Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…There’s some truth to it, but it’s really missing a huge point, which is that if we did not understand the universe as incredibly precisely as we do… It’s stunning that there’s modern, precision cosmology. It’s absolutely incredible. When COBE, which is an experiment that measured the light leftover from the Big Bang in the ’80s, first revealed its observations, there was applause. People were cheering. It was unbelievable. We had predicted and measured the light leftover from the Big Bang. And because of all the precision that’s happened since then, that’s how we’re able to confront that there’s things that we don’t know. And that’s how we’re able to confront like, “Wow, this is really…” Everything everybody has ever seen and ever will see as far as we understand, makes up less than 5% of what’s out there. And so I would say, yes, we are just giving proxy names to things we don’t understand, but to dismiss that as some kind of, “Oh, they just don’t know…” It is actually quite the opposite. It is a stunning achievement to be able to stare that down and to have that so precise and so compelling that we’re able to know that there’s dark energy and dark matter. I don’t think those are disputed anymore. And they were, up until recently, they were still disputed. I think we’re still at such early stages where we’re not really even at a good explanation. You’ve mentioned a few. Well, I can think of examples of dark matter that exist that we really know for sure are real versions of dark matter like neutrinos. Right now, they’re radiating through us. That’s very well confirmed, and they’re technically dark. They don’t interact with light, and so we can’t see them. Fight now, they’re raining through us. If we could see the dark matter in this room and we absolutely know is coming from the sun, it would be wild. It would be a rainstorm. But they’re just invisible to us. Mostly, they pass through our bodies, mostly they pass through the earth. Occasionally they get caught in some fancy detector experiment that somebody built specifically to catch solar neutrinos. So dark matter is known to exist. It’s just, again, there’s not enough of it. It’s not the right mass to be the dark matter that makes up this missing component.…

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