In early December 2018 the physicists' blogosphere went berserk because of a 2017 paper (in fact still a preprint to this date: arXiv:1712.07962) in which the author James Farnes, University of Oxford, tries to explain Dark Matter and Dark Energy with a seemingly preposterous hypothesis: the presence of a negative-mass fluid that permeates the Universe. … Continue reading When Your Gravity Fails and Negativity Don’t Pull You Through: The Case for Negative-Mass Dark Matter
dark matter
What to do in physics when “everything else fails”
10. Subtract Infinity 9. Add heavy fermions 8. Set all fermion masses to zero 7. Invent another symmetry 6. Throw it on the lattice 5. Blame it on the Planck scale 4. Recall the success of the SM 3. Invoke the Anthropic Principle 2. Wave hands a lot, speak with a strong accent 1. Manipulate … Continue reading What to do in physics when “everything else fails”
The Dark Matter is Out There
In the last 10 years evidence piled up that the largest part of the Universe is not made by ordinary (baryonic) matter. Atoms and neutrinos account to about 5%, while the remaining fraction is partly due to another form of mass that does not interact electromagnetically, called Dark Matter (25%). There are indications that it is … Continue reading The Dark Matter is Out There
Sunday Afternoon TED Talks
Stephen Wolfram: Computing a theory of everything Brian Cox on CERN's supercollider Patricia Burchat sheds light on dark matter Brian Greene on String Theory Jill Tarter's call to join the SETI search
Beyond the Standard Model Pub 