Dark Electromagnetism in the Early Universe

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The data tell you that the dark matter is pretty smoothly distributed compared to ordinary matter. If there is any interesting chemistry, electromagnetism level physics in the dark matter sector, it's much more feeble than it is in the ordinary matter sector. The final thing we know is that adiabatic fact we mentioned before. When you have the density perturbations in the early universe, the densities in the darkmatter track those in the ordinary Matter.

Physics is in crisis, what else is new? That's what we hear in certain corners, anyway, usually pointed at "fundamental" physics of particles and fields. (Condensed matter and biophysics etc. are just fine.) In this solo podcast I ruminate on the unusual situation fundamental physics finds itself in, where we have a theoretical understanding that fits almost all the data, but which nobody believes to be the final answer. I talk about how we got here, and argue that it's not really a "crisis" in any real sense. But there are ways I think the academic community could handle the problem better, especially by making more space for respectable but minority approaches to deep puzzles.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/07/31/245-solo-the-crisis-in-physics/

Support Mindscape on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.