Dark Matter
Designing from matter to meta
Ed. The following is adapted from a section of my book Dark Matter & Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary. Read more about the book here.
It’s been quite a month for dark matter. While the latest twist in the Hunt for Higgs Boson thoroughly owned the much-coveted theoretical physics research news agenda, other theoretical physics research news had also emerged, with the bad timing of a wedding on cup final day, revealing a major breakthrough in the hunt for dark matter.
Scientists had used “gravitational lensing” — a favourite new barely understood concept I’ll be using a lot — to detect some evidence of the essentially imperceptible dark matter; that which Must Be There For Everything Else To Be There. As explained here, and thanks to Gill Ereaut for the link:
Something invisible with mass, like dark matter, is bending the light from the cluster of galaxies. So although we can’t see the dark matter, we can see it affecting the light’s path and take a pretty good guess it is there.
ArsTechnica suggests these experiments “support to the theory that the Universe is built on a web of dark matter.”
Yet few people will have noted this, given the kerfuffle over Higgs and the abstract nature of the research. Ironically, even news about dark…
