Dark matter is the Goliath that supposedly dominates our galaxy. But it might already have met its David
You'd think Carlos Frenk would be pleased that no one calls him a crackpot any more. He wasn't always so lucky.
"I would stand up at conferences and have people almost throwing rotten tomatoes at me," he says.
His offence was to be an ardent advocate of a then controversial idea – that most of the universe's matter comes as a cold, heavy soup of invisible "dark matter". Today that is the orthodoxy. Wherever dark stuff accumulates, so the standard story goes, normal matter meekly follows, irresistibly drawn in by its overbearing gravity. This matter forms stars, and then galaxies are born – meagre pricks of light in a domineering dark empire.
But the confidence of such statements now has Frenk worried. "I suddenly realised that young scientists were taking dark matter for granted, and was absolutely scandalised," he says. You can see his point. Experiments that are supposed to conjure up dark matter have so far produced nothing. Searches for its particles streaming through the Earth have thrown up confusing, contradictory results. Models of how the stuff shapes the visible cosmos veer between triumphant confirmation and abysmal contradiction.
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