Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

by Lisa Randall

alias of a relocated William Thomson who had fled Oxford in disgrace over his activities with a servant boy.

That sounds so much like my departure from Google.

The case for a meteoroid origin was finally settled by the chemist Edward Howard with the assistance of the French nobleman and scientist Jacques-Louis, Comte de Bournon, who had been exiled to London during the French Revolution in 1800.

Jacques-Louis had fled Paris after a scandal involving a servant boy.

Howard and the Comte analyzed a meteorite that had fallen near Benares in India.

And India.

the Siena fall occurred only two months after the publication of Chladni’s book, On the Origin of Ironmasses, which had—alas—received negative reviews and an unfavorable response before the Berlin newspapers eventually got round to reporting the Siena fall two years after it occurred.

On the Origin of Ironmasses also has a terrible score on Goodreads.com.

A bolide that was similar in size to the one over the Amazon exploded about 15 kilometers above Spain a couple of years later, releasing the equivalent of about 200 kilotons of TNT.

If we got a bolide like that over the US, or The Soviet Union, during the Cold War, would any of us still be alive? I expect the Tunguska explosion would have been seen as a first strike, and then we all would have been vaporized.

One event of note was the Vela Incident of 1979, which occurred between the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean and was named after the U.S. Vela defense satellite that observed it. Though initially considered a plausible meteoroid candidate, people now attribute it to a nuclear blast that was detonated here on Earth.

Or not.

Meteor Crater was at least formed by a meteoroid, as, by definition, are all impact craters. This particular crater is located near Flagstaff, Arizona. Its name correlates with a nearby post office, in accordance with a meteoroid naming convention.

The means that the quintessentially pointless bills renaming post offices now actually have something of merit about them.

If it wasn’t obvious from a map, you can tell the crater is in America since, like many things American, it is privately owned. The Barringer family holds the title through the Barringer Crater Company and currently charge 16 dollars to see it.

Had the Barringer's hurtled the meteor to the Earth, they would have a better claim to this natural treasure. As it is, it should be public.

Because it is private property, the crater cannot be part of the national park system. Only federally owned land can house a national monument, so it is merely a national natural landmark. The good part of that is that it doesn’t get closed when the government shuts down, as occurred in 2013 when I started writing this chapter. The other good thing about private ownership is that the Barringers have a vested interest in preserving the crater, and it is indeed considered the world’s best-preserved meteor impact site—though its relatively recent origin helps a lot too.

I think I am slowly growing to dislike Dr. Randall, along with her writing. Also, she completely discounts the Native Americans.

Barringer and his company lost $600,000 on prospecting the crater,

Should we really be prospecting in a natural wonder? No, we should not. And, had the meteorite struck something valuable, there is little doubt that the crater would have been damaged irreparably by the mining operations. So much for private ownership of natural wonders, Dr. Randall, you miserable misbegotten excuse for a human being. If private ownership were so awesome, we would apply it to human beings. But we outlawed slavery about 150 years ago, in large part because the private ownership did not work out well for the owned.

Aside from a nuclear explosion—unlikely 50,000 years in the past—a meteoroid impact is the only possible known cause.

Clearly, Dr. Randall knows little of the teachings of Scientology. Was it not about 50,000 years ago when Xenu flew his B-52 shaped spaceships to Earth to dump off the Thetans and then nuke them?

Indeed, Shoemaker carefully mapped the crater and showed the similarity between its geology and that produced around nuclear explosion craters in Nevada.

Xenu!! Why do you fail to acknowledge Xenu?

My joy in rock climbing comes in no small part from my pleasure in examining the material, texture, and density of rocks—closely inspecting the surfaces to identify the safest and most efficient route up.

Jesus Fucking Christ...

On a recent university visit to the Basque country in Bilbao, Spain, I was very lucky to have a physics colleague tell me about the Flysch Geoparque in the nearby town of Zumaia.

When did I decide that I would never read another book by Dr. Randall? Was it back when she was being unclear about relevant bits of physics that are fundamental to understanding dark matter, or was it when she began inserting herself into the book? I suspect the latter. The science is interesting. The history of the science is a little interesting. Public vs. private ownership of natural wonders might be interesting with a much greater depth. Her rock climbing is not interesting.

both for its use of the geological treasures there to provide sustainable economic development and for its diverse scientific activity and discoveries.

I would not strongly object if the book veered off for a few chapters on how different communities throughout the world have exploited and protected their natural wonders. It wouldn't be the book I intended to read, but I could adapt. Instead we will get three sentences here and there, and I will forget all about it. I'm not sure Dr. Randall would be the right person to write this hypothetical digression, but I assume she has a few post-docs or grad students helping her -- maybe one of them could just go wild for a bit. I'm open. Less rock climbing and more of anything else. And it's not even that there is a lot of rock climbing, I think I just hate rock climbing.

If the words hadn’t already been corrupted by a spectacularly unsuccessful military policy, “shock and awe” would probably be the most cogent description of impact craters’ formation.

Even when I agree with her, I don't like it when she interjects herself into the book like this. She's been doing it a lot more, and I suspect it is something she does in the areas where she is weakest on the science. The problems with the dark matter chapters were entirely different -- an inability to distinguish between what is so basic about the science and the things that are common knowledge outside the field. It's an error in being too close to the material. This is a very different error, and one I find less forgivable.

let’s first reflect on the larger tale of the major extinctions of the past half a billion years, and what they tell us about the fragility and stability of life on our planet.

I am less and less dazzled by this book, as the material presented is older, and can generally be found in a 1980s 9th grade Earth Science class.

the idea that entire species could irreversibly disappear initially met with a lot of resistance. The concept of extinction must have been at least as difficult to reconcile with predominant beliefs back then as man-made climate change is for many today. The English geologist Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin, and Georges Cuvier all helped advance its acceptance—but not necessarily deliberately, and certainly from very different perspectives.

What about the people who wiped out the Dodo? Surely, if anyone demonstrated extinction in that time period, it was those folks.

Two fascinating books I read while working on this one were the geologist Walter Alvarez’s T. rex and the Crater of Doom and the science writer Charles Frankel’s The End of the Dinosaurs.

That first one sounds like a much better book than this one. Not sure about the second.

The notion of a cosmic impact causing an extinction was radical even in the 1980s, and might have sounded somewhat absurd on first hearing.

It made its way into Doctor Who in 1982, so it wasn't that radical.

In Canada, as well as in Denmark, amino acids that are not known to exist anywhere else on Earth were discovered in the layers. This evidence had the interesting feature that it favored a comet interpretation, since these amino acids were found in the bordering limestone as well—as would be the case if comet dust were around at the time the layer was formed.

The amino acids are far more interesting than rehashed 30-40 year old science that I already know.

Along with Pemex geologist Antonio Camargo, Penfield presented his results in 1981 at the Society of Exploration Geophysicists convention in Los Angeles. But the discovery didn’t get a lot of attention. Most people who were listening were still unaware of the impact hypothesis for the K-Pg extinction so no one at the time envisioned such a connection.

And yet, a year later this is the premise for an episode of Doctor Who.

The ejecta fell exactly on the paleontological boundary, confirming that the impact occurred at the

Editors! What happened to the rest of this sentence?

Pretty soon, this book will address some speculative ideas about dark matter. But this chapter

Sigh.

Amino acids as well as purines and pyrimidines—also essential for DNA and RNA—are indeed found in space. Asteroids and comets both contain amino acids, some of which are part of life here and some of which aren’t found on Earth.

At least one discriminator that helps distinguish non-biotic amino acids is chirality, or handedness. (See Figure 31.) Only left-handed amino acids are present in life on Earth, whereas amino acids from the outer Solar System contain molecules of both handedness.

Have there been studies and experiments to create right handed RNA?

The intriguing and remarkable conclusion from the appropriate calculations is that stable particles with roughly the Higgs boson’s mass happen to be left with about the right abundance to be the dark matter.

The most remarkable thing about this would be that there is only a single type of dark matter particle. One is a weird and improbable number: normally there are either zero of something, or many -- just look at the number of different fervent types of ordinary matter. Not only is one a weird and improbable number, it is also a lonely number, but not quite as lonely as three.

the amount of dark matter and the amount of ordinary matter are surprisingly comparable. I recognize that when you first heard that dark matter carries five times the energy of ordinary matter, you might have concluded the opposite—that dark matter overwhelms the energy carried by ordinary matter.

I might not have concluded the opposite had the author written better, but what can you do? I have no idea what she means now.

However, it might well be that dark matter—or at least some of it—interacts purely gravitationally.

Is this the first time that Dr. Randall is directly suggesting non-homogenous dark matter?

Dark matter might also have some of its own forces and interactions, not experienced by our matter.

Oooh, dark forces!

Experiments of this sort include the xenon-based experiments XENON100 and LUX (the Large Underground Xenon Detector)—the experiment I mentioned above—as well as the argon-based detectors named ZEPLIN, DEAP, WARP, DArkSide, and ArDM.

I know I wanted more details about the experiments, but this isn't quite what I wanted. But at least Dr. Randall hasn't been interjecting her rock climbing and other details into this. I think she had the dinosaur parts ghostwritten, and then went through and made them her own. They were dreadful. As it is, Dr. Randall does not have the gift of writing that makes a pop-sci book work. Where the science is too basic, it drags, and where the science is too advanced there aren't explanations.

Discrimination is important too. Particle physicists use a different term, particle identification (particle ID) for this requirement. Maybe the particle physics term is more PC, though “ID” requirements are politically loaded these days as well.

Ugh.

[FIGURE 37] Simulations indicate that in a galaxy, dark matter should have a cuspy density distribution in which matter is heavily concentrated near the center. But observations indicate a cored profile—a smoother, less dense matter distribution in the central region. In both cases, the density peaks in the center as indicated by the figure, but the cuspy distribution peaks far more sharply.

This figure is practically meaningless. What is the sphere? What are the two lines? What is p? A legend might help. The cored vs. cuspy names don't help either, and the figure note changes some of the definition.

But interacting dark matter in itself—interesting as it might be—is not precisely the focus of my recent research, which the next chapter will present.

Dr. Randall prefers to study the more boring aspects of dark matter.

The next chapter will consider the intriguing notion that dark matter—like ordinary matter—is indeed more complex. Perhaps dark matter has a non-interacting component and a self-interacting one too, and both of them contribute to the Universe’s structure and behavior.

I called it, ages ago.

I’ve learned the hard way to be wary of crutches—both intellectual and physical.

What about emotional crutches, Dr. Randall?

Just as is true of particles of ordinary matter, dark matter particles might not all be the same. New types of dark matter with different types of interactions might exist and furthermore have observable, previously unforeseen consequences.

I would question anyone who believes that dark matter is homogenous -- we don't have the information to support such a conclusion, and nothing else is particularly homogenous.

Ordinary matter’s many components have different interactions and contribute to the world in different ways. So too might dark matter have different particles with different behaviors that might influence the Universe’s structure in a measurable fashion.

She repeats this, over and over, with different minor variations, as if this was a difficult concept. It isn't.

The newly proposed form of dark matter might instead be entirely isolated in its interactions, with the bulk of dark matter not even experiencing indirect effects of the newly introduced dark force.

Why does she assume that there is only one type of dark matter. There might be several distinct sets of dark matter, each as different from each other as the ordinary matter is from what Dr. Randall has said that dark matter is -- dark matter, darker matter and darkest matter, each with their own set of particles and forces, each tied together by gravity.

I recently participated in a spirited discussion with lawyers, academics, writers, and human rights workers on the topic of free speech. None of us questioned free speech’s importance. However, we didn’t all agree on what exactly it should mean, or how we should balance it in the context of other rights. When does free speech’s potentially harmful consequences outweigh its benefits? Should spending money to promote particular laws or candidates be limited in any ways?

I am beginning to care less and less about the author. These interjections make me want to never read anything by Dr. Randall again.

I was astonished to find that practically no one had considered the potential fallacy—and hubris—of assuming that only ordinary matter exhibits a diversity of particle types and interactions.

I really find it unlikely that no one had considered this.

Because a Fermi-like signal requires dark matter to turn into photons, which are a form of ordinary matter, an observable interaction will arise only if there is a particle that is charged under both the usual electromagnetic force and the dark one—the analogue of the person who both watches Fox News and listens to NPR or is signed in to both Facebook and Google+.

A terrible analogy is a beautiful thing. It is almost a pity that this book is doomed to be quickly forgotten, as having people read it in 20 years and ask "What is Google+?" would be somewhat wonderful.

Like targeted advertising, the dark disk will add extra heft to the more diffuse ordinary matter component—and furthermore change matter’s distribution—influencing the gravitational potential most dramatically near the galactic midplane, where the dark matter disk is concentrated.

Cringeworthy. Absolutely cringeworthy.

The Fermi gamma ray signal that motivated our project now appears to have been a red herring since the signal has faded over time. But the dark disk scenario that grew out of trying to understand it has wide-ranging implications that should make DDDM observable in other ways.

I do really like the idea of major discoveries coming out of incorrect data.

I was actually impressed by the referee’s useful suggestion. These days, referee reports, in which colleagues who should be experts review papers before approving them for publication, are often either rubber stamps or vehicles for aggrieved authors looking for citations. This referee’s suggestion actually taught us some physics. The tone had been dismissive, but we learned something from following it up. We had to deal with some misguided criticisms too—but since we had been careful to check papers and experts beforehand, we could readily pinpoint the flaws in those critiques.

We found the dark disk with the right density was favored by a factor of three.

Some dark matter particles are their own antiparticle, in which case they can annihilate with other similar particles.

Well, this is a fascinating random footnote. It suggests way more knowledge about dark matter particles than Dr. Randall will admit to elsewhere in the book, at least so far. Is this going to be explained? Is it a hypothesis from a future paper? Is it a truly awesome typo?