once again in the same place.
	So it's a very small patch of the universe that's very special in its place, but also in its time.
	We've caught it just the right time after this collision to witness this different behavior of these different materials.
	Now is this actually planets and stars in collision?
	It's enormous.
	It's bigger than the scale of planets, bigger than the scale of stars.
	It's on the scale of not only galaxies, like the entire Milky Way, but even clusters of galaxies.
	There are hundreds of Milky Way-sized things in these clusters of galaxies.
	They're vast.
	They're huge.
	As far as particle accelerators go, if it's like a particle accelerator, smashing things together, then it's the largest particle accelerator in the universe.
	Certainly bigger than anything we could build in Geneva.
	That's remarkable.
	How far from us is this?
	How far from us?
	Oh, let me think.
	It's a redshift point three, if that means anything.
	It's several million light years away from us.
	So it's a very, very long way away from us.
	There's no worry about bits flying off and hitting us.
	It's a very, very long way away from us.
	A long way across the universe.
	And this is a very unusual event.
	Yes, it seems to be very unusual, and this is why we want Hubble back, really, because it's tantalising that we found one of them, and that this really offers a great clue as to not only prove that dark matter is there, that there's some stuff that behaves differently to ordinary matter, but we can start learning about some of its properties and start ruling out some of the theoretical candidates for it.
	But we've only got one, and at the end of the day, if you've only got one thing, then Very difficult to believe or take it seriously.
	We really want to find another couple of examples of this thing going on, and then we can start to really knuckle down and start to figure out what, rather than where, dark matter is.
	I hate to ask, but I can't resist.
	There's not much of a possibility that a collision of that magnitude could occur to our area of the universe here.
	Not quite of that magnitude.
	Eventually, and this is again in about 10 billion years or something from now, eventually our own Milky Way galaxy, which is just a single galaxy rather than the cluster that we're talking about, eventually our own Milky Way galaxy is probably going to collide with the Andromeda galaxy, M31, which is our closest large neighbour.
	And that will happen in a giant collision between these galaxies.
	At the moment they're flying apart from each other a little bit, but they're slowing down and eventually they'll fall back in, just like the bullet cluster.
	So we will eventually collide with our nearest neighbour.
	Now of course this won't happen in any of our lifetimes, any of our children's children's children's lifetimes.
	But, and it also probably won't even affect the Sun, just because the Sun, our star, within the galaxy is a very small point of light and there's lots of space between the stars.
	So they'll probably end up, just one galaxy will pass through another and they'll sort of interact and slowly fall together.
	But anything as small as the Sun probably will just end up residing in a different part of this combined galaxy.
	Wow.
	And, well, anyway, to observe this bullet cluster, I take it you need the Hubble and Earth-based telescopes just won't do?
	Well, no.
	It's because, well, if you look at a star on the night sky, then it twinkles.
	Stars twinkle.
	The reason for this is just because the atmosphere is this bubbling, turbulent broth, if you like.
	there's various air currents and swirling higher, which makes the light, which has traveled
	millions of years across the universe, perfect, I mean, perfectly intact.
	During the last split second as it travels through the Earth's atmosphere, it starts moving around,
	starts getting buffeted by these air currents, starts moving around, and we end up seeing
	the stars twinkling.
	Well, in the same way, the galaxy images also start twinkling, and if you take a very long exposure,
	which is what we have to do with telescopes to see the very faint galaxies,
	then this twinkling sort of averages out into a big blur.
	At one second it'll appear here, one second there, and if you average all those together, you get a big blur.
	And unfortunately, since we need to see these very small, very distant galaxies, when they're blurred out by the Earth's atmosphere, we just can't, can no longer see their shapes, and we can no longer see if they've been distorted by the dark matter in between them and us.
	If we look from the ground.
	Is there any technological way, I mean we've come so far with processing that one would almost imagine there might be some sort of technological way to in effect understand the distortion that we're getting and compensate for it.
	Is anybody working on that?
	Oh yeah, there are active optics programs as they're known.
	Where a normal telescope works just by having a mirror collect the light and pass it onto a photographic plate or a detector.
	And those mirrors are these smooth circular type shapes.
	But if you know, if you can work out exactly what the distortions were as the light passes through the atmosphere, then you can, instead of having a circular, smoothly shaped mirror, you can start deforming that slightly, bending it, making little bumps into it, hoping to correct for all the wobbles induced by the atmosphere.
	Exactly.
	Professor, we are once again at a break point.
	I would think you could use the Hubble as a reference In understanding the distortion the ground-based telescopes are seeing.
	Anyway, we'll talk about this in a moment.
	We'll be right back.
	There really are countries where they turn back time, you know.
	It's amazing.
	Travel a little bit.
	Listen, the question that I'm going to ask, that I began to ask prior to the break was, using the Hubble as a reference, a nice, clear, undistorted view of all that is out there that we can see, Without the blinking, without the fog of the atmosphere that Earth-based telescopes are subject to, even the good ones in Hawaii, and the very best locations we can get, I guess Arizona has one, and on and on.
	But with the Hubble as a reference, and in this technological age we live in, it seems to me If you have a reference, and then you have an Earth-based telescope, and you look at the two of them, that you probably could do a very great deal to, in essence, clear up, with technology, the distortion we get with Earth-based telescopes.
	It's a good question, and we'll ask it in a moment.
	For example, Professor, we can eliminate noise.
	If we have a noise that is annoying us, we now can make, we have headphones we can put on that blank out the noise, create another noise and actually virtually eliminate the annoying noise so we don't even hear it.
	That's done with audio, so what I'm proposing is that using the Hubble as a reference point Why could we not understand the distortion that we're seeing through Earth-based telescopes and technologically correct it?
	That's actually a really good analogy, that this active optics, this Yes.
	So, that really does do that.
	So, that at the moment works with stars.
	the optical equivalent of noise-cancelling headphones, that it's undoing the extra noise
	created by the atmosphere. So that really does do that. So that at the moment works with stars.
	If you have a bright star next to it, you know that that ought to look like just a pinpoint of
	light. And so if you can look at a bright star, you know that should look like a pinpoint of
	light. And you correct, you warp the mirror in such a way that that ends up recovering that
	that pin point rather than a big blurry or twinkling dot.
	But it doesn't work for extrasolar planets, for example?
	Well, it wouldn't work for extrasolar planets because they're so faint and they're right next to a star.
	In principle, you could do it for things that are a bit brighter, so there's just contrast issues there.
	In principle, you could do it for Something that happens to be a bit brighter than a planet, that happens to be nearby a bright star.
	Or you can even create your own star in the night sky by shining up a laser beam.
	Okay, well here's what I'm not understanding.
	You say we can calibrate.
	You can calibrate that, but it only works near something that you know what the shape ought to be, and that's like a bright star that you know ought to be a pinpointed light.
	And currently the technology hasn't managed to make anything more than An image that's very small and just around a bright star.
	So there's no way to survey the whole night sky like this, at least not very effectively, because you'd have to do a very, very small patch of sky at a time.
	But once we have calibrated for a star, then I would presume things that are equal distant from it remain calibrated, yes?
	Well, unfortunately, that's the problem, that the turbulence in the atmosphere varies a lot.
	over time, during the course of the night, there'll be different layers of air, and you'll
	probably have to turn the telescope to point in slightly different directions and look
	through different bits of atmosphere.
	And so it all varies over time, and that's the bit that is the other problem.
	So the Hubble, then, is really irreplaceable?
	Hubble is irre... yes.
	Well, we are trying to improve on it, but being above the atmosphere is certainly the easy way, it seems in fact.
	Perversely, it's expensive, but it's actually the only way to get this tremendous view of the universe.
	Other than dark matter, we've had Hubble up there now for many years and I've seen many of the photographs and they are just absolutely incredible.
	that you don't have to worry about all of these extra problems like the atmosphere.
	Other than dark matter, we've had Hubble up there now for many years and I've seen many
	of the photographs and they are just absolutely incredible.
	They're awesome.
	And I'm playing devil's advocate a little bit here, but I am curious, other than dark
	matter, what might lie ahead for us with Hubble in terms of discoveries that we have not yet
	made in all the years when it was functional?
	Right, well, so, things like extrasolar planets, there's all sorts of things.
	One of the things that I'm most interested in is the sort of large-scale picture about what's happening to the universe as a whole and where it's going.
	And one great thing that Hubble has been able to do has been to look at very distant supernovae, exploding stars that are very, very far away from us.
	And again, we need the Hubble because they're a very long way away from us, and also just because we need to know their the exact color that they are. It turns out in this case
	and that's also distorted by the atmosphere a bit. Okay, let me ask you a little bit
	about...
	That is a way to find out what dark energy is. Yes, let me ask you a little bit about
	novas if I might. It was originally thought that our sun, being relatively small and relatively
	stable was just fine.
	But then I heard that astronomers began discovering a few times that what they thought was a very stable sun, for reasons that I guess we don't understand, exploded.
	I found that a little worrisome.
	I don't know about stars that we knew were stable.
	We know that stars have a lifetime.
	They're born, they sort of evolve through middle age, and then eventually they tend to either just become decrepit and fade away, or they blow up in a big blaze of glory.
	We know that they have lifetimes and that they follow these sort of patterns.
	Is our Sun considered to be a relatively stable star?
	Oh yeah, it's perfectly stable and will be for a very, very long time to come.
	So we've got no worries about that.
	Eventually it'll probably swell up a bit.
	Burn us alive.
	Burn anybody who's left on the Earth, which may or may not be anybody by that point.
	Have there been some observations, Professor, of what were thought to be relatively stable stars going nova?
	Not that I know of.
	Oh.
	That they weren't expected, so.
	Oh, okay.
	Good.
	That's very comforting.
	But supernovae, I mean, we do understand why these things happen, and they're very useful, in fact, in many ways.
	So, I mean, the reason is that we happen to know how bright they ought to be, that the same, in certain types of these supernovae, the same sort of physical processes are going on, and we know that they ought to be of a certain brightness.
	And if you know how bright they are, and how bright intrinsically they are, and how bright they appear to us, then you can work out how far away they are.
	And that's sort of our distance, our ruler to the universe we can work out, how far away things are in 3D.
	Your work now with dark matter, is it on hold until Hubble is repaired?
	Well, we're going to try and do a few things from the ground.
	Sadly, we can't do all the mapping, really, from the ground.
	That's just not possible.
	We can do some very statistical work to try to figure out, in a rather more dull sort of way, what the dark matter is.
	It doesn't make the pretty pictures, but we can come up with some statistics to rule out various bits of this.
	Sadly for the moment, yeah, a lot of what we're doing really has to wait for either Hubble to be repaired or some future telescopes which we're currently trying to design to do this, dedicated telescopes, to do this kind of analysis over a much larger area and resume the search for the dark matter.
	Okay.
	This is something my audience has asked and I've never had the proper answer to it.
	A lot of people have said, why not take the Hubble and pointed at the moon and uh... and you know look for uh... the relics of the things we've left on the moon and and and so forth.
	Is there some reason why the Hubble cannot be used to look at the moon?
	It's just too bright.
	It's too bright?
	It's too bright, yep.
	This is a really sensitive instrument.
	I've taken a telescope and accidentally pointed it at a planet before that I didn't notice was in front and if you take a an exposure of any sort of magnitude, of any sort of length,
	then with these very, very sensitive instruments, you just end up completely burning out.
	Everything appears just whited out.
	And the moon is incredibly bright by Hubble standards.
	If you pointed this at the moon, I don't think you could operate the shutter for a short
	enough time scale I mean, the whole telescope is designed so that you can take exposures of up to an hour or something like that, not fractions of a second.
	Oh, I understand.
	So there's really no aperture control that would allow that to be pointed at safely?
	No, there isn't an aperture on it.
	Just a shutter.
	I see.
	Well, we don't typically want to look at bright things.
	The whole thing was designed to look at faint things, and it would just ruin it to look at the moon.
	Well, I remember originally when the Hubble went up, the mirror was mis-designed in some way, and they had to make corrections for that, right?
	Yeah, that's right.
	That's been done successfully?
	Yeah, it's a huge success.
	Not quite as perfect as it was originally intended to be, but almost there.
	So, a big success, yeah.
	If you had your way, and all the money in the world you needed, and you could put up Any sort of telescope that you wanted into space, how good could it get?
	Well, the other problem with Hubble is that, well, not problem, but what it's designed to do is it's designed to look at very faint things, and individual faint things, so it has a very small field of view.
	If you like, it's a very long telephoto lens.
	And one thing that we're trying to plan to do for a next generation of telescopes is to build basically something very similar to Hubble that has a camera on it that has a wide-angle lens fitted and that will be called SNAP, the Supernova Acceleration Probe.
	It's going to look at weak lensing to study the dark matter and supernovae to study the dark energy.
	And it's going to do that with a wide-angle lens so that we can basically survey the whole sky and really map out where the dark matter is.
	map out these filaments and this network of dark matter, really in the whole universe
	and figure out our place in the much larger cosmos, start to investigate where the dark
	matter is all around us, and really then start to think about what it is.
	And it's going to do that by just having a wide-angle lens.
	Are there currently any plans for such a device?
	Yeah, there's a couple.
	There's one funded by NASA and the DOA, which is in the planning stages, called SNAP, the
	Supernova Acceleration Probe.
	There's also a European equivalent which, depending on the funding, which one will go first, that's called DUNE, the Dark Energy Explorer.
	And these are basically very similar concepts and really rather simple.
	They use detectors much like you would find on an ordinary digital camera that you buy from the shops, only a bit sort of hardened to live in the harsh environment of space.
	and they put it on a wide-angle lens camera and then just fire it up into orbit and there you go
	it's um it's really as simple as that now it'd be a very large number of megapixels on this camera
	to get these huge images but we really want to want to use either snap or dune to uh to explore
	the uh explore the wider universe and map this out um so probably probably be launched in about
	eight or nine years or something like that There's a long sort of time lag on building spacecraft.
	Yeah, I'm sure there is.
	So what are you going to do, Professor, in the interim, while Hubble is still not serviceable, or until it is serviced, you're going to use What, ground-based telescopes to continue what work you can?
	Exactly right, yes.
	I'm also going to be keeping an ear very closely listening to the particle physics and their new accelerators, which should hopefully come online very soon.
	And they might, in fact, be the next step in dark matter.
	But yeah, we're certainly going to try to keep going from the ground.
	And hope that Hubble can get fixed in time to carry on the work and sort of pass the ball backwards and forwards from particle physics to astronomy and get a nice interplay going between them all.
	Do we yet understand the role that dark matter plays in the whole evolution of our universe?
	So yeah, in fact, the universe started out as this smooth, uniform soup in the Big Bang.
	The universe was very small and everything was all mixed around together.
	So it expanded away from that place and in fact the dark matter already began forming into these filaments and creating this scaffolding.
	But the other thing the dark matter did was because there's so much of it, Just like it acts as a glue on galaxies and holding them together, it actually held the universe together and helped slow down the expansion of the universe and keep everything into a relatively small size.
	If there were just ordinary matter in the universe, there wouldn't have been enough of it to keep the universe in a relatively small place.
	Everything would have been spread out, all the matter would have been a very long way apart and there wouldn't have been enough of it in any one place to start forming galaxies, stars and planets.
	Now the dark matter, because there's a lot of it, held the universe together, slowed down the expansion of the universe, and also formed these filaments, and it really concentrated matter inside this scaffolding.
	And so dark matter held the universe together, formed the scaffolding, and that is what made life possible.
	So dark matter played an absolutely crucial role in the evolution of the universe, that life would not be possible without the dark matter.
	That's just incredible.
	I mean, it's incredible to imagine that this dark matter that you talk about is so strong as to virtually hold everything together, and yet almost impossible to measure its existence.
	Simultaneously really exciting and fundamentally important, but then frustratingly invisible.
	So it's a great challenge and really this is why it's so exciting that we get to map out this really important thing that most of the universe is made of, but we don't know anything about it, so it's all new territory and we can have fun exploring it.
	Well it's obviously related to gravity, but in some way that we don't Understand.
	It has to be in some way that we don't understand, because it's such a large force, and yet barely or not even measurable.
	Barely measurable.
	It just... I can't get my mind around it.
	It holds everything together on the one hand, but we can't get our hands on it on the other hand.
	Right.
	I know, it's frustrating.
	So have you written, I assume you're a scientist, you probably write papers, you've written
	about all this, right?
	Yes.
	And how much agreement is there with you, Professor?
	Agreement for what?
	Your colleagues?
	In other words, when you write on what you think about dark matter and what you think you have discovered, is there a general agreement?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's now becoming... The crucial thing about dark matter is it doesn't just explain one phenomenon.
	It doesn't just explain spinning galaxies, or it doesn't just explain the universe being held together, or the bullet cluster behaving in a certain way, or the early universe collapsing into a formless element.
	It explains very, very many different things, and that's a really crucial aspect of dark matter, and why it's become so widely accepted, is that Scientifically, it's really important that any sort of explanation that you invoke explains more than is intrinsically complex.
	So, dark matter explains lots of different phenomena altogether, and it really works with a very coherent picture as a whole.
	Because it explains lots of things, people are generally widely accepted.
	I mean, of course, when it was first introduced, explaining one thing away, then everybody was sceptical.
	Why would you invent something, some mysterious new substance that's invisible?
	Yeah, right, of course.
	Nobody believed that, yeah.
	Well, as time has gone, it seems that lots and lots and lots of different phenomena have been explained by this dark matter, and that is why scientists are now widely believing that as mysterious and unbelievable as it is, It really is the best explanation for all these different stories.
	So we're relatively sure that we're not just taking the inexplicable, which is found all the time, and saying, okay, dark matter is the answer.
	Right.
	There are still a few skeptics, but they're having, and of course that's their right, that's the whole point of science is that you question things.
	It's just that they're having a great deal of trouble now explaining all these different phenomena in a coherent way that explains all of them, and particularly in a simple way, that by doing things like altering the theory of gravity, they just don't get as good an explanation for all these things simultaneously as you do by adding dark matter.
	Is it possible, Professor, the accelerator will fire up and disprove dark matter?
	Yeah, who knows?
	I'm pretty sure it will.
	In fact, even if it doesn't find dark matter, it might be just that some of the candidates are expected that they will be found by this new accelerator, some of them won't.
	So even if it doesn't find it, it might just be one of the other candidates that it can't quite rule out.
	But in fact, even this particle accelerator won't see it directly.
	It's still dark matter, it's still invisible.
	They have the same problem.
	They'll just see it again by the fact that something's missing, by its effect on other things that we can see.
	All right, Professor.
	Lots and lots of people would like to ask, I'm sure, a question about astronomy, and you certainly would be the fellow to answer.
	So, when we come back in a few moments, we're going to open the phone lines for Professor Richard Massey from the High Desert.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Here I am.
	Professor Richard Massey is with us, and he is a first-class astronomer.
	He had use of the Hubble telescope until it went on the fritz.
	It will be repaired, but in the meantime, if you've ever wanted to ask a question of somebody who's certainly used Hubble, or somebody who is constantly looking at the night sky, questions about all that you can see when you walk outside, this would be the man, Richard Massey.
	So pick up a phone and join us.
	We'll be right back.
	I must say, this has been very, very useful for me.
	I definitely understand a great deal more about the concept of dark matter than I have in any previous program.
	It's been very, very interesting, Professor, and I'm going to turn you over to the normal folks now and see what kind of questions they come up with.
	No guarantees.
	We'll see how it can help.
	Let's see what happens.
	Let's go to Phil in South Carolina.
	You're on with Professor Massey.
	Hi, Professor Massey.
	It's my honor to talk with you.
	My question is really two parts.
	I'm fascinated with comets, okay, ever since I saw Kutek and then Halley.
	I'm 45 years old, and I guess when will be the next comet that we may see, at least here on the East Coast, with the naked eye or perhaps with binoculars?
	And my second question has to deal with the first.
	What do you recommend as far as a type of instrument for the novice just to see stars in a non-light polluted area?
	The heavens and stars, planets, etc.?
	You mean what's a good telescope?
	Yes.
	Okay.
	All right, Professor.
	Comets, that's an interesting question.
	We had Hale-Bopp.
	Are there any?
	Comets you're aware of, Professor, that are going to really wow us in the reasonable future?
	I have to confess, I don't work on comets.
	They're all a bit too nearby for me.
	They're all very close to home.
	The one that came recently was tremendous, in January.
	Yeah, I have to say, I don't know what's coming next.
	It obviously isn't going to be back for another 60 years or so.
	Right.
	Well, I guess we can always get surprised, right?
	Yeah.
	I mean, it was a surprise that this one in January was quite as bright as it ended up being.
	These things, particularly if they've never been seen before, are quite close to the sun.
	When they get close to the sun and get their tail, then they often are a surprise as to exactly how bright they're going to appear.
	This most recent one wasn't at all expected to be very astonishing or very bright at all.
	It was really good to see it though.
	Have you got a telescope at home, Professor?
	I don't, actually.
	You don't?
	I've never actually been into.
	That's very interesting.
	In other words, there is no telescope you could run out and buy that would in any way satisfy you.
	Well, yeah, the ones in Hawaii, for a start, they're very big, and they're also in Hawaii.
	No, he was asking, if I were to go out and buy a telescope, what would be a good one to get?
	And maybe you're not ready to answer that.
	I'm not really ready to answer that.
	But, I don't know, they are tremendous, and I just don't know, I can't recommend a particular model, sorry.
	Well, I suppose once you've been with Hubble, Nothing else will do.
	Alright, let's go to Blake in St.
	Louis, Missouri.
	Hi Blake, you're on with the professor.
	Oh yes, Professor Art, thank you for taking my call.
	Hey, I noticed the practical application part of dark matter, how it does exert energy You can readily see it when you notice that there's frost that forms on the surface of a windshield or on the grass and you notice that the weather isn't below freezing.
	That tells you that direct energy force coming from the deep recesses of space that is an anti-matter and it's actually slowing the electron movement and causing freezing to occur before the normal 32 degree weather temperature point.
	So, looking at that dark matter band being, you know, at an extreme distance, and all the galaxies in the universe we know are encapsulated by this spherical black apparatus of exerting forces equidistantly on us, you can see how gravity actually pushes when two objects eclipse themselves They have a vacuum zone between them and the sum of all those vectors are pushing the objects together.
	So gravity actually really does push by virtue of dark matter.
	My concern is this project that is attempting to form a dark matter particle or a black hole and not knowing the degree of energy that goes into these formations or is released in the collapse of these formations
	seeing as dark matter repels dark matter and attracts the mass of light matter
	my concern is that it might impinge itself in the light matter
	physical makeup of our world and go into a continuous expanding state
	at an energy level that we can't comprehend and become a planet buster
	okay in other words he's worried about the accelerator right
	So, dark matter doesn't actually repel dark matter.
	It doesn't interact in any way with anything.
	One of the things that we've discovered is that dark matter doesn't interact in any way, even with itself.
	And so if we create it, then, well, we might create all sorts of things, but fortunately, Mother Nature has already done this experiment for us.
	You're worried about the energies created in this particle accelerator, that we're smashing things together at very high speed and creating dark matter, all sorts of things, even potentially very small black holes.
	But Mother Nature has already done this experiment.
	There are high energy particles whizzing around the universe and in fact slamming into the Earth's atmosphere every day, all the time.
	And we've already seen that these things have much higher energies than we're going to be able to create in this new particle accelerator.
	And that they don't create anything that's going to gobble the earth.
	Fortunately, if they create dark matter then it doesn't interact in any way, it just goes away.
	And even if they create a very small black hole, then those things, in fact, one of the things that Stephen Hawking has shown us is that those evaporate.
	Very small black holes evaporate.
	Mother Nature has already done this experiment and found out that actually nothing harmful is made.
	So when we reproduce it in the particle accelerators, we really don't need to be worried about that happening, because we've seen that it doesn't already.
	Okay, and then he said something about The freezing, the condensation on his windshield when he's driving quickly, I think that has more to do with atmospherics and dark matter, yes?
	Yes.
	When air is moving faster, it gets rarefied, it gets less dense, and then it can cool quicker.
	Okay.
	John in Florida, you're on with Professor Richard Massey.
	Hi.
	Hi.
	Good evening.
	I had a question about harnessing the dark matter once you discover that it's really there.
	And if you were able to harness it, wouldn't travel to other places be almost instantaneous?
	Wouldn't travel be almost instantaneous?
	I don't know how we would do that.
	I'd love to be able to teleport somewhere and travel somewhere instantaneously, but I don't think dark matter has any of the sort of required properties to be able to do that, unfortunately.
	And as Art said, I'm afraid that the sort of Practical applications of using this aren't really very many.
	This is a really exciting curiosity thing to find out about the world around us.
	But in terms of practical applications, it doesn't do much.
	Of course, you never fully understand the possibilities of practical application until you understand what it is you have, right?
	Well, that's right, yeah.
	I mean, who knows what exactly it might be?
	And, in particular, what theory is that?
	If that proves supersymmetric theory is correct, then we'll have a slightly different understanding about the way that physics works.
	And that might lead to all sorts of discoveries.
	We'll never know, Scholar.
	Applications always tend to be spin-offs from pure blue sky science.
	Right.
	Do you think there's evidence on Earth now, because of the pyramids, that it had been harnessed in the past?
	I don't think the dark matter helped very much with the pyramids, I'm afraid.
	It would have just flown out of the pyramids rather than helping build them up together.
	Though the pyramids certainly remain a mystery.
	How they were built remains a mystery.
	Oh, yeah, yeah.
	Bob in Pennsylvania.
	You're on with Professor Massey.
	Hello.
	Yeah, it's an honor, Art, to be on your show.
	I have one question.
	Professor, do you believe in multiple universes?
	Yes, so OK Bob, that's a really good question.
	There might in fact be multiple universes and this is one of the very interesting explanations of why we find ourselves in a universe that's so finely tuned to support life.
	I said before that dark energy and dark matter are undergoing this tug of war to both fight out whether the universe gets bigger or gets smaller and everything's just right that we find ourselves in just the right kind of universe
	that's lasted long enough to be able to have us evolve and observe it. Now one of the
	explanations for this is this sort of really fine-tuning which is in itself kind of
	unlikely. One of the explanations for this is that we find ourselves in only one of very, very
	many universes and those other universes might not necessarily be able to support life but
	as is, and of course we find ourselves in one that is able to. And I find a very compelling theory.
	The problem with it in terms of science is just that it's very difficult to prove it.
	If you're trying to find things outside our universe, then how on earth do we look for them?
	And we haven't found a good way yet to prove that or not.
	So it's a really interesting theory and I'm very excited by it, but I don't necessarily believe it one way or another yet.
	Couldn't it be that dark matter would be able to move perhaps between dimensions?
	One of these that sort of strange theories about what's going on in the
	universe is that there are actually different sheets or different universes and that
	the dark matter, so and these might be reasonably near to each other but in some different
	dimension and that dark matter is not actually dark matter at all, it's just ordinary matter
	on this different universe.
	And as gravity travels between these two universes, and we see sort of a shadow or an echo of this ordinary matter, which we interpret as, we see it's gravitationally fenced because the gravity travels between the universes, but we don't see any matter there.
	And that's a really interesting idea about what the dark matter might be.
	But again, we haven't really got up to the point of proving any of that yet, so it's still speculation at this stage, but really interesting stuff.
	Okay.
	Somebody calling himself a rat man in Hoagieland.
	You're on with Professor Massey.
	Good morning, guys.
	Yes, Hoagieland is in South Philadelphia.
	Okay.
	And it's famous for its sandwiches, not for being Richard Hoagland's cousin.
	But, I'm fascinated by all this crossover between dark matter and black holes.
	Earlier, fortunately, someone had asked a question where tiny black holes had been brought up, and I was wondering if either Professor Hawking or someone else, Dr. Massey, has decided how small a sustainable black hole might be, and would we be able to detect it the way you're inferring dark matter currently?
	How small could a sustainable black hole be?
	Those hoagies are great!
	So the question is would we be able to see any of these small black holes?
	And in fact we might be able to see small black holes or even dark matter if it sort of evaporates and turns into a shower of light in the form of gamma rays.
	And there is actually an experiment We're very good at coming up with acronyms but not quite knowing what they stand for.
	But this thing is going to try and spot the decay of things like, specifically dark matter, if it happens to eventually turn into light.
	And that might also find things like the showers of particles produced when black holes evaporate and sizzle away.
	So there are experiments underway to sort of test these things, but we haven't found any yet.
	We're still looking.
	Well I asked how small a sustainable black hole might be.
	Oh yeah, how small.
	There is a minimum mass needed for it to...
	Well black holes sort of live by feeding and slowly get more and more massive.
	Exactly.
	And as they get more massive they of course attract more things to them and then get more and more massive and it runs away.
	All the time they're sort of slowly evaporating and it's only when they get particularly small that below a certain threshold, which I can't remember, that they stop attracting matter to them at a sufficient rate that they will actually That would be an important cut-off point, wouldn't it?
	In other words, if you created a black hole of sufficient size that it began feeding, you'd be in deep trouble, wouldn't you?
	and it probably depends on the environment.
	But I can't remember off the top of my head what that is.
	Well, that would be an important cutoff point, wouldn't it?
	In other words, if you created a black hole of sufficient size that it began feeding,
	you'd be in deep trouble, wouldn't you?
	You would, yes.
	But these, I mean, if you worry back about the particle accelerator,
	then the energies that we are going to reach in this particle accelerator are still below those that,
	the energies of those particles that are slamming into the Earth's atmosphere all the time.
	So, it really is not a worry that we're going to create anything big enough to start running away.
	You would need... May I ask about a tie-in?
	Would a black hole eat dark matter?
	Yes, it would.
	Completely.
	The black hole pulls things in through its gravity and dark matter does interact through the gravitational force.
	Things fall to it and it falls to other things.
	So yeah, dark matter will go into a black hole and increase its mass just like any ordinary matter.
	So we could create black holes eventually which could go out and eat dark matter and scoop new parts of the universe for the kind of matter one day if we ever expand that far.
	Well, it's not really like clearing land, because we actually need dark matter around.
	Dark matter helps us grow, and in fact there is dark matter around the solar system.
	It's not very concentrated, it's sort of spread out a bit, but there is dark matter around us now.
	And because it doesn't interact with us in any way, we don't notice it's present.
	It's very benign.
	It just helps create us and get us where we are, and it helps hold us together now.
	So we actually need it around, and we need this dark matter.
	We don't want to actually clear it up.
	You know, without dark matter, if I understand what you said earlier, Professor, we wouldn't be held together.
	In other words, our systems would move away at a very, very rapid rate from each other and we'd soon be all alone, much sooner than otherwise.
	Yeah, exactly.
	In fact, our whole galaxy would fly apart because it's spinning so fast that if you took the dark matter away, it would just fly out in bits and splatter itself across the walls of the universe.
	Hi, you've sort of covered my question already, but I was going to ask if dark matter and energy could be clues to the existence of other dimensions, and you said that Yes, it could be multiple universes, the different sheets theory.
	Well, how about this?
	Could dark matter... Dimensions.
	Well, yes, exactly.
	Could dark matter perhaps be used to confirm the existence of other dimensions with gravitational measurements?
	Yes, and because we don't know anything, well, we know scant details about it at the moment. We're basically piecing
	together the simplest possible theory that we live in the universe as we
	think and know it should know it is around us but there's an extra dark
	matter. Well as we find out more about dark matter and particularly more about dark
	energy and the way that gravity works, as we learn more about all these facts we
	might find some flaws.
	in this simple model.
	And this is how science has always gone throughout the ages, that you start with a simple model,
	assume the simplest thing, and then try to find flaws in it,
	and try to find things that don't work.
	That the model predicts one thing, but you observe another.
	And as we start observing more things, then that's the big hope,
	that we'll find some scientific revolution, and maybe one of these different theories of cosmology
	will explain things better than our simple picture at the moment.
	Could I ask a follow-up?
	You may, very quickly.
	what you explained about uh...
	uh... something new being discovered uh...
	There's an astronomer, Halton Arp, who questioned the velocity component of redshift, which is what you guys use.
	Hey, caller, listen, we're at a break point.
	I'm going to hold you over, all right?
	Okay.
	So just sit, rest, and we'll be right back to you.
	Professor Richard Massey is my guest.
	I'm Art Bell.
	Indeed so.
	My guest is Professor Richard Massey.
	He's had time on the Hubble telescope.
	He's an astronomer.
	If you have a question that is in his area of concern, we'd very much appreciate it.
	We've got a caller online.
	We'll get back to him and the professor in a moment.
	Okay, Walt, thank you very much for hanging on.
	You're on the air once again with Professor Massey.
	Thank you.
	We were talking about multiple universes and dimensions, and that's obviously very difficult to prove scientifically through replicable measurements.
	How come when somebody challenges something, particularly in a deep science like astronomy, and I mentioned this guy Halton Arp, who questions redshift, which is the equivalent of Doppler for the universe, like how far away everything is.
	He seems to have come up with some proof that the velocity component of redshift isn't the only thing you should consider, that there's an inherent component.
	Do you know anything about that controversy?
	Because he was essentially, from what I understand, totally barred from time on any telescope.
	And the funny thing is, that's Hubble's law, I believe, the redshift thing, and he started out working for Hubble when he was alive.
	Do you know anything about that?
	Right, yes.
	You're right.
	That's exactly what Hubble was designed to do.
	I'm talking about Edwin Hubble, the astronomer that worked with him.
	He's challenged quasars and redshifts and controversies.
	I think that was a book he wrote.
	Can you add any light?
	Because it seems that it's very difficult, if you have something that's far out in science, Get through to other people, they seem closed off.
	Your community of fellow astronomers say, well look, there's questions about the Big Bang.
	I mean, I'm not sure.
	Logically, it just doesn't seem right to me.
	And I think people need to be more open to other ideas.
	And it seems like you guys crush any opposition to some idea that All right, well let's stick with the redshift for a moment.
	It's a very interesting question.
	Professor, there are challenges to redshift being a precise science for distance.
	Yeah, well, I mean, okay, so I should lead to the defense of science just a bit here.
	Of course we do tend to be quite conservative, just from the sort of nature of the scientific method that we really do demand quite strict Rightfully so.
	We're naturally sceptical about ideas.
	You're right, it's not always fair to immediately say something's wrong and not work on it further.
	We perhaps do that a bit too much.
	In terms of redshift, redshift now is really quite well set up as an estimate of distance and there have been lots of new techniques For example, things that the Hubble Space Telescope has done to really confirm that things that are further away from us really are red-shifted, and in other words, they just appear redder to us.
	And those techniques include things like the supernovae that are expected to all have the same intrinsic brightness.
	And sure enough, the ones that are red-shifted do appear fainter as if they're further away from us.
	But then again, it's not just the one observational evidence, or one bit of observational evidence that confirms this.
	There are other techniques, such as in this gravitational lensing that I work on, that galaxies which are more redshifted are also lensed, but more, just because they're further away from us, and so there's more dark matter between them and us.
	And we can see that galaxies which are redshifted really are further away.
	I agree with what you're saying, that it just seems to me that ARP may have found one out of a thousand examples that doesn't agree with the whole redshift thing and it would be a red flag to me that we better explain.
	He has, I think his best example was something called NGC 4319 and Markarian 205, a quasar, two quasars I guess, that he says that the way you astronomers, I'm not an astronomer obviously, Calculate these things doesn't take into account an inherent shift in the red that's caused by some of these quasars.
	They have galaxies and NASA.
	There are a couple of other examples where NASA wipes these connections between a quasar and a galaxy out of the photograph because they can't explain it.
	And that's what bothers me.
	Do you know what I'm talking about?
	I don't know.
	I don't think NASA really are in the habit of blanking out patches of the universe and putting secret signs over certain portions of the sky.
	know what I'm talking about.
	Actually, no, I don't.
	I don't think NASA really are in the habit of blanking out patches of the universe and
	sort of putting secret signs over certain portions of the sky.
	We really are out there to try and understand what's going on.
	We honestly do have the best intentions to try and understand for ourselves.
	We become scientists because we're curious about these things.
	So we don't want to hide things away.
	And you're right, the way that progress is usually made is by finding things that don't fit the current picture, and therefore we have to go and rearrange the current picture.
	In terms of the redshift of quasars in particular galaxies, we do know that, just like a Doppler effect, If the quasar is moving, and it might well be moving within
	a galaxy, it might have its own velocity, then that does add to the redshift.
	The redshift can be caused by the universe expanding and also by things moving,
	just as we're all familiar with the Doppler shift of a passing police siren.
	And so we do know that objects that are moving have their own redshift and therefore change the redshift-distance relationship a little bit.
	John in Ohio, you're on with Professor Richard Massey.
	Hello, I was wondering, You know how we got the atoms and then the protons and electrons and neutrons?
	Yeah, sure.
	That is the so-called smallest known object?
	Like, the smallest thing we know so far?
	In fact, there's even smaller things.
	The protons and neutrons are made up of quarks, it seems.
	Each of them contain three quarks, which are even smaller particles.
	Have we actually identified a quark yet, Professor?
	I thought we had not.
	You can't see them on their own, because they like to go around in threes, and so they naturally group together in threes, and we only end up seeing them in the form of triplets, some of which are protons, some of which are neutrons.
	Okay, we haven't seen quarks yet, so otherwise, the smallest we've seen, he was quark.
	Oh, okay, sure.
	Yeah, so my question was like, is there any way possible that this dark matter could be a form of the smaller objects of Yeah, that's really interesting.
	And, of course, this is the kind of thing that people first went out and started to investigate.
	You know, we found this extra matter.
	Rather than inventing something completely new, let's just go through at least through a checklist of things that we know are there, like the protons and neutrons, and see if they could possibly be the culprit.
	It can't be protons, it turns out, because protons have an electric charge, so they would interact through the electric force, the electromagnetic force, and that does things like make light scatter off a proton.
	So protons would emit and reflect light, so you'd be able to see them.
	Dark matter is completely invisible, so we can strike that off the list, so it's not protons.
	Neutrons, now they're electrically neutral, so they don't interact via this force.
	But it turns out that a neutron, if it's on its own, is electrically neutral, but it decays.
	And after about 15 minutes, it turns out, any neutron that's on its own will turn into a proton and electron and also give off some light as well.
	So we'd eventually see those as well.
	So it can't be a neutron either.
	Now there is another particle that it could have been, the neutrino.
	Which is amongst the sort of known roster of particles in the standard zoo.
	And it could have been the neutrino.
	This is a very, very lightweight particle which whizzes around the universe at almost the speed of light.
	And it was thought for a while that it could perhaps be a neutrino.
	But again, we sort of went back to the observations and figured out what they would look like or what we'd expect things to look like if dark matter were made of neutrinos.
	And it turns out that because it's so fast, it would whiz around the universe and basically smear out the structures.
	Rather than seeing these fairly crisp, interconnected network of dark matter, it would see fuzzy blobs where the dark matter, if it were made of neutrinos, would have spread out and whizzed off in all sorts of directions at the speed of light.
	So it can't be the neutrinos either.
	And we've basically got to the point where we've run out of candidates of what it could be.
	And therefore, started invoking different symmetries to come up with new particles and suggest that it's probably one of those.
	What could it possibly be?
	The very, like, the smallest possible thing ever?
	Well, how about the quark?
	Since we haven't seen a quark yet, Professor, I guess we could speculate that they might be involved.
	We could speculate, but as I say, there are these really strong forces that try to get quarks to join together into these trees, and even more rapidly than a neutrino turns into a proton and electron, these quarks would fall together and become protons, and then start giving off light, and we'd see them.
	Everything we know basically interacts with the four forces that we know about, because this is what physics is set up to do.
	Physics has explained everything in these four forces, and these four forces are what cause things like light emission and shining.
	And so we have to find something that's really beyond this theory that doesn't interact via these four forces.
	Roger, in California, you're on the air with Professor Massey.
	Hi.
	Hi, Art.
	I love your work.
	I'm totally addicted to the show.
	And for your guest, Dr. Massey.
	Okay, you're going to have to speak up good and loud.
	You're not too loud.
	Okay.
	Hello, Richard.
	Hi.
	The exciting point I heard tonight was about the dark matter filaments forming a scaffolding or a skeleton for the formation of ordinary baryonic matter.
	There was an ancient Indian text, a Hindu text, talked about a god who at the beginning of time cast a net out which covered the whole universe, which still is here, and I'm wondering if you cosmologists are getting your talking points from these ancient texts?
	That's a really good analogy!
	Oh, great!
	What text is that?
	That sounds very interesting.
	You know, I can't give you a quote right now on a site right now, but I read about it recently again in The Divine Matrix by Greg Brayden.
	Sounds a little like scaffolding, huh?
	Yeah.
	Net is an analogy we use all the time.
	It's amazing, these engines.
	They really did get a load of things.
	They're very well described, aren't they?
	Well, so that's interesting.
	It could be who knows.
	Jody in Texas, you're on with Professor Massey.
	Hi.
	Yes, you're talking to me, sir.
	I am.
	Yes, sir.
	Thank you for taking my call.
	You're welcome.
	I have a question for the professor.
	Hi.
	My question is, if dark matter is invisible and you really can't measure it, how did you come up with the figure that there's six times more dark matter than matter?
	Okay, so that's from basically doing a budget, or trying to account for the effects of gravity in the universe.
	So we know that wherever there's mass, there's some gravity, and wherever there's gravity, there's some mass.
	And we looked at these spinning galaxies, for example.
	We can look on lots of different scales, and it still works out as about six times.
	But let's just look at the spinning galaxies.
	And we worked out how fast they were spinning, and therefore how much gravity is needed to hold it together.
	But then we sort of looked at the stars, and this was first done in the 70s.
	Look at the stars, count up how much mass you can see, and just from there we can count up all the stars that we can see and that are out of this normal visible matter.
	And there just wasn't as much mass as we would need to create that gravity.
	To create the gravity that's needed to hold the galaxies together and keep them together while they spin relatively fast, We would have needed six times more mass than there is in the visible stars.
	So it's really just a budget exercise, that we've counted up how much gravity there is, subtracted off the amount of gravity that's produced by the stars that we can see, and we're still left with a deficit, that we've got something to make up, and that something is about six times as much as the gravity that we can see.
	Okay.
	Mark and Tahoe, you're on with Professor Massey.
	Great weekend of programming, Art.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Doctor, I wanted to ask, has the cosmology community considered that the universe may be of a static size and everything within it, including time, is shrinking?
	Including time is shrinking.
	So the idea that the universe is a static size was a perennial favorite until the 40s.
	In fact, the institute where I did my PhD was wrapped by a personal feud between two people who just couldn't agree on this issue about whether the universe was static or expanding.
	They got so angry with each other they ended up forming their own departments opposite the road from each other. So they, it really has
	divided astronomy.
	Now in recent years, everything really is coming together and it's this idea of explaining lots of
	observational evidence in one theory that has really made everyone believe
	that the universe is indeed expanding.
	For example, we see the afterglow of the cosmic microwave background radiation.
	We see the afterglow of the initial fireball that created the universe.
	That implies that the universe used to be hot.
	By the fact that we see galaxies expanding around us, we know that if we run that backwards, the universe used to be small as well.
	This is how we form this scenario of the universe having started at a hot, small condition and now expanding.
	Everybody basically now agrees on this.
	To the point in fact that I think next year these two different halves of the Institute in Cambridge where I did my PhD are actually moving back together and really joining back together.
	It was actually helped by an American donation that got these two people back together.
	Everyone's friends again and we really do now all agree that the universe really is expanding and it explains so many things that it has to be true.
	Well it has to be true if the two departments Well, there you go, yes, you see.
	And if I can just make one other comment, we could use whoever's prayers up here in Tahoe.
	We've lost 165 homes and 2,000 acres to a wildfire tonight.
	Yes, I've seen it on the news.
	Indeed, the prayers go to you.
	Kimberly in Oregon, you're on with Professor Massey.
	Good morning, gentlemen.
	Good morning.
	My question was with regards about the bullet cluster, fender bender as you put it.
	I was wondering, applying our law of physics as we know it, and considering the different attributes of dark matter versus dark energy, as you explained them, looking at the unexpected behavior of the dark matter after the impact, Is there any possibility that the dark matter was converted to dark energy?
	Well, we still see the dark matter, is the thing.
	We still, in the bullet cluster, we see a lot of extra mass, or a lot of invisible mass, in a different place, crucially, to the ordinary mass.
	But we still see it, and it's still there.
	It's just Because it's dark matter, it passed through itself and carried on, and it's now a long way away from the point of impact.
	But it's still there.
	Have you detected any slowing?
	Have you detected any slowing of the dark matter?
	Any movement, even a hint of movement, back toward the larger mass?
	Well, it will eventually slow down and fall back in naturally, just because it's affected by gravity.
	What we're actually doing at the moment is measuring If it has slowed down at all by the collision then we'd like to know about that because that will say either it doesn't interact at all
	And it just kept going, and it went at the same speed until it eventually slows down.
	Professor, you know what?
	The show's over.
	I could go on with this.
	I, for example, would wonder if it could actually get escape velocity and keep going, but that's for another program.
	Listen, thank you so very much for being here tonight, and we'll do it again one time.
	Oh, yeah, it was my pleasure.
	I really enjoyed it.
	Thank you.
	Have a great night, Professor.
	That's it, folks.
	I'm Art Bell.

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