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Asked by marcusw to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 15 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by highpriestesswill.
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Adam Stevens answered on 14 Mar 2012:
Definitely what dark matter is. We can see the effects of this… ‘stuff’ in space, we know something has to be there, and we’ve tried looking for it every way we know how, but have never managed to see anything.
So there are theories that it’s made up of new particles that we’ve never seen (and maybe will never be able to see) or it may be some new aspect of physics or cosmology that we can’t even imagine.
But we know that it affects the matter in the universe way more than the matter we can see, so there must be a lot of it!
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Leila Battison answered on 15 Mar 2012:
I think finding out about dark matter is really important, because it has all these weird effects and nothing in our understanding of science and physics and particles can explain it at the moment, so we are really in the ‘dark’!
Personally, I think a really big question for people is ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ The sheer size of space would suggest that life must me somewhere else out there, but the size of space also means that we may never find it. Finding out about extraterrestrial life would change our ideas not only about science, but also about religion and philosophy as well.
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Karen Masters answered on 15 Mar 2012:
Dark energy. It’s just a name for something we don’t understand about the expansion of the universe (that it’s been speeding up). We’re not even really sure if it’s a new kind of matter or a change in how gravity works on large scales.
I disagree with Adam about dark matter – that I think we might be close to figuring out, and we’ve narrowed down a lot of the possibilities, so I think it’s quite clear to most people now that it’s some kind of massive particle of matter which just doesn’t interact much.
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