If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, and lose, and start again at your beginnings
Black holes may constitute all dark matter
Dark matter is the mysterious stuff that cosmologists believe fills our Universe. The evidence for its existence is that there is not enough visible mass to hold galaxies together. But since galaxies manifestly do not fly apart, there must be some invisible stuff, some missing mass, that generates the gravitational forces holding them together.
But there’s a problem with this idea. Two of them actually. First, physicists’ best guess at the laws of physics give a good description of all of the particles they’ve discovered so far and a few they expect to discover soon. The trouble is that none of these particles have the right kind of properties to be dark matter ie electrically neutral, long-lived and slow moving. But none of the known or reasonably hypothesised particles fits the bill. To make room for a dark matter particle, the laws of physics have to be changed in ways that many theorists feel uncomfortable with.
Second, despite a decade spent searching for dark matter with experiments costing tens of millions of dollars, nobody has laid eyes on the stuff. Most physicists think these experiments have found nothing: zip, zilch, zero.
photo { Nick Waplington, S-M Club Ceiling, 2004 }
