Science Series 2: Dr Ben McAllister / Dark Matter / Axioms / Theoretical Research vs Experimental

0:01 Welcome to another episode of Come Together. Doctor Ben McAllister, Welcome to the show. Happy to have you here. Yeah, thanks for having me, you look. Awfully young for a doctor, got to tell you. Oh, I don't know. I mean, thank you, but I'm 32 years old and yeah, I don't know, did my PhD straight, basically straight, like high school, undergrad, grad school, kind of straight through. So you can get it done in that time.

0:42 That's a lot of work, I imagine. Right? Yeah. Oh. Yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, it's, it's, it's a life of a a lot of studying. But if you if you love it, then it's it's good fun. I don't know if it, if it, if it stimulates you and it's enjoyable, then yeah, I always say it. I mean, we've, we've jumped right into to would you do a PhD? But I always say to people, if you like it, it's great. But you know, don't do it because you think you should. Right. Yeah. I kind of feel that way about everything, you know? Yeah. I mean, I find out the more that I live like that, the happier the happier I am or the more productive that I am because it's really hard to play something, these things. And if you like it, then it's not really a pull. Yeah. Yeah, please. I always say to my students that if you're not like having fun, I mean, not like literally every moment of every day is fun, But if in the kind of macro sense, working on the project, like if you're not having fun, you're doing something wrong. Like, especially in the kind of area that we work in, because it's like fundamental physics, like we get to try and like answer the big mysteries and the big questions in the universe. And it's like, I think we should not lose sight of the fact that that's like an immense privilege. And it's really cool to be able to work on that stuff and like not get too lost in like the, the parts of it that are like annoying or painful and remember what they are sort of all point towards.

1:54 And if you're really truly having a miserable timing of PhD program or whatever, maybe just do something else. Because it should be. It should be fun, you know, ultimately in in the big scale. Yeah, yeah, that's actually why I never went back to to school because I didn't think that I would enjoy getting a master's degree in creative or, you know, PhD in any kind of literary aspect, which is my undergrad. But but I'm I'm way more interested in what you study, which is physics and specifically the I think, and please correct me if I misunderstood, but the dark matter in particular, correct? Yeah, that's that's right. I'm a dark matter physicist. It's a relatively obscure niche category. Physics, I think based at least based on social norms or based on, you know, the zeitgeist.

2:40 Sure. Whether people have heard of it, yes, fair enough. I, I guess you could say that it's relatively obscure in terms of who's aware of it. But in some senses I think it's like very not obscure as a science problem. It's one of the biggest problems in modern science today. The scale of the problem is massive. So it's just for anyone who's not aware, dark matter is the name we give to what I like to call one of the biggest mysteries in the universe. It is what is the nature of all of this invisible stuff that is all around us, passing through US, makes up most of the matter in the universe, and we just don't know what it is. We The name dark matter is actually incredibly descriptive. It's sort of tells you just about everything we know about it. It's dark, which means that it doesn't interact with light. It doesn't reflect light or give off light, so we can't see it using traditional telescopes.

3:22 And it's matter, which just means it has mass, it has some stuff to it. And that is that is kind of the stuff we know for sure. We know it's dark, we know it's matter. We know roughly how much of it we think we know roughly how much that there is. We think we know roughly where it is. We have ideas about what it might be made of, but that's sort of it. So I kind of think it's a huge, huge mystery for for contact, the scale, it's about 5 sixths of all the matter in the universe is this invisible stuff. So if you think about like everything that makes people, planets, stars, black holes, all of those fun little fundamental particles, all that stuff, according to our best models today is about 1/6 of all the matter. And then there's about five times as much again, this invisible stuff called dark matter that we, yeah, we simply don't know what it's made of.

4:10 Is that not extremely daunting for not not only for yourself, but also for every other scientist that MO that because I kind of from a science perspective, adds A variable or variables that you have no idea how to define, right? Yeah. But yeah, Well, yes, it's daunting for sure. I had to answer the first question. Yes, it's a huge, it's a huge problem. But hey, there's a lot of big mysteries in science and there's a lot of history of, of working to answer them. That's sort of what it's what it's what it's all about if you ask me, in terms of like stuff we can't define. I guess that's like that's the idea behind Dark Matters. We do try to kind of fence it in. Like we take the information that we have and we say, OK, it's dark and it's matter.

4:53 So that's, you know, automatically like it sounds like it's a huge fraud category and it is. But at the same time, we've run out a lot of stuff that it isn't, you know, like we know it can't be any of the stuff we already know about. We know it has to have mass that kind of already puts some fences around it. And then you can kind of start kind of closing in on it from there. And that's that's kind of the the aim of the game is we go, OK, so does this stuff does dark matter? What might it be made of when people come up with different ideas and then we do either different, like theoretical calculations, which is not my area, or different experiments, which is my area, that sort of gradually constrain that large parameter space of possibilities for what the dark matter can be? Cool. What's the just just to understand for myself and for anyone listening, what's the difference as far as the theoretical and the experimental goes from the from your end?

5:45 Sure. So, yeah, it's a great question because it is a relatively, I'm not going to say like brand new thing, but it is a in the grand history of science, the divide between theory and experiment is relatively new. Time was the sort of like, you know, great since the field, your Isaac mutants, your, your Lord Kelvin's, your, your people from, you know, hundreds of years ago, pioneers of science would be theorists and experimentalists. They'd be doing experiments in their lab and then working on theory to explain the experiments. Now, in a sense, physics, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to denigrate these guys or, or, or people, you know, who, who are absolute legends, discovered all kinds of incredible things with the kind of equipment that they had on hand at the time. It's astonishing, some of the stuff that was done, but the science was a little bit simpler then. Like we weren't talking about like subatomic particles. We weren't talking about quantum physics. You know, we weren't talking about the kind of level of intricate detail that we have today, which makes it very just difficult for one person to be so highly specialized in. Like as as science has gotten kind of more advanced and physics has gotten into ever smaller scales, there's a lot more like we're kind of like, you may think like, oh, as we're narrowing in and getting smaller, like it's getting, you know, we're getting closer and closer to the bottom, which is true in some sense, but it's also opening more and more doors and like more and more rabbit holes. And so there's, there's so much more physics today that we know about than there was like 300 years ago, which means it's impossible for anyone physicist to know all of it. It's just not practical to be an expert in literally everything in all of physics.

7:17 And so one way and that gets divided up in like lots of different ways, like within the field, but one like kind of big broad category split would be the split between people who do theory and people who do experiments. And, and theorists would be people who do, you know, calculations and simulations and, and, and modeling and, and model building to try and understand the physics in question and then come up with like predictions. And then experimentalists will be people who will build and run experiments and devote a lot of their time to think about how to make those experiments better, how to get the data, how to analyze the data and how to either fit it in to confirm or refuse the theory. So this is kind of like into play between the two kind of aspects.

7:58 And you know, like with everything like this, it's not really. Hey everyone real quick if you're enjoying the show, click subscribe and rate the show. 5 stars helps a time. Thanks so much. Like a strict binary, it's, it's there are people who exist kind of partially in both areas and everyone will sort of sit somewhere along the spectrum in this regard. But broadly speaking, physicists will tend to categorize themselves as either a theorist or an experimentalist. I gotcha. That's really cool. Is it? Can you say that it's metaphorically, I guess, similar to the way that that someone it could be teaching a, a topic and then, you know, let's say about business and then another person is actual business owner. A lot of times you'll go back and forth between the two and you know, and, and students had to make fun of teachers and say those who can't do teach. But but I think that there's something to be said about the ability to communicate, which we will obviously get back to. Yeah.

8:48 You know, I think it's, it's funny the analogy there because I think if you asked both camps, they'd probably both be like, yeah, and I'm the one who's actually doing it. On the other hand, it's, I don't know, I mean, that would get a little bit thorny. I think it's definitely like both. I don't know. I think both are really important in doing modern physics. And that's why, yeah. I mean, ultimately, ideally in a perfect world, probably there wouldn't be that divide. Everyone would have like such incredible expansive brains that we were able to know all of the deep theory and also all of the technical details for making experiment work and how to acquire it. It's not practical. We divide and conquer, you know, both. Both are really, really important things to to have. You need people coming up with brand new ideas and you need people building better and better experiments. Can I ask your thoughts before we go on with dark physics? Just on that point, I know that one of the huge values of AI is to sort through an enormous amount of data and be very effective, far more effective than people could be. AI can do.

9:57 AI companions like the new Clawbot or anything like that play a role as far as sorting data and trying to really like cover more ground and what you know, teams and teams of people could cover. It's not. I mean I do anything AI related. It's a very difficult question to answer in any kind of concrete way. I think to give a very broad question, our physicists using large language models to help them. Yes, unequivocally yes, people, people and more and more as I think is common in just about every field at the moment. And in terms of like machine learning more broadly for data science, I would say that's been going on since kind of for the current kind of AILOM boom, you know, like, like physicists and, and data scientists have been interested in machine learning is the way to tease things out of data for a very long time.

10:46 So yes, broadly speaking, I think is the answer, particularly in fields where there's big data. Like, I know there's some people here at the university that I'm at, Swinburne University in Melbourne that work specifically on like AI and machine learning for radio astronomy data. Because like telescopes pull into an enormous amount of data from the sky. And there's a lot of really like amazing kind of regular statistical signal techniques for pulling information out there. And then there's kind of increasingly like, oh, I wonder if we can do something interesting with this AI stuff. I mean, the, yeah, it's, it's, it's certainly a useful tool. And then on the other aspect of it, like data analytics aside, like more and more physicists they know are reporting that they find that the tools like the, the more commercial tools like useful for like a sort of research assistant kind of thing. You know, you still have to be quite careful about hallucinations.

11:43 You have to really, you know, check, check the sources for sure. If it's going to be anything that you're going to like rely on firmly. But it can definitely help as like a jumping off point for, for things. It's, you know, more and more often I'll find myself like, oh, OK, this is an area I don't know anything about. First thing I'll do is go get an LM and be like, well, one of the, you know, or even just to be like one of the 10 papers I should read. And then it'll like get out of this, you know, and that's, that saves a lot of time in, in terms of good searching and stuff. So yeah. And it's getting used in different ways in physics at the moment. So actually something quite interesting happened maybe like, and, and, and well, I guess like with everything of AI, it's like it's changing so rapidly. It's like, you know, the the. Tomorrow will be it'll be something new already. Exactly, Like if we had this conversation two months ago, I'd probably have given you a different answer.

12:26 But, and yeah, I mean, like, especially like recently, as of March 2026, I don't know, it feels like the, like, it feels to me personally, like, I mean, I'm unqualified opinion on this. I'm really not like an AI expert at all, but like just just just personal experience. It feels to me like the model had gotten quite a bit better quite quickly in the last little while. But anyway, that aside, like 2 years ago, I think like, well, maybe a year and a bit ago, like early in like the kind of people were starting to adopt these things. There was a seminar here at at the university that was like, oh, like, you know, AI and physics seminar. And I like went along and it was a room full of like physicists and astronomers and the first thing, and I wasn't using like AILLMS that much at that point.

13:12 And the first thing the guy running the seminar said was like, OK, like, put your hand up if you're using an LLM every day. And probably like 75% of the room put their hands up. And I was like, oh, OK, there's something about this I'm not understanding because up until that point I'd been like, Oh yeah, this is kind of a kind of a useful tool. I guess I can like help me like edit down documents or whatever. Like it's not, you know, I'm not really. And I like tried to use it for research questions. And then like, oh, it's not that good. You know, it's not very useful. And then like all of these physicists, all of the peers were like, oh, yeah. And then I was like, OK. And I was like, really, you know, then then focused on, on the preceding hour of people describing different use cases and some other things. Anyway, I don't want to get into a whole chat about AI, to be honest, because I honestly don't know how I feel about it more broadly speaking as a as a thing. But to answer the question as asked, are people using it? Yes.

14:02 Is it helpful in some ways? Yes. Do I use it? Yes, for some things. I gotcha. Yeah. I don't know how I feel about it either, man. That's how. Yeah. And you know what? I don't think that we should know how we feel about it because like you said, the, the, the, its existence is changing so rapidly, so frequently that it's very hard to wrap your head around what it really is. Because what it was six months ago, it's not the same thing as it is now. And having anyone who has a set opinion on it is might be might be ignoring the, you know, the present, the present circumstance. Yeah, I, I agree with you that it's, it's like, yeah, it's hard to have a fixed opinion about it.

14:42 I, I, I do, I do kind of like, I do think that that in itself is also kind of a problem. Like I think like, you know, that like stuff is changing too quickly for people to really have fixed opinions about it and that it it's changing too quickly to almost like know what the sensible thing to do is about it. And I think that that, you know, we should look at and be like, OK, maybe we need to slow down a little bit on this kind of, you know, like this kind of this arms race between these like this driving this thing. And it's just like that is actually that doesn't need to be happening. Like we just, we could, we could stop and pause and be like, OK, like what's a sensible way forward here? But anyway, like I said, not not an expert on this topic, just. For sure.

15:25 And I think that it's important for you. What I think is interesting and particularly important is the fact that, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, well, AI is the next breakthrough, AI is the next development. But there's so much science that has to be done, including the work that you're doing that, you know that we can turn to as well. And so I think that for people that think that, hey, you know, the next, you know, the future is just AII mean. There is that you're ignoring a whole lot of you're doing a whole lot of universe out there and there's a whole lot of science and there's a whole lot of other things going on that, you know, I'm sure could, could, could be looked into as well. And yeah, we need to catch up as a society. We still need to catch up years ago from what we still need to catch. Up from 20 years ago. I mean, like, you know, I mean, like I think people are still, I think I think that society's kind of going, you know, we're still trying to figure out how to navigate the world now. And I don't think it's really been consistent in one place that we've really figured out to get a handle on it for since really probably the early 2000, you know, the mid 2000s. Yeah, I have this theory that like, like technological development is like, it's exponential, obviously, and against time.

16:29 And like The funny thing about an exponential is like if you zoom in and you don't like you zoom in at any point, it still looks like an exponential, like the the Y axis and the X axis change. So like you're here and you're like, wow, things are changing so quickly. And like, so it always feels like it's going way faster than you can possibly deal with it. And then at the same time, it's also getting faster and faster. So like in a, in a, in a sense, it's like, it's easy to be like, oh wow, things are like things are so crazy right now and things are changing so fast. And it's easy to forget that they also were, you know, 20-30 years ago. I think like, you know, like we're about the same age. I think like probably grew up, I wouldn't say like the kind of like younger generation, maybe like, you know, complete digital natives because like, you know, and I don't know that you like my early childhood, I wasn't on the Internet all the time, but by the time I was like, I don't know, seven, I was. And then so I think that transition is like pretty crazy in terms of the like, I don't know, networking and connection information and and then like watching the kind of like smart smartphone thing happen.

17:31 I think those were like massive messengers, idolships that you're right, I don't think we have really fully come to grips with as a as a culture. And yeah, so in some sense, I guess there's nothing that new about the fact that things changing so rapidly and crazy and we're not prepared to deal with it. But in other ways, yeah. I mean, it's, it is. It is. Different We're still trying to convince you whether social media hasn't been a great idea. You are like not to let kids use. And we're like, I just can't believe like it's 2026. We still have to have this conversation. We're talking about AI now. You know we're talking. About, you know, talking about. We're talking about quantum physics, we're talking about UFOs, we're talking about like all this stuff. And you're talking about like, you know, whether or not a kid spending too much time on Twitter or X or Instagram or whatever it is. And on one hand, it is a super important right now problem that like has to be, you know, responded to or acknowledged at least, you know, And on the other hand, it's like, but things are also going on over here, you know, it's really, it's really.

18:24 Yeah, too much stuff going on, fire hose and information, too many, too many different areas that need a lot of immediate attention is broadly speaking the case. But hey, I mean, we're not talking about physics right now, so let's get. Back to it. So can you take me through, please, the life of her? So how'd you get, how'd you get started in this? Were you always a science enthusiast or curious about? I know that people I talked to are either very analytical or very imaginative when it comes to becoming scientists, I feel like. And what was your kind of experience and what what drew to it and what does it experiments look like? You know, as far as throughout your education, was most your time spent in labs or how'd that work? Yeah, it's a good question.

19:14 I I guess in a sense I kind of in school I didn't really know what I wanted to do. Like in primary school that is like I was just like I was good at science and maths so that, you know, I was just good at them. I guess just happened to have that kind of brain and that was, you know, something that I just did and always kind of enjoyed. I enjoyed the problem solving aspects of it, but I wasn't thinking at that time like, oh, I'm going to be a scientist. You know, like I always, I always say these days, like, you know, I was in high school, I wasn't thinking about becoming a scientist because I guess I just wasn't kind of aware that that was something you could do. Like it, it didn't, it didn't even occur to me that that was a thing you could do. And I was like good at physics and maths and good at chemistry and stuff. And like all of my like peers who were also good at those things, the vast majority of them will be like, oh, we're going to go into Med school, we're going to come doctors or whatever.

20:03 And I knew I didn't want to do that. I, I don't know, I just kind of like didn't, didn't appeal to me very much. And so I was like, OK, I guess I'll be an engineer because that's the thing you do if you're good at physics and, and maths and stuff. So I like, I went to, to university to study engineering and I was taking a second major and I just picked physics basically because I kind of found it interesting. And I was studying engineering all through undergrad And I was like, OK, cool, I'm going to be an engineer. And the physics stuff is just kind of cool and interesting and it helps the engineering, you know, you understand the physics, you understand the engineering, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it wasn't until like the end of undergrad that I was doing like an astronomy class and I learned about the dark matter problem, like, and the scale of this problem and like how we know about it and all this extra matter and blah, blah, blah.

20:47 And I was like, oh, wow, that's incredibly fascinating. And I don't know how you could like have a bigger problem and how more people not aware of it. And how was I not aware of it? And like, what, what, what you know, and, and, and I was sort of like, how could I, it just kind of grabbed me, just kind of grabbed my brain as like a problem. And I was like, oh, OK, how can I do anything else in a sense? So you kind of became very quickly the feeling. And so I kind of shelved the engineering at the end of that, like undergrad, it was like, oh, do you want to go to your masters in engineering? I'm a professionally qualified engineer or start grad school in physics. I kind of told myself like, oh, I'll like start grad school and see how I go and maybe I'll go back and do the engineering eventually. Engineering, right. Yeah. Yeah. I just never looked back. Went straight through to the PhD and then started working as a physicist on this dark meta problem. Yeah.

21:33 Just just found the big, the big mystery aspect of it. And the fact that there was like something that I could actually do to contribute to it, you know, it was, was fascinating. And like, I don't like, you know, I don't, I, I always say like people sort of like, oh, like this is an area like, you know, a Nobel Prize, blah, blah, blah. I don't like, I mean, obviously, like no one's going to be like, no, I don't want to win a Nobel Prize. But I was like, that's not, that's not the motivation for me. Like, I don't really like, I don't need to be the person who makes the big discovery. I'm really be working on the big problem. And I'm like, I'm, I'm, it would be awesome, obviously, like if our experiments worked and we detected dark matter and we made, you know, this massive discovery. Like obviously that's like kind of what I, what I want to happen. But at the same time, I like see the value in contributing to solving the problem because it is kind of this process of elimination like with with dark matter, like with testing different models and like ruling things out. So did I lose you?

22:32 Sorry, did I? Did I disconnect for a second now? Yeah. You're good. OK, Yeah. It's like we're we're we're testing different problems and kind of testing different ideas and kind of ruling things out. And like if you do your experiment well and you rule out a certain concept of dark matter, it means that someone else doesn't have to do that later. And so you've kind of narrowed down the space. You know, it's like famous, like Isaac Newton quote, we've seen further than others. It's because I'm stood on the shoulders of giants is an appreciation of the fact that that's how science works. You know, like the the number that there are, there are many, many, many more unsuccessful experiments and ideas than there are successful ones. And you have to have all of the unsuccessful ones to have the successful 1. So, you know, someone ultimately, maybe me, maybe someone 10 years from now, maybe you know, will will be the one that stumbles upon the answer.

23:21 And that will be because of all of the work you did before of narrowing down possibilities. I love that there's a great, there's a great quote. It's not up to you to finish the job, but that doesn't mean you're not doesn't it doesn't deprive you from the responsibility of contributing. Yeah. You got to be the one to crack it. But if everyone ignores it and everyone has that attitude of it, I'm not going to crack it. I'm not going to do it, then then it's never going to get done, you know? And so that's that general attitude. I think that leads to progress. Yeah, absolutely. And it's especially true in science. I think it's, it's, yeah, it's people like often say we're talking about like the dark matter thing. They're like, oh, like how do you feel? Like, you know, you might spend your entire year working on this problem and never discovered the thing. And I'm kind of like, well, yeah, maybe. But it's exactly like you just said, like that's, that's, that's more often the case than not. And if we all feel that way, then no big problems would ever get solved.

24:10 You know you need to to be to be willing to to do the best you can, chipping away at it and contributing to the eventual discoveries. So can you walk me through the research process? Do you find fear? You know, I guess you do find papers or theoretical works and then try to bring them to life in your in a, in a lab. Is is that the way that you go about it? And yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, so broadly speaking, there's different like like like I mentioned, like there's different ideas about like what the dark matter might be made of. So we can talk a bit more about the the the ideas there. So like historically speaking, so OK, maybe I'll create history a little bit. So dark matter as a problem has been, I'm going to say it's roughly 100 years old.

24:52 The the origins of it, specifically in terms of who the first person was who proposed it. People come up in different answers to that question because it depends whether you're like including someone who made like the vague idea that all maybe there's some invisible stuff as opposed to someone making a concrete idea that's like, oh, the extra matter is needed to create this effect in space, blah, blah blah. About 100 years ago, different astronomers were looking at different stuff in space and they were looking at the way that it moved around and there started to be evidence for the presence of extra stuff that we can't see. So you would look at like the way a Galaxy was moving and in space, the, the main force that that pulls things around is gravity.

25:37 And you can look at something and kind of by looking at like the number of stars and, you know, gas and dust and all the stuff you can see, you can like estimate roughly how much mass there is, which means you should be able to estimate how much gravity there is. And so you should be able to estimate how stuff should move. And like what people started to see is like, oh, when we look at these like galaxies and we count up all the bits of matter we can see, the way stuff is moving cannot be accounted for if all the gravity is only coming from the stuff we can see. There has to be some extra stuff, some extra invisible stuff that isn't giving off light so telescopes can't see it. That's providing extra mass, that provides extra gravity that holds stuff together. And this idea was kind of like floating around for a while and then it started to gain like really good scientific traction in the 1960s, Nineteen 70s.

26:25 Particular work of these astronomers, Vera Rubin and Ken Ford and others, measuring what were called the rotation curves of galaxies. So you look at like a spiral Galaxy, like the Milky Way, like our own Galaxy, and it's like kind of a spinning disk. So there's like a big, heavy thing in the center. And then there's these spiral arms of matter that are just kind of like rotating around them. And if you use a telescope, you can look at a Galaxy like that and you can measure how fast all the different parts of the Galaxy are rotating. So you can say, like, OK, how fast is the part near the center spinning as opposed to the part in the middle, as opposed to the part on the edge? Then if you just looked at a Galaxy with the telescope and counted all the stuff you could see, you would say, OK, most of the stuff I can see is near the middle of the Galaxy, there's a big bulge of matter, and then it gets wispier and wispier to the outside, which means that in near the middle there, gravity should be really strong.

27:15 And then as you get to the outside gravity, the pull towards the center should be weaker because you're further away. There's less matter. And so. Sorry, was that a question? Yeah. Question I wanted to ask on that. So that means that that that means that there's something very heavy typically in the center of these galaxies, that is, yeah, putting everything towards it, right. Yeah, so that's right at the center of galaxies, there's what's called a supermassive black hole usually, which is a giant, giant dense core of the Galaxy. And then also there's just because of, I mean, it's the nature of a spiral. Like the arms get closer together near the center. There's just more stuff there, like more of the the stars and the gas and the dust. Like if you just look at a Galaxy, most of the stuff is near the middle and it gets more and more sparse as as the arms go further out.

27:59 So the gravity should be strong near the middle and it should be weak on the outside, which means that the stuff should be spinning around really fast near the middle. And it should be spinning around a lot more slowly around the outside. Because it's like if you've ever had a ball on a string and like you spin it around, you know, like you can only spin it so fast before the string breaks and the ball flies away. In this context, like gravity is the string. So like the stronger gravity near the middle means that the ball should be able to spin around really quickly. And the weaker gravity near the outside of the Galaxy means that it should only be able to go like much more slowly without being like flung off into space, right? And so that's, that's like, that's what we expect galaxies to behave like just by looking at them. But then it turns out that when you actually measure the velocities of the stuff in the Galaxy, the parts near the outside are not spinning really slowly compared to the parts in the middle.

28:47 In fact, they're spinning just about as fast or faster than the stuff near the middle. So they're moving like really quickly around the outside of the Galaxy, even though we can't see like what it is those speeds. Well, but those speeds, like if all the gravity was coming from just the stuff we can see in the middle, the Galaxy should be like flying off into space. There shouldn't be enough gravity to keep it bound to the to the center of the Galaxy. So there has to be some extra stuff, some invisible matter in the Galaxy that is holding it together, providing extra gravity and like pulling in on the outer parts of the galaxies to allow them to like spin that quickly without like completely breaking apart. So that's essentially like the first good bit of evidence for the problem. There's all this dark matter. It's providing extra gravity. It's holding galaxies together. And then people go, OK, So what is it? OK, what's it, What's it made of? And there were historically a very popular hypothesis was this particle called a weakly interacting massive particle or a WIMP.

29:40 Because, yeah, silly acronyms are very important in physics. People like to come up with, with fun, fun names for things. And these particles are essentially like they do what they say on the tin. They are massive, which is to say they have mass and they interact very weakly with the regular matter. And they are just all around us. And they're, they're passing through us because we're sitting in a big soup of dark matter. And occasionally one of them might like bump into one of the atoms in our body or one of the atoms in an experiment we make and give it a little bit of energy. And this was like the favored hypothesis for dark matter for probably, I don't know, 40 years or so that it was made of these things, these, these weakly interacting massive particles. And there were reasons for that that I could go into or probably what in terms of why that was the most popular model, it was to do with some deep theory stuff. So I guess this comes back to your question, like how do people decide on how to do experiments? Maybe it is actually instructive to talk about the the. I would love, I would love to hear. I'm fascinated doing a great job explaining this. Sure, thank you.

30:41 So we had this big problem with the dark matter and people were like, oh, what's it made of? And then at the same time, like a different group of physicists. And so I guess this is sort of similar to what we're talking about before with this kind of like so many different streams of stuff we need to know about. Like you have the astronomers who were going like, whoa, there's all this extra matter or there has to be all this extra matter to account for the way the galaxies move. And at the same time, like particle physicists and, and, and quantum theorists and people were starting to try and build different like models that explain the whole universe, like the grand unified theories and stuff. So sort of like unrelated physics. And there was this really, really popular kind of family of new models to explain the universe that was called super symmetry, which is the name for just like a class of, of, of models and physics that that try to account for all of the like, essentially trying to come up with like one big grand unified equation or theory that explains the whole universe.

31:33 And like one of the popular candidates for this was called super symmetry. And one of the consequences of supersymmetry, like if it was real, was it predicted all of these new particles. And one of the particles that it predicted was this thing called a called a neutral, you know, don't worry about it. But when people looked at like the properties that they expected that new particle to have, they like matched exactly with the properties of dark matter, which is to say they had mass. They would be wary with the interacting. And they would be expected to be produced in the like, early universe in about the right amount to account for all the dark matter. And so everyone was like, OK, great, we've solved it. Like this is it, the neutralino is going to be the dark matter. It's also going to prove supersymmetry is real. And we're going to solve all of this in like 1-1 fell swoop. You know, we're gonna we're gonna find this particle that's going to prove our ground unified theories, right? It's also going to explain the dark matter. It was just too beautiful.

32:24 Like what was it too? Sorry. When was that? When did it? Was that discovered? Mid 20th century this this would have been so like, yeah, sixties, 70s, around that time, probably maybe a little earlier, mid 20th century would have been the prediction of this particle. And everyone was like, so convinced that this was like going to be it and build a bunch of experiments to try and detect this particle and prove that it was real. And yeah, it just kind of didn't find it. So sorry. In what sense? Well, we, we build different experiments to try and and find these particles passing through US. And like generation after generation of these experiments has not seen this particle, they've not detected it. And it's starting to call into question the idea of whether this theory is right, just because this theory is so beautiful that it predicts the existence of this particle that explains all these problems.

33:19 And you know, that doesn't mean it's a bad theory. I guess this kind of gets back to like what we were talking about before. Well, like, say that it's a it's a good, it's a good idea. It like it all, you know, there's no, it's very self consistent. It solves a lot of problems. It all hangs together nicely on paper. It just sort of starts to look like that's maybe not the way the universe works. Like the universe doesn't have to work a certain way just because it looks nice on paper. Like just because you can write down these really gorgeous theories of super symmetry that you know, are mathematically beautiful and perfect and elegant and solve all that problem. The universe doesn't have to care about that. Like it can just work a different way. You can just think. It is not that particle can just turn out to not exist. And I don't, I want to be clear in case there are any other particles. This is listening to this. I'm, I'm not saying that that winds are completely dead. I'm not saying that sort of symmetry is dead or anything. I'm talking in very broad terms.

34:07 I think it would be fair to say about very broad shifts. There are people, very serious people who are still, you know, believe that we're going to find these particles, that these experiments are still ongoing. They're certainly not ruled out by any, by any nature that it's still possible that these particles exist. I'm simply saying this was the historically most popular candidate because it accounted for these beautiful theoretical models. And it also was going to explain the dark matter. And I built all these experiments. And over time, as the evidence for that particle has started to look a little bit shakier, other kind of ultimate dark battle models and hypotheses have started to become more more prevalent in the field. And that is kind of where my work comes in because whilst winds have sort of been like, yeah, the historic juggernaut in the the search for dark matter around, I'm going to say, I guess it's really like the ideas about these particles began in like the late 20th century, like 70s, eighties, 90s. They really started to become like a big force in definitely the 21st century.

35:05 And it's it's searches for this different particle called the axion, which is a different kind of dark Meadow. Great. Real quickly before we dive into that, I just want to confirm that I understand correctly. Is the is the issue with the WIMP particle and the neutralino? Yeah. Is the issue that we can't measure it and so we're saying it can't be it because we haven't measured, because you haven't found an accurate way to measure it. Is that? Is that what the problem ultimately is? It's some two things. So I mentioned before that like the WIMP particle was motivated by these like grand unified theories called supersymmetry. And for a long time, particle physicists were very excited about supersymmetry and, and many still are.

35:47 And you've probably heard of the Large Hadron Collider, like the big particle accelerator that is the like, maybe, maybe not. OK, maybe this is one of my OK, I need to, I need to get out of my head problems. Yeah, sorry. I said I'm a real novice, but yeah. Yeah, sure, sure. Well, yeah, the the Large Hadron Collider is this giant particle accelerator that is underneath like several countries in Europe. It's like the biggest physics experiment that's ever been built. It's like many, many kilometers of, of particle acceleration with like super strong magnets that drive the particles around and smash them together. And like, look at what comes out. And it's, it's, it's part of a like grand tradition of what's called like Collider physics, which is how we like discover stuff about like the very, very small particles in the universe.

36:32 Like we smash atoms together, we see what falls out and we go, OK, the atoms made-up of protons and neutrons and most protons and neutrons are made-up of quarks and blah, blah, blah. And that's, that's like the history of particle physics. And the, the Large Hadron Collider is this massive, massive thing that was built, you know, to, to do lots of new physics. But one of the things that people were really excited about was it was going to find all of this evidence of supersymmetry, not just the neutralino, the web stuff matter, but like all of these other predictions of supersymmetry. And so we built this big Collider and we did all of these like precise experiments and we discovered all kinds of like incredible things, like new particles, figured out all this other amazing stuff about particle physics and no evidence of supersymmetry. And so it was kind of like, so the, the theoretical grounding for the existence of this particle, whilst it's not dead, it's fair to say it's looking a little shakier.

37:21 And you know, many physicists will tell you, oh, we just like if we have a, a more powerful Collider, if we can access higher energy scales, then we'll eventually find the supersymmetry. So yeah, like I said, by no means dead, certainly shakier as a, as a theoretical motivation for the existence of a particle. And then at the same time, all of the dark matter experiments that have been looking for the web dark matter for decades have not seen it. So like whilst when you're looking for like an unknown unknown, you can't ever say it's like completely ruled out, right? Because you can always just say, oh, it exists in a different vast range or a different energy scale, or it's more weakly coupled is I think personally, I'm willing to stand on this fair to say that it is at least worth considering the fact that these particles may not exist and that there are other candidates that we should be looking for. You know that's that's not to say sorry. It's a very polite way.

38:12 Of saying it too, you know, because it's just an idea, you know, You're not insisting on anything. Yeah, that, that's right. Like I certainly and like, yeah, to be clear, like there's, there's generations of these web experiments that are still being built that I think should be built because the hypothesis is by no means completely ruled out. And we have a lot of a lot of expertise at building these things now and a lot of very capable scientists who can, you know, it's kind of like a marginal, like it's like the the field is already built. So building the next generation detector is like a marginal cost compared to spinning up an entire new field. So I think that is very much worth continuing to pursue as an area, at least for the moment. But I also think it is fair to say that both the theoretical groundings of the things and the experimental searches have meant that it makes sense to consider alternate candidates more seriously.

38:55 And that is, that is kind of where my work comes in, which is, yeah, like I said, this, this newer kid on the block as it comes to, you know, dark matter, it's called the Axion, which is it's sort of a similar story. It, it falls out of a different area of particle physics, There's this other problem. So I mentioned like, oh, super symmetry is the motivation for this particle slightly different thing. There's this big problem in particle physics that I honestly will not go into because it's, it's very, you know, people can Google if they're interested. It's called the strong CP problem. Suffice to say, it is a very glaring hole in an otherwise incredibly precise theory. So like we have this really, really nice mathematical theory called quantum chromo dynamics that explains things about the way particles behave on very small scales. And it's really precise.

39:37 Like it's able to predict things, interactions and particle gliders really, really, really well, except for the fact that it has this one gaping hole in it. And whenever you've got something like that, it's like, oh, that's really interesting because this theory is clearly not completely bad. It's really good. It's just predicting like one thing that we just equivocate like unequivocally do not see. And so like, what, what's what's going on there? Like what's wrong with this theory? You know, what's the patch we need to put on it? What's the change we need to make? And in the 1970s, these physicists proposed that you can solve this problem by introducing this new particle called the axion. And it's introduced and it has these certain properties that interact with that physics in such a way that it removes that problem. And then shortly thereafter. A bunch of other physicists, sort of similar story to the WIMP, looked at this prediction of this new particle, the axion, and said, oh, it also has the exact properties we need of dark matter. And it can also be produced in the early universe in such a way that it can account for all of the dark matter that's all around us.

40:30 So that makes it a compelling dark matter candidate. This it's, it's, it's, it's very plausible that the dark matter could be made of these particles. They're motivated by this other problem. They can account for the dark matter. So we should look for them. And so that is the kinds of experiments that I do is searching for this particular type of dark matter called the axion. Now, when you're searching for dark matter, it doesn't matter what model it is. And also to be clear, there's like dozens of other candidates as well. These are, I think it's probably fair to say, just kind of the two biggest ones, the Wimp and the Axion. The, the, when you're searching for them, regardless of what you're searching for, you've still got a like, it's not like, oh, I'll build an experiment for this particle. I'll build an experiment for this particle.

41:11 There's one type of experiment to search for that particle because the properties of these things exist in what are called parameter spaces. So like part of the issue is we don't know the mass of either of these particles. So like we don't know if say dark matter is axions, whether it's made of a smaller number of very heavy axions or a much larger number of very light axions. We know roughly how many total mass there is like in a given volume. We just don't know what's making that up. And then we also don't know how strongly interacting they are. So if you imagine like a 2 axis parameter space, like on the X axis you would have the mass of the particle and on the Y axis you would have like how strongly it interacts with the regular matter. And the particle can be like anywhere in that space.

41:52 And so when you when you do an experiment, you are only sensitive to like a small subset of that space at any given time. You can only make your experiment to search for axions in a given mass range in a given sensitivity range. And so that's essentially the name of the game. It's building different experiments that probe different regions of the parameter space and either say, OK, upgrade, we've detected dark out of here. Or as has been the case with every experiment to date, no, we didn't. And we can rule out a chunk of this parameter space and we can say like, OK, cool, we searched here, we didn't see it, so that bit's ruled out and now we can move on to the next bit. Or we can try and make the thing more sensitive to try and push lower and lower on the Y axis. I see. OK, think I think I got that all.

42:32 I think, I think I got that all hang on. I'm trying to think of that the best way to process and to to respond. So how do you, So what are you observing? What are you taking, and how are you observing it, and how? And what's the process like for actually filtering out whether or not you're finding this dark matter or not? Good, good question. So it depends on on what you believe it is. But going forward, I'm just going to talk about axioms, because that's the kind of thing I do. Sure, with Axion, dark matter searches, one of the things that's nice about axions as a candidate is they are predicted to have an interaction with photons, which are particles of light. And the thing that as a species we are the best at detecting. We're really good at observing photons. Our eyes do it really well.

43:18 We build telescopes, we build other kinds of sensors that are really, really good at detecting small amounts of light, which makes them experimentally attractive as a candidate because you have a mechanism by which you can take this invisible stuff, dark matter, and convert it into a little flash of light, something we can see a really, really good at observing. And we do that with experiments that are called Axion haloscopes, which actually were proposed by a guy who was at the University of Florida. His name is PS Akivi. He's a great physicist. And yeah, sorry, Pierre Sikivi PIERESIKIV i.e. Yeah. Anyway, very, very good, good physicist there at UF. Anyway, he proposed this type of experiment where you can convert axons into photons in inside a special kind of chamber. And so the way you do that is you apply a strong magnetic field.

44:10 So like a really, really strong magnet, like stronger than the kind of magnet that you might use in a scrap yard to pick up a car, kind of stronger than an MRI magnet. And if there are axions inside passing through some amount of them will interact with that magnet and convert into one of these little photons, these little flashes of light. And then the game, the game becomes detecting those photons. And then it's about how you do it. And the thing that makes it hard is what lots of things make it hard. The two things that make it hardest are because the so the the frequency of that photon or like the color of the light if you will, depends on the axion mass which is not a quantity that we know. So we don't know what frequency that light is going to be and the size of the signal like whilst we don't know how strongly it couples. So like how many of those photons are going to convert per second.

44:56 What we do know is that it is a very small number. So like even in the kind of best case scenarios, it's going to be a very, very small signal of light. So we're looking for tiny little flashes of light of an unknown frequency, which is a really difficult experimental challenge because you can only build a light detector to be sensitive to some bandwidth of frequencies at any given time. But you are getting maybe? Am I understanding this correctly? So you're basically causing a reaction that is measurable, right? Meaning that the, the, the magnetic force allows the axiom to I guess collides or whatever it is interacts with axiom in the sense that causes it to turn to light.

45:39 And you could capture that, right? And you could actually. That's exactly right. That's the that's the goal of these experiments. And the challenge is that you don't know how much light it's giving off, or what the percentage of light to its mass it creates in the process. Yeah, we don't know how much of it it's producing that. That would be like the probability of interaction. The other thing we don't know is the the like, if you've like, if you use a radio, right and like you tune the radio through different frequencies, like it's like looking for like a radio station. We don't know the radio station. Like we have to tune our detector because we don't know the frequency of the light that's coming out. So it's actually very similar to to a radio station because a radio station is a thing that is picking up radio frequency light, a radio tune.

46:22 It's so it's actually quite similar, like we're tuning, we're tuning a radio detector to look for light of an unknown frequency and an unknown signal strength as well, which makes it challenging because, yeah, like much like your car's radio receiver, it needs to be tuned because it is only sensitive to some small bandwidth, the frequencies at any given time. The same is true for our receivers that we use in the Axion experiments. We can only be sensitive to some bandwidth of frequency. So we have to tune the thing around and that's just experimentally quite challenging. It turns out tuning the location in frequency space the key detector is sensitive to. And then of course there's just the fact that the signals are incredibly weak, which means that you are always looking for something small buried in a huge amount of noise. So that's that's the experimental challenge is to bring the noise level down and to increase your ability to do like statistical data processing to pull small signals out of noise. I gotcha.

47:13 I can't believe I got, but I got you. Great, glad to hear it. Hey, that's a real that's a real testament to your ability to explain this stuff because you did it. That was that was that was a trip. And I'm happy I was able to hang on for the ride. I'm. Glad. So, but it's got to be incredibly encouraging to know that you are getting like you're getting a reaction, you're getting something tangible that you can that you can measure. When was the first time that this was measured, and how long has it been since we're trying to accurately measure it? So this, this is the thing so much like with like with the with the Wimps, what I'm describing is the mechanism by which this interaction is proposed to occur. We have not actually yet detected this particle. That's the thing we're doing searches for this. So when we run an experiment, because light is everywhere, you detect stuff all the time.

48:03 And then the question becomes like, is that an axion? Have we definitively proven that this thing exists, right. So this, this is this is the the great mystery of dark matter. We've known about this stuff for about 100 years. We've done a lot of very precise experiments and we have never like categorically detected it directly here on Earth. It may be that we just can't, It may be that we are wrong about what it's made of. It's not made of limbs, it's not made of axions, and it just doesn't interact with the type of stuff we can make detectors out of. There's no reason that can't be the case. All we can do. I was going to say the beginning. I was going to say the beginning. Well, you just think that our method of measuring things, you know, could capture, you know?

48:43 Yeah, there's there's no reason to to well, OK, I'm not going to say there's no reason to believe that, but it's not, it's not impossible that. Yeah, we just can't, right. Like so. So when we talk about physics, we talk about the particles in the universe interacting through what we call the four fundamental interactions. And this, this is just a list of stuff that particles in the universe are allowed to do. It's really, it's quite, it's quite descriptive. We don't in some ways have like a deep, deep why knowledge of why these things exist. We just kind of have observed and we can very precisely mathematically describe these four different kinds of interactions. So the four things that as far as we know, it's possible there are more.

49:28 The four things we know about now, that stuff is allowed to do in the universe, gravity, that's one of them. So that is stuff that has mass, attracts other stuff that has mass. Anything that has mass, even something very light, something very heavy, they pull on each other gravitationally. Another one, electromagnetism. This is the main force that you actually feel in your day-to-day life. If you push down on the table in front of you or sit on the chair you're sitting on, the reason your hand doesn't go through the table and the reason you don't fall through the chair is because the particles in you and the particles in the surface are repelling each other using electromagnetism. It's also the force that makes, you know, magnets stick to fridges and like static electricity, that interaction is, is is a really dominant and important one. Then there's these two other ones that are called the strong and weak nuclear interactions, which only occur on very, very small scales inside atoms and inside subatomic particles that are to do with the way that those but are bound together and the way that they decay apart.

50:21 So those are the four things that we know stuff is allowed to do. As far as dark matter is concerned, we know it must experience gravity because that's the only way we see it. We see it pulling on stuff in space, right? We see the presence of extra mass, so it must have gravity. We know it must not experience electromagnetism because it's passing right through us all the time. It passes through itself. We can observe like large clusters that contain both regular and dark matter hitting each other. The regular matter like collides and sprays off. The dark matter just goes straight through. So we know it doesn't experience electromagnetism, we know it doesn't experience the strong nuclear interaction, because if it did, it would like mess up the way atoms form and would be able to detect it. And we're not sure about the other one, so it's entire, but it is entirely possible that dark matter is some new kind of exotic material that only experiences gravitation. It just only has gravity.

51:11 And so the only way we're ever going to see it is by looking in space with telescopes at the way stuff moves around and seeing the presence of this matter. And all these experiments that we're doing on Earth to try and detect it by these other mechanisms will just never work because the dark matter just doesn't interact that way. It's possible, but in terms of like, why are we doing those experiments then? It's because it's the only thing we can do. Like we, we, we, you know, we can only use the, the tools that we have. And like you would say, it's like it's, you know, we, we're, we're trying to answer a big mystery. Anyone being intellectually honest is going to tell you, we may never answer it, but like, does that mean we shouldn't try? You know, we, we, we try with the best tools we have available and we'd be honest about the fact that it may not work. But if we want to try and solve the mystery, this is the only way we're going to.

52:01 And even if the stuff that we're doing now isn't the right stuff, it's still like the steps on the road, you know, like if we rule out the fact that it is either of these particles, well, OK, now we need to do the next thing and maybe eventually we'll get there. Like this is the like science is it? It's, it's not like it's not, I guess I would say it's, it's like this. I heard this said somewhere sometime. I can't remember who said it. But science is not a guaranteed path to knowledge. It is not guaranteed that by doing the science you will get the answer. But it is a reliable path to knowledge and it is kind of the only one that we have so. Really like. We go, here's the problem. We throw our best hypothesis at it in terms of stuff we can actually do, and we do the best we can to try and answer the question.

52:47 I gotcha. I gotcha. What do do people hypothesize about the potential uses of understanding or applying, you know, our knowledge and trying to, I guess, control or manipulate? It yeah, it's a great question. It's all my favorite ones about dark matter like, OK, cool. So it's an interesting problem. I agree. Get into it. I'm sorry about that. Sorry. Oh, no, no, no, no. That's great. It's the right time. Yeah. It's one of these good questions. It's like, OK, cool. You've convinced me. It's an interesting problem. But like, ultimately, why do we care about this? I think there's a lot of different. I imagine that if something that comprises so much of the galaxy's mass, it's got to be enormously, enormously valuable, no? Well. I mean, hey, so that's that's one of the things is because we don't know what it is.

53:29 It's kind of you can't, you know, we can't say one way or another. But I think the fact that we don't know what it is and we know there's so much of it to me is like reason enough that we need to know what it is. Because like, you look around and you think about like, OK, think about everything humans have accomplished, computers, modern medicines, space travel, all of art and literature, everything that's ever moved you in this life, all of that has been achieved using 1/6 of the matter in the universe. And there was five times as much again of this invisible stuff called dark matter. We just don't know what it is like. So, like, to me, the idea that it's not worth trying to figure out what it is is kind of ridiculous. Like, we, we need to know what it is first. And if it turns out that it's useless, well, OK. But we had to, we had to find that out because it could be, you know, like this whole new world of, of incredible stuff. And, and so that's like the very kind of high level, kind of, you know, optimist answer on the other side, like the slightly more practical answers, like there's a few of those as well. If it is axions for, for one, that's really particularly appealing because we can convert them into light, which is, you know, a form of energy that we can potentially harness and, and use for things.

54:33 I mean, we'd, we'd need a few things to go our way for that to be the case. Like we'd need the coupling to be quite strong. We'd need the local density of axions to be strong. But anyway, it's, it's, it's certainly interesting. You know, you can also imagine that people have proposed using them for like communication technology, like if we can figure out how to reliably convert, because the conversion works both ways. If axions exist and they couple to photons the way we think they do, you can also turn photons into axions. And so you can imagine like taking some signal of information that's encoded in in photons, which is a common way we send information, converting it into a stream of axions and then reconverting it on the other side. And having like unhackable, undetectable communication transmitted by dark matter that you can shoot right from the center of the planet. You don't need satellites or whatever. So, you know, you can get all kinds of interesting sci-fi ideas out of axions because you can couple them to photons. And I do think it's worth thinking about those things. But ultimately I think the first thing we need to do is figure out what this stuff is and then we can start looking at like what it's useful for.

55:26 And then of course, there's the other side of it, which is that like we, we know doing this kind of fundamental research in inevitably leads to new technologies and, and, and new kinds of like spin out. So there's, there's two aspects of it, right? There's like, as we build better and better experiments, we're building better detectors, we're developing quantum technologies, we're developing things that are going to be useful in other areas. That's certainly the case, and that has always been the case. There is also the fact that like doing fundamental physics is the only thing historically that has led to massive technological breakthroughs. There's and like usually they don't come from people doing research with like well defined outputs and answers. And this is like a key point that I like to that I like to hit like so for example, like all modern computing technology, communication technology is based on this thing called a semiconductor transistor.

56:15 And our ability to engineer those semiconductor transistors relies heavily on our understanding of quantum physics. And if you ask the people who discovered quantum physics in like the early 20th century, what is this for, they wouldn't have said 01 day. It will allow us to build something called a semiconductor transistor that will eventually go inside something called an iPhone. They would have said, I'm just trying to understand the way the universe works on a fundamental level. And that is the thing that inevitably leads to making the new stuff. Another great example is radio waves in like the 1880s when radio waves were discovered by the scientist Heinrich Kurz is recent enough that you can actually go read newspaper articles from the time. There's a journalist who interviews Heinrich Kurtz and says Professor Hertz, you know, I'm paraphrasing, great job that you've discovered these radio waves. But essentially like of what possible use are these radio waves?

57:04 And Heinrich Hertz goes, I don't know, probably nothing. I just wanted to prove that Maxwell, who's the physicist who proposed them, was correct. And now, of course, the entire modern communication network is based on radio wave communication. So like, you don't always know what the downs to impacts of these things are, but doing that research is the only way we ever make truly groundbreaking discoveries. And if we, if we require that the people doing that research can tell you from day one what technological, scientific or like, you know, commercial output is going to come, then we are doing something wrong. Right, can not a completely fun, speculative, you know, sci-fi fun level. Can you potentially understand the UAP phenomenon that's been going on through the through, especially the way the way you describe the relationship between axioms and photons and the way that they kind of could convert over And it almost, And I mean, you know, the, I guess the common thing that people seem to be saying about the UAP UFOs is just the sheer speed and velocity doesn't seem to, it seems to break our understanding of physics at the moment.

58:10 And I'm not sure if you're and I don't, and I'm actually, I'm curious what you would think, if you are familiar with Eric Weinstein, who goes on long podcasts and talks about how he thinks that there's basically blacklisted physics or classified physics that we just have not, you know, that like we've basically been at a dead end for a while and it's been going on in a classified, compartmentalized, you know, capacity. And this is kind of what we've been seeing. I don't know if he goes as far as it is what we've been seeing, but he says it's curious about the relationship between the. 2 Sure. Want to talk about your PS. The first thing I will say is that I am by no means an expert in this area and I you know this is fun. This is just fun Yeah, just for fun. The next thing I would say is without looking like, because I'm probably not like, as I know there's like interesting stuff going on in that area in terms of like new releases of information and stuff and like, you know, declassified videos and whatever.

59:09 I know that that stuff has been confirmed by like military officials saying like, yeah, these are real videos or whatever. The last time I honestly checked in on that stuff in any kind of serious way, like looking into it was like a couple of years ago, to be honest. But sort of I imagine things may have changed. But just to like one thing that I think is quite interesting and important to, to acknowledge about some of that stuff at the time, at least the stuff that I was referring to from a couple of years ago, like the stuff that gets referred to as like physics defying or physics breaking. I, I think it's care. Like it's important to be careful about that language because like a lot of the stuff people like, oh, it's like moving so fast, it's accelerating so fast or whatever, based on like statements made by like the like people on the planes who are like filming the thing. And it's like, it's not like, yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

59:59 But it's like, you know, the the people who are measuring a thing, moving really fast or whatever. They're not like, they're very smart people who know how to fly these planes, but they're not necessarily like. They're not just the ones saying it. It's the people it's captured on. I mean, you, we have military footage of it. A lot of this, because a lot of this stuff revolves around military. I don't. Know that's that's what I'm talking about like the military guys right like so like the guys like on the video will be like whoa that thing's crazy I've never seen it like they don't like that doesn't mean that it's like in physics it means it's a possible plane right like they don't necessarily have the like so I I don't know I've seen I've seen things but someone's like oh this crypt defies physics and then like people look at it and they're like well clearly that's like that speed is a radar error this frame shows the right speed and that's actually.

1:00:42 Just I'm not referring to the, I'm not talking about like Twitter videos. I'm talking about, you know, if something's giving, you know, if you could detect something with the radar, that means that there's tangible data that's being collected about it, isn't it? Doesn't. It totally. I'm not saying these things don't I'm not saying these things don't exist to to be clear, sure. I'm, I'm just saying that like, I think like I haven't seen any like confirmed official footage that could like, and I'm not saying it doesn't exist that that like you could look at it and be like, oh wow, that truly breaks physics. There's no way that a craft could do that, you know. And, and like the this, I think the stuff that has been like officially like military footage risers just like, yeah, that's a really interesting weird thing that's going on. It doesn't look like a it doesn't look like a plane that we're familiar with today. But yeah, I'm not, I'm not convinced that that stuff is necessarily physics breaking.

1:01:30 Yeah. But anyway, to to talk about in a more big picture sense, do I believe that there are aliens in the universe? My answer is almost certainly yes. I mean, the universe is very, very large. It would be crazy to think that there aren't aliens somewhere in terms of whether they've ever been to Earth. I don't know. I, I personally, I think like it's totally unlikely. Like as much as I want to believe in like the, you know, like the, and I, I wouldn't say that it's, it's like impossible. I just think it's like kind of unlikely given the distances involved and, and the fact that like, yeah, obviously. And, and this is where it gets in the realm of like, oh, OK. But you can imagine some like massively, massively advanced thing. And it's just like, but at that point it's like, it's, it's purely like it's, it's literally purely speculation. Like, is it, is it possible?

1:02:12 Yeah. Is it possible that there is some like massively, massively advanced civilization and it's able of doing like wormhole travel across space? I'm sure. Yeah, that of course that's possible. But I don't believe that those people are like like if if the station was not advanced and they didn't want us to know about them, like we wouldn't. And if they did want us to know about them, we would like the Earth based governments wouldn't be able to stop them. So I don't know that's that's like those are the things that my brain always gets hitched on when I think about this stuff is that I'm just like as much as I look at like interesting UAP phenomena and I'm like, wow, that's really interesting. I really like and I do believe there are probably aliens in the universe. I just like I can't get over these mental hurdles of like the why of it I find so challenging.

1:02:54 It's just like, well, why would they be here and not telling us? Or if they didn't want us to know, why would we then be able to film it like that? That seems, that seems weird to me. But you know, in terms of like, is it possible like, yeah, I guess it's possible that there's some like massively advanced technology in terms of relation to dark matter. I don't know. I mean, it'd be throwing out sci-fi buzzwords like, oh, OK. Well, like manipulating gravity by course in the dark matter and that lets us travel super falls like, yeah, I don't know, maybe, but it's that stuff's way out there. Although stuff that is way out there, sometimes real, but it's it's it's, yeah, more. Often than I'm than I'm comfortable with actually is what I said a lot more often than I'm comfortable with. I found recently, you know, every everything that I thought was wild is is just having it, You know, it's just being confirmed.

1:03:40 I'm like this. Yeah, but I, I tend to, you know, I, I think, I think I have a really strong argument with the why and the Y factor, particularly with, coupled with the fact that this activity does happen on military bases, does lead me to think that. Especially because now we're having, you know, conversations at least from the Americans. And I actually was going to ask you this from the Australian perspective, because my understanding is that other countries are not as skeptical about alien life in general as Americans are. And I think Americans have an enormous, enormous stigma. It's even the possibility that humans aren't alone, you know? Right. OK, Well, yeah, I mean, that's interesting. I think. I don't know, I, I, I wouldn't want to speak to like the Australian general public perspective. I would say most of the scientists I know, I imagine believe that aliens probably exist somewhere, you know, like the, the, that, that it's, it's most of the businesses probably believe that.

1:04:33 I, I think from at least the one that I've spoken to, tend to tend to think that the universe is so vast. If the universe's purpose was to create humans, Gee, there's a lot of waste in that simulation. You know that there are easier ways to do that than to make. So anyway, yeah, in, in a broad sense, I, I tend to to think that that's probably the case. But yeah, the UAP services find hard to connect. I think it's just more likely like the more, the more likely explanation is that they're just like highly advanced military craft that we just have the disclosure about or some other kind of thing. I, I don't know, I mean, like, don't get me wrong, like I find this substitute super interesting and I like to talk about it and I like to think about it. I just, I think, yeah, it's, it's easy to jump to the alien explanation and I would love if that were true. I just, I think that would be really cool. I just I'm yet to see anything that couldn't reasonably be explained by something else.

1:05:30 When I was about, I don't know, maybe 9 or 10, I grew up in New York and during the change of seasons, I don't know, there's a phenomenon in Australia. But when there's a pretty drastic, dramatic, dramatic change in temperature, it looks sometimes like the stars are shimmering and changing color. Sometimes, I don't know, probably a regular phenomenon. You know, I mean, there's a million different reasons why that would be. I was 11 years old. I'm looking at my window and I'm going to bed and I see these shimmering stars. I'm like, they're coming. And let me call my friend Jason, who's like the smartest friend I know. And he's a, he's a mechanical engineer. He was 11 year old at the time. And I'm like, dude, look outside.

1:06:11 He's like, what? I was like, what is that? And he's like, I don't know, you guys like pull out this like, you know, one of his books. And he was like, oh, that's just like the gas. And like, you know, like right now it's like, you know, it's small and the air is changing and the airs get heavier or whatever it is. And so it just looks like that. We're totally finding. And ever since then I've wanted it to be true, but I still alas and disappointed on a regular basis. Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. I yeah, I think it would be cool, but I, yeah, I just, yeah, I look, I'm not totally close to it as a concept. There's definitely weird stuff. I just don't think that it's, yeah, I haven't seen anything like, Oh yeah, that's definitely aliens as opposed to like, oh, that's some kind of crazy aircraft that, you know, or like some kind of drone or something. Sure, sure, sure.

1:06:53 I want to. I want to actually talk the last little bit with you, if you don't mind, about probably an equally valuable contribution you're making, which is communication and teaching. I personally am a huge advocate of education. I think that in general, it's enormously underappreciated. And the way that you were describing the type of science for the sake of science are almost like playing like a just like, you know, I mean, some of the best scientists that I know are guys that just have always loved to play and like take things apart and put things back together just for the fun of it. And like, like they're just fun people that like fun things. And so science is appealing to them for that reason. Tell me about teaching and you know, 32 year college professor. It's, it's probably, it's probably fun. I imagine.

1:07:37 I've always wanted to teach college. I teach high school. Tell me about what that's like teaching introductory classes and how you know what what you feel about it and what you're hopeful about. Sure. So to be clear, I'm not a professor. I'm a I'm a research fellow. I have a few runs on the on the totem below professor, but you know, I'm hoping to hoping to get there one day. I do some teaching at the moment. I'm actually like right now one of research fellowships. I'm actually 100% research allocated time. I have taught in the past and I do I do I really enjoy it. I really, I really enjoy it. I like in my last Gen. I was teaching intro quantum and introparticle physics at the University of WA and that was really cool.

1:08:20 And I'm a good question. It was like FIS 102, which is the smaller of the two, because everyone takes FIS 101, which is like engineers and stuff, like all take FIS 101. And then FIS 102 is like just the people going into physics. I don't know, there were maybe like 40 or 50 students in the class, not that big. And yeah, in some ways that's really nice because you can like kind of get to know the students quite well and you like know the students who show up every week and the ones who don't and you know, what to expect out of them. Honestly, more of the like, teaching stuff I do at the moment is more like, it's more like like all primary school and high school, like school engagement stuff. So like one of the things that I'm involved in is this thing here called the National Quantum and Dark Matter Road trip. Every August in Australia, it's National Science Week. And a bunch of other physicists and I get into cars and they like drive around like regional and remote schools around Australia and like visit classrooms and science teachers and, and talk about the science that's going on like around the country and try and like promote people to get interested in, in STEM and, and to go into physics at uni. Because I don't know what it's like in the US, but the rates of like enrollment in like STEM degrees at universities are like not going in the direction that they should be. So, so always trying to trying to bump those numbers up as best we can.

1:09:39 I think part of the compete problem, I completely agree. Like education is like so, so important. And a big part of the problem is just that, like, there aren't enough teachers in high school with a science background. Yeah. And so like, you'll have, like, really, like, awesome teachers who are really passionate about education, and they just, like, struggle with the STEM stuff. And so then that just gets passed on to the kids. And then the students like who may have otherwise gone into STEM because like they like just like find it kind of like difficult or intimidating or scary because their teacher did. And so then they, they don't like consider that a path they can go down. I know like, I think some countries, I think Canada has a thing where like to be a science teacher in school, you have to have like at least a few years of university science. I think that's awesome.

1:10:24 I think that would be great everywhere. But part of the problem, I guess, is just like Australia's like so big and so remote. So much of it is so remote that like, it's, it's not really. And to have like a physics teacher in every school who actually has a physics degree, you know, and like, we definitely see that out in the countryside, there are like so, so rarely like really STEM teachers with, with those qualifications like in, in the schools. Yeah. I don't know what to do about that other than try and encourage people to go into teaching. I mean, I think it's, yeah, an incredibly important and valuable thing to do. And yeah, I think more people like with stand backgrounds need to need to go do it personally.

1:11:12 Well, the problem is that you are asking people essentially to be a martyr. But it's hard. And I think a lot of people that, you know, especially if you can make bigger money, whether that be via grant or, you know, a job at A, at a private company or a government contracting company or whatever it is, you're basically asking someone to take in a very intense and refined and particular niche skill and accept essentially minimum wage for it, you know, and deal with a bunch of snotty kids and their parents. And, you know, and I, and so I, I can't imagine if I was a scientist, you know, of that caliber that I don't want to be a high school teacher either necessarily, you know. I I agree with you.

1:11:59 I mean, I guess I'm like, not so much talking about people with PhDs necessarily, although that's certainly good too, you know, And I, I mean, like, people do that. Like they're like, I'm sick of this. I'm going to go teach high school. That happens, you know, because academia is a pretty brutal game as well. But yeah, I mean, it seems hard for sure. Like, I definitely think teachers need more support and more incentive to do it. I think also like it's, it's a bigger problem outside of the cities, right? Like if you go around Melbourne or Sydney, you're probably going to find like pretty good science teachers in most of the schools. If you go out, you know, a couple hours out of one of the cities, then like it becomes harder. And that's also, I think part of the challenge is because you're not just asking someone to, to, you know, take these skills and, and go teach high school.

1:12:40 You're also asking them to like move several 100 kilometers from, you know, everyone they know to go to teach kids. So I don't know what the solution is there. And I, yeah, like I said, we just try and we try and go visit the schools and try and provide a bit of like motivation, inspiration, someone to, we try and leave results behind to help the teachers. We try and provide like a communication and just like, oh, if you know your students ever have questions, like here's a kind of catch all e-mail that they can send information, send a question to and we'll try and answer it. But yeah, it's a hard problem. I guess, like so many things, it's a hard problem and there's not an obvious solution. Yeah.

1:13:20 I think I, I mean, I personally think that we are a little overdue for an education reform, just the structure of the way that we do it. And I think that we are in a world at the moment where people could be a lot more the way that their education could be a lot more customized and personalized to their needs and allow them and really, you know, while providing a lot of the basic foundations, also allow their individual niches to be expanded on and developed and matured. And I think that integration at the moment is probably just the hardest, the hardest issue, which just trying to shake up a system exists to support to save itself. You know, that's, that's always the way it is. And this this system is not letting go very anytime soon it seems like. Yeah, I get.

1:14:05 Yeah, it's, it's an interesting thought, the idea of like a really big like revolution in the way we do education because I suppose that's happened before, you know, and I guess like, yeah, it's, yeah. Not being an expert on, on pedagogy or anything, I wouldn't want to want to comment too much other than to say I do see the value in like a journalist education. I do think it's important as a kind of foundation file learning to have a journalist education. And I'd be worried about a system that encourage people to specialize to, you know, but at the same time that is like increasingly that like that's just the way because of the same stuff I mentioned before about like in physics, like there's too much physics. You can't, you know, know all of it. So you kind of end up specializing. I guess that's probably just true in general. It's hard to know everything, but you have to know some subset of the things.

1:14:52 I guess it's just about where along the way you do that specialization because, you know, kids brains haven't always necessarily fully formed by the time we'd be asking them to make those kinds of decisions. No, yeah, I, I don't know, man. It's a hard problem. Like I said, I, I don't, I don't see like a direction that anyone's moving in that is like this is the answer. But at the same time, I do believe that like there are people who care about this problem. Yeah. Like, and, and it's, it's like everything, it's like the tendency to think like when something is so like heavily involved in like bureaucracy and like the government stuff that you're like, oh, like, yeah, that's decay because nobody cares about it. And then you go meet the people whose job it is. And it's like, Oh no, these people actually do care about this.

1:15:37 We actually do want this to be better. You know, It's just that they're, they're dealing. It's a really difficult problem as well because there's aspects of it that you haven't considered yet because you don't know about the, you know, the realities of how the system works and blah, blah, blah. And it's like, everything is always more complicated than you think it is. Like, do you think that something is like, oh, yeah, this, like, this is a problem because of these people doing this thing who are like, you know, just don't care? Like I find that is almost never the case. I was talking to a friend of mine. I did, I mentioned that I did this podcast to the nuclear physicist and he was telling me about the potential of, of efficiency and, and literally like limitless energy with, with nuclear and I was talking to other friends about it. I'm like, it's so weird. How come it's not integrated?

1:16:17 He's like, dude, because do you know what the would happen to the world if tomorrow oil was worthless? So like, do you know, like, you know, like what would happen to like every institution and like the global economy, like you can't just like pull it out from underneath it and just like have the whole thing claps on itself is like, I mean, you could if you want to, but does it, you know, it doesn't seem to be practical make any sense. Last question and then I'll let you go. I really appreciate your time and this is tons of fun. That your favorite, most and least and least favorite. I'm sorry your favorite but least accurate science movies or shows? Man, that's so good. All right, I'll preface all of this by saying I am not the kind of scientist who needs my science fiction to be believable.

1:16:59 Like I really don't care. Like I I'm not, I'm not going there for that. I don't want it to be real science. You know, I appreciate like some of it when it is because it's just like that's an extra flavor of sci-fi. Like they've made an effort to make the science kind of more believable. That's cool, but I don't get mad if it's bad. My, one of my favorite movies just in general of all time is Back to the Future. Fantastic film, great sci-fi Lots, lots to to be excited about. And yeah, the fact that the science is bad, I don't know, I found kind of charming. And in terms of stuff that's like pretty good, I mean, like in terms of like believability, I really like, I mean, I think like Andy Weir stuff, which is like the Martian and the forthcoming like project Hail Mary, I think is the movie that's coming out soon.

1:17:44 I, you know, I think that's cool and I think that he deserves props for, for making it efforts to like put a bit more of the hard science in. Like it's not 100% right, but like, like I said, who cares? It's like, it's, it's cool that he like bothers. And then I don't know what was my least favorite. Huh, I don't know, least least favorite. I mean, the the stuff that is my least favorite would have nothing to do with whether the science is good or not, and everything's true whether the narrative is good. OK, I got you, I got you, I got you. OK, I'm not going to ask you to crap on any narratives on here, but but Doctor Ben, I really appreciate the time. This was really tons of fun and I hope maybe to do this again because I think that I learned a lot and I would love to kind of process this and maybe dive more into some more stuff that you're you've been researching and looking into in some time from now.

1:18:31 But this is great meeting you and thanks again for taking the time and a short notice to hop on with me. Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having. Me. Cheers. Thanks so much. Take care. Bye.