Physicist

And on September 11, another event opens.

The International Congress of Physicists.

61 scientists.

Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, and Niels Bohr.

Quantum materials promise dark matter breakthrough, yet remain invisible themselves.

When the solution to an invisible problem is equally invisible, Physicists are just a few equations away from inventing the emperor's new clothes.

Sweden pays immigrants to leave, calling it a solution as elections approach.

When your political strategy involves relocation incentives, it's like trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle by throwing away half the pieces.

And now, before we go further, let us pause for a small clarification, because the word dark is a slippery word, and it is worth setting it down carefully before we build anything more on top of it.

When physicists say that most of the matter in the universe is dark, they do not mean what most of us mean by dark in ordinary life they do not mean black they do not mean the color of coal or of the inside of a closed drawer or of the sky between the stars They do not mean shadow.

They do not mean a cloud of soot drifting invisibly through the corridors of space.

If dark matter were black, it would in fact be quite easy to see.

Before we can speak gently about what dark matter might be, we should first sit for a while with what it is not.

because a great deal of the honest work of the last half century has been the slow, careful ruling out of comfortable possibilities.

When Zwicky and Rubin left us with the puzzle of unseen mass, the first instinct of any reasonable person, and indeed of the physicists themselves, was to imagine that the missing matter must be ordinary matter that simply happened to be dim.

Perhaps the halos of galaxies were filled with faint, unglowing companions, objects made of the same protons and neutrons and electrons as you and I, only cold, only dark, only shy of the eye.

Many of our ideas just push back the uncomfortable something-from-nothing moment.

Physicists have a thing or two to say about that, from quantum fluctuations from nothing to Stephen Hawking's timeless interpretation of eternal inflation that draws on the holographic principle.

All things we'll discuss in the future as we travel beyond the beginning of space-time.

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