Arie Altena
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Compiled by Arie Altena
A collection of quotes, compiled on occasion of the 2012 Kontraste Festival and published in the 2012 Kontraste Cahier | PDF.
‘Today, as we have done for centuries, we gaze into the night sky from our planetary platform and wonder where we are in this cavernous cosmos. Flecks of light provide some clues about great objects in space. And what we do discern about their motions and apparent shadows tells us that there is much more that we cannot yet see.’
Vera Rubin, ‘Dark Matter in the Universe’, in Scientific American Presents (special quarterly issue: Magnificent Cosmos) 9, no. 1, 1998, pp. 106–10.
‘What do we know … of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.’
H.P. Lovecraft, ‘From Beyond’, in The Fantasy Fan , 1934 (written in 1920). <http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/From_Beyond>
‘In 1609 Galileo had discovered that looking farther into space than what he could see with the naked eye led to seeing more of the universe. Since the middle of the twentieth century, astronomers had discovered that looking farther along the electromagnetic spectrum than what they could see with an optical telescope led to seeing even more of the universe – including the echo of its origins. And now (…) you could ask (…) How could you possibly see farther than the electromagnetic spectrum – farther than seeing itself?’
Richard Panek, The 4% Universe. Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. Boston, New York: Mariner Books 2011, p. 54.
‘Understanding something you cannot see is difficult―but not impossible.’
Vera Rubin, ‘Dark Matter in the Universe’, in Scientific American Presents (special quarterly issue: Magnificent Cosmos) 9, no. 1, 1998, pp. 106–10.
‘This is the enigma which we must confront: mathematics’ ability to discourse about the great outdoors; to discourse about a past where both humanity and life are absent.’
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Continuum 2008, p. 26.
‘The search for the Standard Model Higgs boson at the LHC is reaching a critical stage as the possible mass range for the particle has become extremely narrow and some signal at a mass of about 125 GeV is starting to emerge. We study the implications of these LHC Higgs searches for Higgs portal models of dark matter in a rather model independent way. Their impact on the cosmological relic density and on the direct detection rates are studied in the context of generic scalar, vector and fermionic thermal dark matter particles. Assuming a sufficiently small invisible Higgs decay branching ratio, we find that current data, in particular from the XENON experiment, essentially exclude fermionic dark matter as well as light, i.e., with masses below 50 GeV, scalar and vector dark matter particles. Possible observation of these particles at the planned upgrade of the XENON experiment as well in collider searches is discussed.’
Abdelhak Djouadi, Oleg Lebedev, Yann Mambrini, Jeremie Quevillon, ‘Implications of LHC searches for Higgs – portal dark matter’, December 2011. <arXiv:1112.3299v3>
‘There was a time, not so long ago, when science seemed to understand how the universe worked. Everything – us, the Earth, the stars and even exotic-sounding supernovae – was made of atoms which were all created at time-zero: the Big Bang. In between the atoms was nothing, a void: quite literally, “space”. But recently things have started to unravel. There is, it seems, a lot more to the universe than meets the eye. According to the best estimates, we only really know what about 4% of it is made of. But if only 4% is made of atoms, what about the rest? The rest is made of mysterious entities about which very little is understood, with equally mysterious names: dark matter and dark energy.’
Text for the BBC Horizon documentary Most of Our Universe is Missing, 2006. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/missing.shtml>
‘I have to admit that I find neither discovery (of dark matter and dark energy) all that mysterious. To me, the word mystery conveys something that completely eludes rational explanation. The discoveries of dark matter and energy were surprises but not mysteries.’
Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape. String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company 2006, p. x.
‘Based on 50 years of accumulated observations of the motions of galaxies and the expansion of the universe, most astronomers believe that as much as 90 percent of the stuff constituting the universe may be objects or particles that cannot be seen. In other words, most of the universe’s matter does not radiate―it provides no glow that we can detect in the electromagnetic spectrum. First posited some 60 years ago by astronomer Fritz Zwicky, this so-called missing matter was believed to reside within clusters of galaxies. Nowadays we prefer to call the missing mass “dark matter,” for it is the light, not the matter, that is missing.’
Vera Rubin, ‘Dark Matter in the Universe’, in Scientific American Presents (special quarterly issue: Magnificent Cosmos) 9, no. 1, 1998, pp. 106–10.
‘(O)ur ignorance about dark matter’s properties has become inextricably tangled up with other outstanding issues in cosmology―such as how much mass the universe contains, how galaxies formed and whether or not the universe will expand forever.’
Vera Rubin, ‘Dark Matter in the Universe’, in Scientific American Presents (special quarterly issue: Magnificent Cosmos) 9, no. 1, 1998, pp. 106–10.
‘So here is what we know with good confidence. First the ordinary mass in the universe, stars, gas, clouds, and dust, is not sufficient to make the universe flat. (…) Without other hidden sources of matter, the universe would be open and negatively curved. But there is more matter in the universe, about ten times more, that we know about by its gravitational effects. It may be made up of new elementary particles that hardly interact with the usual kind. These dark-matter particles, if that’s what they are, would fill the galaxy, passing right through the sun, the earth, and even us. But they are still not enough to make the universe flat or closed. If the universe is flat, another kind of mass or energy must be pervading space.’
Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape. String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company 2006, pp. 160–1.
‘When we observe the orbits of stars and clouds of gas as they circle the centers of spiral galaxies, we find that they move too quickly. These unexpectedly high velocities signal the gravitational tug exerted by something more than that galaxy’s visible matter. From detailed velocity measurements, we conclude that large amounts of invisible matter exert the gravitational force that is holding these stars and gas clouds in high-speed orbits. We deduce that dark matter is spread out around the galaxy, reaching beyond the visible galactic edge and bulging above and below the otherwise flattened, luminous galactic disk.’
Vera Rubin, ‘Dark Matter in the Universe’, in Scientific American Presents (special quarterly issue: Magnificent Cosmos) 9, no. 1, 1998, pp. 106–10.
‘The galaxies are all heavier than the astronomers had thought. Roughly speaking, every galaxy is about ten times more massive than all the visible stars and interstellar gas that it contains. The remaining nine-tenths of the mass is a mystery. It is almost certainly not made of the things that comprise ordinary matter: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Cosmologists call it dark matter: dark because it gives off no light. Nor does this ghostly matter scatter light or allow itself to be visible in any form, except through its gravity. So strange is modern science.’
Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape. String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company 2006, p. 147.
‘Dark matter is the dominant form of matter, apparently observed to be present in the initial stages of our own aeon. It comprises some 70% of ordinary matter (where ‘ordinary’ just means not counting the contribution of the cosmological constant Λ―commonly referred to as ‘dark energy’), but dark matter does not seem to fit at all comfortably into the standard model of particle physics, its interaction with other kinds of matter being solely through its gravitational effect.’
Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time. An Extraordinary New View of the Universe. London: The Bodley Head 2010. p. 161.
‘Subtler ways to detect invisible matter have recently emerged. One clever method involves spotting rings or arcs around clusters of galaxies. These “Einstein rings” arise from an effect known as gravitational lensing, which occurs when gravity from a massive object bends light passing by.’
Vera Rubin, ‘Dark Matter in the Universe’, in Scientific American Presents (special quarterly issue: Magnificent Cosmos) 9, no. 1, 1998, pp. 106–10.
‘There is now compelling evidence for the ΛCDM model or the “Standard Model” of cosmology according to which the energy of the universe is about 74% dark energy, 22% Dark Matter, and 4% baryonic matter. There have been independent confirmations of the dark energy component of the universe from observations of high redshift Type Ia supernovae. The evidence for Dark Matter is even more compelling from the study of galactic rotation curves, acoustic oscillations in the cosmic microwave background, large scale structure formation, and gravitational lensing.’
S.M. Carroll, S. Mantry, and M.J. Ramsey-Musolf, ‘Implications of a Scalar Dark Force for Terrestrial Experiments’, in Physical Review D 81, 2010. <arxiv:0902.4461>
‘The existence of dark matter is abundantly clear to astronomers, who can see its gravitational effect on galaxies and clusters of galaxies through their telescopes. But its nature is a mystery: the stuff is utterly transparent, and passes through stars and planets as if they weren’t there. A prevailing theory holds that it is a haze of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) that formed during the Big Bang, and have permeated the Universe ever since. The trick is to catch and study WIMPs in a laboratory detector ― a task that, once again, requires ultra-low background radiation.’
Nicola Nosengo, ‘Gran Sasso: Chamber of Physics’, in Nature, 23 May 2012.
<http://www.nature.com/news/gran-sasso-chamber-of-physics-1.10696>
‘The tradition of postulating new, hard-to-detect particles began when Wolfgang Pauli correctly guessed that radioactivity involved an almost invisible particle called the neutrino. Dark matter is not made of neutrinos, but by now physicists have postulated plenty of particles that could easily form the invisible stuff. There is no mystery there – only the difficulties of identifying and detecting those particles.’
Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape. String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company 2006. p. x.
‘When dark matter collides with the nucleus of a xenon atom, a tiny light flash will be seen. This light flash is generated by the recoil that the xenon atom has experienced. Dark matter will not be made visible in this research; it remains an indirect process in which the researchers will prove the presence of dark matter by its reaction with a particle known to us. The detector can distinguish between the WIMP and possible leftover background radiation. The researchers hope that on the basis of the measurements they are able to prove it is indeed a new subatomic particle, and determine what the mass of the particle is and what its likelihood of interaction with ordinary matter is exactly.’
Text on the Nikhef website about dark matter research. <http://www.nikhef.nl/en/science-technology/astroparticle-physics/donkere-materie/xenon-1t/#c1251>
‘The early universe was a liquid-like plasma of protons and electrons in which light was trapped, with dark matter also part of the mix. “Baryons” (ordinary matter) moved in “acoustic oscillations” (sound waves) through the plasma. When the Universe cooled enough for the protons and electrons to combine into hydrogen atoms, the photons were freed and the Universe became transparent. The dark matter stayed invisible, but variations in density left their mark in the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background radiation) and were the seeds of large-scale structure in today’s universe, such as clusters of galaxies.’
Paul Preuss, ‘The Evolving Search for the Nature of Dark Energy, Part 2, Baryon Acoustic Oscillation: A Very Large Standard Ruler’, Berkeley Lab Newscenter. 2009. <http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2009/10/27/evolving-search-2/>
‘In the 1990s, scientists studying exploding stars called supernovae in far-flung galaxies discovered that the Universe’s expansion is accelerating, not slowing as theorists predicted. This discovery led them to the conclusion that some unknown process was causing the Universe to speed up, and they named it dark energy.’
Text for the BBC Horizon documentary Most of Our Universe is Missing, 2006. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/missing.shtml>
‘(I)t seems likely that the standard model is missing some fundamental physics. Perhaps we need some new kind of accelerating energy―a “dark energy” that, unlike Λ, is not constant.’
Saul Perlmutter, ‘Supernovae, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Universe’, in Physics Today 53, April 2003. <http://supernova.lbl.gov/PhysicsTodayArticle.pdf>
‘Independent evidence from measurements of the cosmic microwave background and other estimates of the matter density of the Universe provided early support for the radical idea of dark energy. Newer and quite different techniques, including weak lensing and baryon acoustic oscillations, are now poised to offer unique insights into what Nobel Prize-winner Frank Wilczek has called “the most fundamentally mysterious thing in basic science.”’
Paul Preuss, ‘The Evolving Search for the Nature of Dark Energy, Part 1, Supernovae as Standard Candles’, Berkeley Lab Newscenter. 2009. <http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2009/10/27/evolving-dark-energy/>
‘The cosmological constant is equivalent to another term that may be easier to picture: vacuum energy (…) The vacuum is empty space. By definition it is empty, so how can it have energy? The answer lies in the weirdness brought to the world by quantum mechanics, the weird uncertainty, the weird granularity, and the weird incessant jitteriness. Even empty space has the “quantum jitters”. Theoretical physicists are used to thinking of the vacuum as being full of particles flickering in and out of existence so quickly that we cannot detect them under normal circumstances.’
Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape. String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company 2006, p. 72.
‘But vacuum energy is very different. It’s a property of empty space. When empty space expands it’s still just empty space, and the energy density is exactly what it was originally. No matter how many times you double the size of the universe, the vacuum energy density stays the same, and its repulsive effect never diminishes!’
Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape. String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design. New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company 2006, p. 264.
‘Three-quarters of the Universe is dark energy, but nobody knows what it is. An unknown form of energy that fills space? Some kind of “antigravity” matter? Is it caused by extra dimensions of the cosmos, or is it just a flaw in Einstein’s theory of gravity?’
Paul Preuss, ‘The Evolving Search for the Nature of Dark Energy, Part 1, Supernovae as Standard Candles’, Berkeley Lab Newscenter. 2009. <http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2009/10/27/evolving-dark-energy/>
‘Like dark-matter astronomers, dark-energy astronomers had to confront a paradoxical question: How do you see something you can’t see? And like dark-matter astronomers, they had to expand their understanding of “seeing” until it could encompass some manner of “coming into contact with”.’
Richard Panek, The 4% Universe. Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. Boston, New York: Mariner Books 2011, pp. 207–8.
‘The dark energy evinced by the accelerating cosmic expansion grants us almost no clues to its identity. Its tiny density and its feeble interactions presumably preclude identification in the laboratory. By construction, of course, it does affect the expansion rate of the universe, and different dark-energy models imply different expansion rates in different epochs. So we must hunt for the fingerprints of dark energy in the fine details of the history of cosmic expansion.’
Saul Perlmutter, ‘Supernovae, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Universe’, in Physics Today 53, April 2003. <http://supernova.lbl.gov/PhysicsTodayArticle.pdf>
‘In spite of such strong evidence for the existence of dark energy and Dark Matter, almost nothing is known about their properties. The simplest explanation of dark energy is a small but non-zero cosmological constant. The Dark Matter properties such as its mass, quantum numbers, and interactions with the Standard Model remain unknown. Furthermore, it remains to be seen if there is only one type of Dark Matter particle responsible for all of the observational evidence, or if there exists a rich spectrum of Dark Matter particles analogous to the complexity seen in the visible sector.’
S.M. Carroll, S. Mantry, and M.J. Ramsey-Musolf, ‘Implications of a Scalar Dark Force for Terrestrial Experiments’, in Physical Review D 81, 2010. <arxiv:0902.4461>
‘We live in an unusual time, perhaps the first golden age of empirical cosmology. With advancing technology, we have begun to make philosophically significant measurements. These measurements have already brought surprises. Not only is the universe accelerating, but it apparently consists primarily of mysterious substances. We’ve already had to revise our simplest cosmological models. Dark energy has now been added to the already perplexing question of dark matter. One is tempted to speculate that these ingredients are add-ons, like the Ptolemaic epicycles, to preserve an incomplete theory. With the next decade’s new experiments, exploiting not only distant supernovae, but also the cosmic microwave background, gravitational lensing of galaxies, and other cosmological observations, we have the prospect of taking the next step toward that “Aha!” moment when a new theory makes sense of the current puzzles.’
Saul Perlmutter, ‘Supernovae, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Universe’, in Physics Today 53, April 2003. <http://supernova.lbl.gov/PhysicsTodayArticle.pdf>
‘As I see it, science is slowly and painstakingly excavating the deep structure of a reality whose fundamental features may turn out to bear little resemblance to the kinds of entities and processes with which we are currently familiar.’
‘Against an aesthetics of noise’, Ray Brassier interviewed by Bram Ieven, nY, 2009. <http://www.ny-web.be/transitzone/against-aesthetics-noise.html>
‘My conviction is that the sources and structures of human experience can and will be understood scientifically, but this integration of experience into the scientific worldview will entail a profound transformation in our understanding of what it means to be human―one as difficult for us to comprehend from within the purview of our current experience as the latter would have been for our hominid ancestors.’
‘Against an aesthetics of noise’, Ray Brassier interviewed by Bram Ieven, nY, 2009. <http://www.ny-web.be/transitzone/against-aesthetics-noise.html>
‘It seems to me that the astronomer confronted with the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and the artist trying to make sensible the very real but incommensurable phenomena of quantum mechanics find themselves in a connected search for a Sublime, for those moments of an inkling of a perhaps larger context that we only glimpse partially. For the scientist the potential horror in the Sublime would be the incomprehensibility, unpresentability, of the world; perhaps for the artist the reverse?’
Roger Malina, ‘Is there a Role for the Sublime in Artscience Today?’, draft for an article in Leonardo Reviews Quarterly. May 2012.
<http://malina.diatrope.com/2012/05/28/is-there-role-for-the-sublime-in-artscience-today/>
‘There is a reality that transcends the bounds of possible human experience set out by Kant, but we are learning that it is populated by “things” about which it is proving increasingly difficult to say “what” they are, using the resources of sense currently available to us. We will have to forge new vocabularies to be able to say what these things are. Admittedly, this still has a “speculative” ring, but I would like to insist that metaphysical speculation be constrained by scientific knowledge.’
‘Against an aesthetics of noise’, Ray Brassier interviewed by Bram Ieven, nY, 2009. <http://www.ny-web.be/transitzone/against-aesthetics-noise.html>
‘The time has come when the normal revolt against time, space, and matter must assume a form not overtly incompatible with what is known of reality―when it must be gratified by images forming supplements rather than contradictions of the visible and measurable universe.’
H.P. Lovecraft, Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in H.P. Lovecraft (eds. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei), Selected Letters III, 1929-1931. Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House 1965, p. 293.
[Selected and arranged by Arie Altena]
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Arie Altena
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