Events

"How Dark Matter Came to Matter: a History of Missing Mass, 1930-1974"

In 1974, two independent research groups in the U.S. and Estonia concluded on the existence of missing mass: a yet-unseen type of matter distributed throughout the universe. Their conclusion formed the foundation of today's dark matter problem. This talk is about how this conclusion was established—it is about the history of dark matter and the historical conditions that made dark matter come to matter. I address how, in the 1960s, anomalies in galaxy rotations were observed, and as early as in the 1930s it was known that the masses of galaxies did not add up to make sense of the dynamics of galaxy clusters. Although both observations are in hindsight considered evidence for the existence of dark matter, I show how only in the mid-1970s these results were put together as a single problem. The talk will conclude with some connections to the present search for particle dark matter.