(Roughly) Daily

Quantum effects may not be just subatomic, Sabine Hossenfelder suggests; they might be expressed across galaxies, and solve the puzzle of dark matter…

Most of the matter in the Universe is invisible, composed of some substance that leaves no mark as it breezes through us – and through all of the detectors the scientists have created to catch it. But this dark matter might not consist of unseen particle clouds, as most theorists have assumed. Instead, it might be something even stranger: a superfluid that condensed to puddles billions of years ago, seeding the galaxies we observe today.

This new proposal has vast implications for cosmology and physics. Superfluid dark matter overcomes many of the theoretical problems with the particle clouds. It explains the long-running, increasingly frustrating failure to identify the individual constituents within these clouds. And it offers a concrete scientific path forward, yielding specific predictions that could soon be testable.

Superfluid dark matter has important conceptual implications as well. It suggests that the common picture of the Universe as a mass of individual particles bound together by forces – almost like a tinker toy model – misses much of the richness of nature. Most of the matter in the Universe might be utterly unlike the matter in your body: not composed of atoms, and not even built of particles as we normally understand them, but instead a coherent whole of vast extension…

Is dark matter composed of particles? Is it a fluid? Or is it both? Read On: “The superfluid Universe,” from @skdh in @aeonmag.

* William J. Broad

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As we deconstruct the dark, we might spare a thought for Richard Philips Feynman; he died on this date in 1988.  A theoretical physicist, Feynman was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-WW II era.

Richard Feynman was a once-in-a-generation intellectual. He had no shortage of brains. (Relevantly to the piece above, in 1965 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum electrodynamics.) He had charisma. (Witness this outtake [below] from his 1964 Cornell physics lectures [available in full here].) He knew how to make science and academic thought available, even entertaining, to a broader public. (See, for example, these two public TV programs hosted by Feynman here and here.) And he knew how to have fun.

– From Open Culture (where one can also find Feynman’s elegant and accessible 1.5 minute explanation of “The Key to Science.”)