I told Neil deGrasse Tyson we've already detected dark matter

Ajouté : 2026-06-08

[00:00:00]Do you know that we detected dark matter?

[00:00:02]There's dark matter detection. It's called the neutrino. Neutrino has every property of dark matter. It just doesn't make up enough to, so-called, you know, make the universe flat and so forth.

[00:00:09]But, we detected dark matter. However, embarrassingly enough, shamefully enough for physicists, there are 17 elementary particles. We don't know the mass of three of those 17. We know the mass exquisitely accurately for the other 14, the Higgs boson, the um electron, etc. >> What don't we know?

[00:00:25]>> We don't know the mass of the three types of neutrinos, the three neutrino flavors. We have a lower bound and we have an upper bound, but we don't have a measurement. It's like someone looking at Chuck and saying, "Oh, you're somewhere between, you know, uh 1 in tall and 1,000 ft tall."

[00:00:37]>> Like, it's interesting, but >> but [laughter] not useful.

[00:00:39]>> It's true, but not useful.

[00:00:41]>> Yeah, it's not useful.

[00:00:42]>> True, but not useful.

[00:00:42]>> That's a beautiful way to phrase it. So, what we're going to go after is the because we can take these early images of dark matter and these a composition of the universe that is affected by them, we can effectively weigh the neutrino by getting enough of them together. They're very light. They're a million times less massive than the electron, at least. They could be even less. We can, for sure, constrain their properties, weigh them, if you will, but only by collecting them on the universe's most grand scales. Literally, to weigh enough of them, you need to measure a huge fraction of the universe's volume. And that's what we're going to do. So, we're guaranteed to make an imprint on that and detect not new particles, perhaps, but uh we could possibly detect new particles. We just don't know if they're out there and that's why serendipity is so hard to