Seminar: David Kaiser on Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter

The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT is excited to welcome Dr. David Kaiser for a talk on black holes and dark matter.

For fifty years, physicists have been stymied by the puzzle of dark matter. From the motion of enormous clusters of galaxies to the rate at which individual galaxies spin, decades of careful measurements have indicated that all the visible matter astronomers can observe contributes a tiny fraction to the total mass contained within the universe. Many hypothetical new particles have been proposed, which might play the role of dark matter. Yet after decades of meticulous experiments, no clear evidence of any such particle has turned up. In recent years, many physicists and cosmologists have returned to a different idea: what if all of dark matter consists of ordinary matter locked up within black holes, which could have formed right after the big bang? Theorists have identified several plausible mechanisms by which a population of such primordial black holes could have formed, and several groups around the world (including my own) have proposed new tests that could yield evidence that primordial black holes really do exist and contribute to the dark matter abundance. Remarkably, some of these tests would leverage decades-old technologies — such as laser-ranging to the Moon, first set up by Apollo astronauts — to try to identify the dominant type of stuff that fills our universe today.

David Kaiser is Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at MIT. He is the author of several award-winning books about modern physics, including, most recently, Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World (2020), which was honored as among the best books of the year by Physics Today and Physics World magazines and named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, Kaiser has received MIT’s highest awards for excellence in teaching. His work has been featured in Science, Nature, the New York Times, and the New Yorker magazine. His group’s recent efforts to conduct a “Cosmic Bell” test of quantum entanglement, together with Nobel laureate Anton Zeilinger, were featured in the documentary film Einstein’s Quantum Riddle, which premiered on PBS in 2019.

Please contact Learning and Events Coordinator Claire Sadar if you are interested in attending.