1945 TRINITY TEST
Centennial Search for Dark Matter
Govert Schilling, author of The Elephant in the Universe: Our Hundred-Year Search for Dark Matter, Part One: John Batchelor speaks with science journalist Schilling regarding the historical origins of humanity’s century-long quest for dark matter. Schilling details Jacobus Kapteyn’s groundbreaking 1922 realization that stellar motions imply unseen gravitational mass, Jan Oort’s 1932 analysis of stars orbiting the Milky Way’s galactic plane, and Fritz Zwicky’s discovery of missing mass within the Coma galaxy cluster. He further highlights theoretical breakthroughs by Jeremiah Ostriker regarding spherical galactic halos, as well as Vera Rubin and Kent Ford’s crucial observational proof demonstrating that flat galaxy rotation curves require vast quantities of invisible dark matter to hold spinning giant galaxies together. (1)