If you’ve ever wondered about dark matter, or been asked puzzled questions about it by your friends, now you have something to point to: this charming video by 11-year-old Lucas Belz-Koeling. (Hat tip Sir Harry Kroto.)
Dark matter draw my life style
The title references “Draw My Life style,” which is (the internet informs me) a label given to this kind of fast-motion photography of someone drawing on a white board.
You go, Lucas. I doubt I would have been doing anything quite this good at that age.
Sean, what do you think of David Spergel’s new paper on black hole dark matter? http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.00017
Wow, what a fantastic presentation! I wouldn’t be surprised if Lucas solves the mystery someday!
Very cool! Marvelous explanation!
…and I spent all that time and money watching Dr. Carroll’s The Teaching Company Great Courses course “Dark Matter, Dark Energy. 😉
A well-informed production for an 11-year old!
If he were to expand upon this, I would suggest adding the part about Vera Rubin’s work and comparting the ‘mysterious particles’ hypothesis to its alternatives with their pros and cons, singals and evidences thereof.
Someone discovered that dark matter actually consist of particles, and it interacts with xenon and argon?!?!?
Succinct presentation.
Thanks Lucas. Inspired me to a Haiku:
… Search for the absent
Beyond our escaping reach
Holds us in its sway
Young Lucas rocks!
Wonderful presentation. Thank you.
Cool! Well done, Lucas. I liked the demonstration with the wine glass foot.
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” … and for more details on the subject, please read my essay.”
So, where is his essay? No link was given, and I didn’t find it via Google.
Sean sir, I am a heck of a nerd in physics! I am 14 now. When I was his age, I had my own theories explaining the existence of it. Chameleons and stuff ( to make theories more meaningful). I made a book of ideas when I was 12.If you can recall I sent you a mail on it.I never got the right endorsement :(. I don’t understand that what should I do? That kid gets a post from you which is making me burn at Planck temperature. What should I do so people take me seriously. I am not just “a lofer”. I have my potential. You have been a God to me. Always. The day I know you from. That helpful blog. I am always your follower. Please tell me what to do? I am counting on you sir. Good day!
I respectfully submit that you enjoy your intellectual gifts and let praise come to you rather than seek it out. It will come in it’s time….and I admire your energy. Raphael
What a lovely talk and presentation. The use of the wine-glass foot is beautiful–this may be aulde hat to physicists but to me it was brand new–as well as useful in providing understanding. I find fast-motion photography of drawings on a white board very powerful. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has used them to explain economic ideas. Thanks for posting this! and thanks to Mr. Belz-Koehling.
What about baryonic dark matter? How did scientists falsify a repulsive electromagnetic force and deduce that a new force, dark energy, is pushing matter in the universe apart?
This is just a kid parroting popscience hype. He talks about “mysterious invisible particles flowing through you”, when actually we don’t know that dark matter is made of particles. He says it “reacts with xenon and argon”, when that’s just another assumption. He talks about an Einstein ring, but he’s never read Einstein’s papers, and then he uses a piece of bottle-glass to emulate gravitational lensing. The glass emulates space. Talk about missing the trick.
See The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity where Einstein said “the energy of the gravitational field shall act gravitatively in the same way as any other kind of energy”. That’s spatial energy. When it’s inhomogeneous, it has a mass-equivalence and a gravitational effect. And the universe has expanded a thousandfold since the CMBR, like the raisin-cake analogy: space expands between the galaxies but not within. So the spatial energy isn’t homogeneous. So it has a mass equivalence and a gravitational effect. So every galaxy is sitting in its very own halo of “dark matter”. Only it isn’t made of particles. It’s just inhomogeneous space. Which is what a gravitational field is. Remember this:
Space is dark, it has its vacuum energy, and there’s a lot of it about.
John D. while you are probably correct that Lucas hasn’t caught up yet with all of modern physics, your passion for science has made you too critical of him. At 11 years old he has done a great presentation of “popscience”. As he grows he will fill in his head with modern science, and if he is creative, he will learn it slightly different than you or I. Perhaps he is the one who will have the key insight and find the solution to DM and DE. After all, most of our original ideas come from our youth, and we replay them through out our life. Lucas has lots of youth left to go.
In one of Dr. Carroll’s many wonderful explanations of all things physics, he talks about how a “story” helps us understand each other and keeps us glued together. Lucas told a wonderful story grounded in the current thinking with the skill of a artist. He is part philosopher and part scientist. I give him 5 stars for being so interested and creative at the same time. Keep it coming. It is so much fun to read these blogs. It was not like this when I went to school. Raphael
No way I would have constructed such a concise and to the point presentation on as difficult a topic as dark matter when I was 11. Quite an impressive young lad.
@John D
Talking about missing a trick. I learned the same things you mentioned by reading pop science. Although, gravitational lensing is the way scientist detect dark matter…
I kind of found that peculiar as well when hearing about it. Then it can be sad that a 11 year old knows more about dark matter than you do. It was why I asked about the xenon and argon bit. It seemed too specific to just be made up out of thin air, and he must of gotten it from somewhere. Made me think he may have had some information about it that I haven’t seen before…
BTW, it looked like he was actually using a suction pad to demonstrate the effect.
Finally Quantum Gravity confronts the problem of galaxy rotation curves, singularities in GR and late time cosmic acceleration and even derives the Baryonic Tully Fisher relation. http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0219887815500425
Gary/John: one of the issues with dark matter is that the WIMP guys are forever trying to portray their exotic-particle hypothesis as “the only game in town” via a Goebbelesque propaganda campaign. IMHO this video is more of the same, taking advantage of your reticence to be critical of an 11-year-old kid. I suppose next we’ll have some guy in a wheelchair telling us about it. You won’t want to be critical of him either.
John D: Yes, it does seem like the WIMP mantra gets a little loud at times, but it is an exaggeration to call it a ”Goebbelesque propaganda campaign”. There is no central leader commanding the troops to say what they say. Rather, many physicists are truthfully acting on the only ideas in their heads to solve the DM problem. Experimentalists look for the stuff at ever weaker cross sections, and theories are gradually eliminated. DM may be found or the enterprise my peter out as the experiments grow larger, take longer, and the solar neutrino floor is hit. What other experiment would you propose?
I agree with you that there is evidence against particles solving the DM effect. I can’t imagine that the stochastic assembly of DM particles can ever give the very tight and universal Baryonic Tully Fisher Relation. However, even MOND predicts more mass than is seen as gas and stars in clusters of galaxies, and the beautiful pictures of the Bullet Cluster show by gravitational lensing that something “noninteracting and dark” is there. But in support of MOND the large relative velocity of the collision is difficult to explain by DM and Newton. It is also coincidental that a gas of Fermi Dirac 1-2 eV mass neutrino mass, filling up the galaxy cluster’s phase space, would account for the missing mass that MOND predicts. KATRIN will measure the neutrino mass in a few years. Based on a cosmology involving DM, everyone expects the neutrino mass will be less than KATRIN’s resolution of .2 eV. A measured neutrino mass of 1-2 eV would eat up DM’s part in the Omega budget of the Universe. It would also cause galaxy formation to cool too fast with Newton (but not MOND)…so maybe this is how the WIMP quest will end. Lucas will still be young enough to figure it out!