The Best Evidence for Dark Matter

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In the 1930s Fritz Zwicky pointed out that it needs to be more matter. Vera Rubin and Kent Ford with their observations of spiral galaxies in the 70s said okay here is forced due to gravity that is not accounted for by ordinary matter so we need something new. But now that is no longer the best evidence for dark matter. These days we have way better evidence. We have evidence from large scale structure and how it evolved. Evidence from gravitational lensing but mostly most importantly we have evidence from the cosmic microwave background. Those tiny temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave back evolve in a very predictable way which depends on precisely how much dark matter versus ordinary matter you have in the universe. It

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/

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