What Is the Best Candidate for Dark Matter?

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In the 80s or 90s, your point of view that dark matter is a temporary holding place for a more deep understanding would have been 100% respectable. But I don't think that we as cosmologists have quite conveyed to the public the extent to which that changed when we really started observing the cosmic microwave background in detail. You could make predictions. If dark matter exists, the CMB will look a certain way. If it doesn't exist, it will look another way. It's almost impossible to reproduce that success in a model where you just change gravity without dark. That's what happened with quantum mechanics. Where the theory kept predicting things that kept being true over and over.

You might think that human beings, exhausted by competing for resources and rewards in the real world, would take it easy and stick to cooperation in their spare time. But no; we are fascinated by competition, and invent games and sports to create artificial competition just for fun. These competitions turn out to be wonderful laboratories for exploring concepts like optimization, resource allocation, strategy, and human psychology. Today’s guest, Daryl Morey, is a world leader in thinking analytically about sports, as well as the relationship between impersonal data and the vagaries of human behavior. He’s currently an executive in charge of the Philadelphia 76ers, but I promise you don’t need to be a fan of the Sixers or of basketball or of sports in general to enjoy this wide-ranging conversation.

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Daryl Morey received a bachelor’s in computer science from Northwestern University, and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He served as general manager for the Houston Rockets from 2007 to 2020, and since November 2020 has been the President for Basketball Operations for the Philadelphia 76ers. He is founder and co-chair of the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. He was voted NBA Executive of the Year in 2018.

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