we have learned to live with cancer, with hive ahead hiv/aids. there are no cues. i'm sorry. we have learned to live with disease but manage disease. i will recall the breast cancer movement. a woman who work for me had breast cancer. i saved her job, protected her space. she came back.

she got sick again. when i went to visit her, she looked beautiful that day. her head was shaved. she could not move but she had me put post-its on every piece of furniture in the house and where they would go. she was part of the decision of what happened to her all the way through. you are robbed of being able to be part of what they do and when it's time to say enough is enough. and if you are not offended by that, it is time that we all got offended together, but i stood by her. cancer didn't run in my family. we need people who are not touched personally. if people sitting next to you a neighbor or you have someone that you feel so badly for, be their advocate. the care gave is the advocate on the front lines at the doctor's office in the hospital, with the

health insurers. we're wearing out. we need our kids. to be angry for us. if you look ahead, you see -- they say their future. we are robbing them of their future. so that to me is a huge issue. join with us. i mean, i would really -- i have to tell you, if i hadn't become an advocate, i would have been sucked deeper into the disease. beinged a invocate has saved my -- invocate has saved my life. alzheimer's will win in my house no matter what die for my husband and mother. alzheimer is going to win. i am take can it outside the house and fighting it at a different level, and i was recruited to run a foundation, and this to me is where we all need to be. we need to step out, and who is willing to step out with me?

step out for someone else. see what feels lining. but we have to step -- time for one question. >> you talked in the very beginning about victims who have no voice. but another category of victims are the patients or clients of lawyers or doctors or whoever who have symptoms of the disease that the client doesn't understand, and how does that person -- how does the population at large need to be educated to recognize in different kinds of providers, as to how to recognize and how to deal with, and assert themselves in terms of a professional is kind of a different category always. but so how do you -- how do people learn to identify? >> if you an accountant, a

doctor, psychiatrist, you have seen it. you know it. and listen to the caregiver. we are really ignored. nobody asks us, and we're the closest to the patient. take us aside, if you suspect something is wrong, you're probably right. but it's a very tricky space, especially in the early part of the disease. very tricky. because you don't want to take the independence away from anyone. our health and being independent is what we value. what else is there? but this is a bankrupting disease. bankrupting for families. again, 213 billion on care. medicaid spends 24 billion annually on families who go bankrupt trying to take care of loved ones. it's all in "slow dancing with a stringent "for for this on the front lines of the care i'm

happy to talk to you personally. do hope that you consider joining with us again, women against alzheimer's. it is time. now is the time. the other opportunity are the clinical trials. we have learned best get ahead of this disease in the prevention space. i signed up for the a4 trials. they're one of 60 sites being run nationally at georgetown is one of the sites. the hardest part is having to admit to being 65 but you get over it. you can get over that when you are thinking you're doing something for science. but now is the time. these are prevention trials. they're looking for healthy, asymptomatic adults. it will take a conversation with 100,000 to get 10,000 to sign up, to get maybe 100 or 50 who actually qualify for the trials

themselves. so that's why it's important to step out, feel you're -- do something. do something. share this story. give the book to a caregiver, do something that will make you feel engaged. so, thank you so much for coming. i'm really touched on a nice saturday afternoon. [applause] >> this is my only book, by the way. my first and only book. >> block

roberto trotta is the author of "the illinois of the sky" explains the universe using only the 1,000 most commonly used english language words. this is about an hour. >> i now use my pleasure to introduce our distinguished speaker, dr. roberto trotta. professor trotta is a theoretical cosmologist in a astro i physics groups.

one of the world leading figures in astro astro physics, focusing on using statistical methods to solve problems in cosmology and astro physics. roberto has held research positions at the university of geneva, university of oxford, as well as visiting positions at the african institute for mathematical sciences in capetown. and university of california at santa barbara. also published more than 50 scientific papers-contributed to two books, and received numerous awards for his research, including michael -- of case western university. the award of the british

association for the advancement of science, and a public engagement fellowship by the science and technology facilities council, u.k. pleaseman in me in welcoming dr. roberto trotta. [applause] >> thank you. good evening, everyone. and thanks for being here. and very pleased to be here tonight in such an amazing place. i love this city. sits on the edge of a big body of water, looking towards where the sun goes down. i love the ups and downs, ever surprising corners, its story, and of course, its people. so, this really is the perfect place for me to be giving the first of self talks about me new book "the edge of the sky." the books came out with also

idea, it should be possible to talk about very hard things in a straightforward way that all people can understand. the problem with stupid people like me, you see, is that sometimes we get cared away and speak about our work using words that only -- people can understand. it's not possible to have a conversation with other people, people like you. the reason why your eyes will begin to stare into empty space and probably walk away as soon as you can, happy to have escaped. a way to avoid that is talking with using the only most common words in their tongue. i thought it would be a fun idea to use it to explain the entire origin. this is what my book is about and what this evening is about. i'd like to share with you ideas behind the book and the story of how this crazy idea became reality.

so, might be forgiven for thinking this little piece at the beginning sounds a little strange and i'm sure you thought this is down to me, spontaneous, and as you know, britain and the united states are two nations divided by a common language. that's why this sounds strange but that's not the reason. the reason is that with all -- only the most used thousand words in the english language, the very book being published today and i'm honored to be presenting to you tonight. by way of background, as we heard a minute ago, i'm as stro physicist in the college of london, and my research is about dark energy, dark matter, all of this unknown dark things, pretty useless dark thingness the universe. but i'm also passionate -- i really believe that one of the

main roles of scientists in this day and age is to be able to communicate with the and can not just communicate in a top-down way, but even engaging the public in a two-way dialogue about the concept, the ideas, the very fundamental questions about the reality of the universe. we all agree that we all share and are interested in. in particular astrophysicists like myself are in a position where the big science we do is science that naturally draws people's attention, and wherever i go i always find people being fascinated by the questions we ask, by the answers that we sometimes get, and even bigger questions that are still unsolved and the biggest mysteries in the universe. so it's really -- to share in a dialogual way, and why they're spending big money, taxpayer money, into this kind of

research, which is as fundamental as few other things in my view in our endeavor to understand our place in the universe. but trying to do that we face -- as scientists we face some big hurdles. one, and perhaps the most obvious one, is the problem of jargon. we scientists tend to speak in jargon simply because those are the word wes have -- the words of our trade, the words we have chosen to explain our subject to our peers. then obviously important questions and important ideas can get and do get lost in translation. let me give you an example. here is a paper from 1965 by these two gentlemen, who in 1965, working at bell labs in new jersey, picked up using a big horn antenna, a strange

signal they could not explain away in any way. they were picking up some noise in this microwave horn that they didn't expect and couldn't explain. and so after trying as hard as they could to get rid of the noise, they reluctantly came to realize that it was something actually that was quite important, and they had no clue what this was about. so a team of other scientist at the time was working on building such an antenna, picked up this noise, told them what they were actually picking up. and so they went on and published a paper in a journal. the paper biteled "a measurement of temperature at 40 mega cycles per second." this short paper, one and a half long, was nobel prize worthy a few years later. what they really meant was we have discovered proof of the big

bang. the universe at the beginning and the beginning was a hot, dense state, and the radiation was the noise we're piking up in the microwave antenna. the noise themselves at the time, and this is the type of -- in 1965, surely the idea and the communication of science to the public must have improved in this past few decades. well, fast purdue to 1999 -- fast forward to 1999. another paper, and you can see comes harder. two guys in the first paper, about 25 guys, only a fraction of the authors here, in the new paper -- it's harder to make discovers now that all the low-hanging fruit, as it were, have been taken. so this paper says, measurement of mega and landa from 42 super

nova -- every time you see papers with greek letters, that's a sign people are trying to be smart, trying to impress their audience by using letters that normal mortals do not understand. and when the paper goes on saying, report measurement of the mass density -- of the universe based on the 42 -- super nova project, blah blah. spare you the rest. they're trying to say it's the truth that 70% of the universe is being ripped apart by an unknown force field. okay? and this paper one the nobel peace noh obel price but it's hard for people to understand what is actually about. now surely 21st century, things have improved. so let's look at this paper here

by the cms. -- a detector in geneva, about five stories high. and this paper, you don't see the authors' names because the corporation is composed of give or take 5,000 scientists. observation of the new -- matter of 125ged with -- lxc, was presented. now we go over to make it more attractive. our presenter from the -- proton collision, using data samples of up to 5.1 and 5.3, et cetera, et cetera. that ware saying is found the particles. so you see why jargon is a problem in my field.

and fair enough, those are serious papers that are written for the experts and for fellow physicist us. might not expect them to be accessible to just about everybody. but just about everybody with a phn physic. so jargon is a problem in our field. the use of language, the fundamental nature of this. when i say other electron or galaxy or star, these words which are fairly common and everybody knows about, perhaps in school or reading 0 science about but what mean by electron is different from what people who don't have my day job think. so i think i'm being presis and communicating science by using words that are understood at some level by everybody, but actually their little meaning

that came and does escape. and so in my quest to find new ways to talk about the science which i'm very passionate about, i was looking for now the ways of bridging the technological gap and leveling the playing field so we can have a meaningful, informed discourse, about the big questions in my science, where did the universe come fromment? what this what is matter? what is energy. why are we here? and so i tried a few things. i tried using cookery and food to explain the expansion of the universe. i tried the cooking show trying to use pancakes to explain the universe. i worked with artists and designers to create objects -- artwork that tried to encaps lay

--ens caps late in a more -- and a pinball machine that represented -- i won't tell you what it represented. that a story for another day. in those efforts i was trying -- what i was trying to do is find new ways of communicating -- talking about my science in a way that would not only speak to people's minds but also speak to people's hearts to bring back passion in science. because after all, science is a human endeavor, creativity, sometimes frustration, and sometimes just plain hard work. so how did we bring all of that back into play? nor a decade i have been looking for a new way, and -- because i love language, doing it in language was something i loved to do, something akin to what --

is reported to have done when hi took this bag in the restaurant. somebody challenged him to write a story or novel using only six words. he took up the challenge, and the eh thought for also while and then came up with this, for sale, baby shoes, never worn. pretty intense. pretty powerful. and six words, an entire story, and a tragic one is condensed in this short story, which -- a form now called flash fiction. and so how could we do that with science, with cosmology, the concepts that are difficult to bring back down to the human scale. so i had thoughts in my mind, and then one day something interesting happened. i was looking for something entirely unrelated and then i

stumbled upon something called the challenge. it's an area by a guy called monroe, creator of the xkcd.com. it's a activity going on for many, many years, and it's the same characteristics, it's very geeky in a good way, but geeky, so geeky that most of the tomorrow i don't get the jokes. and those jokes are usually about physics or computer science that i don't understand. math and so on, and -- but a huge following. and in fact for an interesting piece of fate, if you like, was in this very place, this very room, and two weeks ago presenting his new book which came out two weeks before mine. so amazing how sometimes people pass, intersect in entirely

unrelated but interesting ways. the opinion -- point is this cartoon here is -- it's a sketchy drawing of something that you might recognize as the saturn 5 moon rocket, but the interesting idea was that it was all the parts of the rocket were labeled using the most used 1000 words in the english language. couldn't call it saturn or rocket so have to call it up go earth, something that goes up. five luckily is in the little words, so that's good. and all of this is labeled with -- in funny ways, and there's this bits and pieces that say, called room for not so great for fire comes out, so it was a fun idea, and sure enough, somebody picked it up, and

challenged people to write their job in -- using this very same vocabulary, very bare lexicon. i came upon this challenge and i spent a half an hour trying to describe my job, my day job, using the words, and this is what i came up with. it was very hard, actually. a couple paragraphs, took over an hour to do it. this is what i came up with. i study tiny bits of matter which are all around us but we cannot see, which we call dark matter. we know dark matter is out there because is change the way other big fire-wasting, such as stars, we want to understand what dark matter is made of because it could tell us about where everything around us came from and what will happen next. to study dark matter people like me use big things that take lots

of money for people to build. some of those things fly way above us, some are deep inside the ground. some are rings that make tiny pieces of matter kiss each other as they fly around very, very fast, almost as fast as light. we hope we can hear the whisper of dark matter if we listen very carefully. we take all the whispering from all the different things and put them together in our computers. i go to places all over the world to talk to other people look me. together we can think better and work faster. together perhaps we can find new and better ways to listen to dark matter. most of them are good people, and we go out and have a drink and talk more. so, i put this on my web site anding for get to about it in

february last year i went to give a talk, and the person introduced me, gave me bio, and then they said something along the lines that, and he even writes about science using thousand word only, on his web site. okay. and i give my talk, and then somebody in the public said, what's the thousand words about? can you explain? and because i had my computer with me so i rattled out the very same two paragraph is just read to you, and i get the very same reaction i got here tonight. people chuckling and being mused and i got a -- much better than doing my talk, actually. and so that got me thinking, these notions that actually -- this format could do something to solve the problem i was trying to get around, to communicate science and talk about science in a fresh knew

way to give new eyes to cosmology and make it surprising and perhaps fill it with hopefully childlike wonder. so i started actually writing what has now been "the emof the sky" as also project of my own. i wanted to figure out how far you could stretch this format i only used for three paragraphs, and it could be used, would it work at book length. a short book to be sure but a book. it was very much experimental in my mind asia sat -- mind as i sat down and started the exercise. the first word, how die get around talking -- how do i get around talking about this complicated and far away concept with the most used thousand words. so, words i really wanted to have and didn't have -- i didn't have telescope, didn't have universe. i didn't have big bang,

scientist, moon, galaxy, didn't even have fog, which is -- i would say why didn't fog -- turns out the universe shrined as a kind of fog but i couldn't use fog so i was stuck. and so at the beginning was very hard, very hard. i kept banging my head against this wall of this self-imposed strait jacket. then something interesting happened. it grew on me. a new vocabulary emerged naturally by itself. new voice was from -- very much out of the interaction of what i wanted to say and what the format was allowing me to say. so telescope became a big seer,

a planet, a crazy star. the universe, all there is, planet -- earth, your own world. particles became drops. scientists, student persons. moon, that sounds simple. why not. and galaxy, star cloud, and i used something for big bang. now, my first word for the big bang was, the hot flash. now -- then -- [laughter] >> then my editor told me, you can't use that really. i didn't know. i learned something else. so, became the big flash, actually. fine. fine. that's what you find in the book. so out of this new vocabulary, new picture of the universe emerged in my mind as well. a picture of the all there is that in the end came in at 707

words, and one short -- so those are the words i used. a lot of dark and people -- not because dark people are in the book but because student people are in the book and dark matter is in the book, lots of drops for particles. far is a war that comes up a lot because things are far away all the time. seer, as in big seer. crazy for crazy star, et cetera. so there is sort of the -- it's like the map of the book. so, now i had a little bit -- i had language. what i also needed was time and mental space too put it together, and i was very lucky again for one of those beautiful things that sometimes happen in life. i had three months university of california santa barbara, and i was -- i have three months where all i have to do is do my

research and had space and intellectual freedom as well to think about things, including this. so every day i would go to my office at the big campus and look out the window, and pretty much every day this is what i would see, and possibly this is the title of the book came from "the edge of the sky." the edge of the sky is reaching the big body of water, the ocean. and so i had the time where every day i would sit down and try to let this new voice come forth and emerge from the book itself. and so the story line was actually very natural. the story line of the book came out of a distillation, condensation of runs of public lectures given over the years, and didn't have to think very much about what i wanted to say because i knew what wanted to explain. i wanted to have this, ark from

antic quit to today, and what we don't understand that the universe but i need with a fema student woman -- here she is, those are -- this is one of the beautiful illustrations that a young talented artist did for me for the book. i'm very fortune to have met him and really was able to interpret in pictures what i was trying to do with the book. so simple but yet intense way of representing things. here she is. our student woman. she is walking up to big seer. the book has got one obvious character, the student woman that i was talking about. but also there's a second

important person, big seer himself. you would find that big seer is a he rather than an it. big seer is a big telescope that the student woman uses to make observations of the universe. the story follows, the first night 0 observation out there in one of the big telescopes -- i had hawai'i in my mind. i'm not an observer so i don't get to go to hawai'i and observe at 12,000 feet. it's hard. i make it sound like it's fun but it's hard to do this kind of job, and my colleagues have a hard time. so i -- to explain what she would do going out all by herself, like poet tick license in reality you wouldn't go out by yourself, too dangerous, always somebody with you.

and she would spend the night making observations, trying to figure out how a light from them to us has been bent and changed by dark matter. and all along she casts her mind back to where we came from and what the ancient people thought about. people who saw great figures of gods in the sky, and what did they think about them? and what was the cosmic makeup of our -- all there is back then? so the story then unfolds -- fast forward into the present day, and especially to the big dark side of the universe, the big unsolved mysteries. by way -- i expected since a publication date of the book is today, surely you will have read

the book anybody in the room yet, i hope it will be correct soon. but by way of background, let's cast our mind's eye back to what we learned and where our student woman is coming from. very much the content of the book but not quite so many simple words. so, here's a picture of the night sky. and this is the moon. the full moon. in technical terms the -- this is half a degree. so we don't know what the mon looks like in the sky. but look at the small little square marked xdf there? this is a tiny patch of the sky. this is patch of the sky, about this big as the piece of sky that would fit inside an eagle's eye, held at arm's length. and yet if you zoom in and look at this patch of the sky using

one of most powerful telescope wes have at our disposal, the hubble, this is what we see. there are 5,500 galaxies in that tiny little patch of the sky, and each one of those dots you see in this picture is a galaxy just like our own galaxy. the white rope. and each one of those galaxies contains 100 billion stars just like the sun. 5,500 of them just in that tiny eye of the needle at arm's length. so you can see proof that what i'm saying is true. you can see the galaxies and they're beautiful in their own right. but the point, the most astonishing point really is that 96% of the universe is actually missing. so that's breaking news here. all you can see in this picture is nothing. it's about four or five percent of the total. all the rest is dark and unknown.

so that's the big question, and the big mystery that we as cosmologyises are trying to solve and trying to tackle. you can see on this cosmic pie, if you like, the tiny little yellow light, all you saw in the previous picture, all these galaxies and tapestry all around us, this tiny bit of the pie, and then another red back here is another components which i like gas and stuff, stuff we cannot see but made of the same stuff we're made of. and then dark matter, 23%, and dark insuring, 73%. and that is the big question, the big quest that we are all trying to solve and get our student woman goes out to big seer to help her solve the dark matter. so that's what she is up to and

that's what our universe looks like. but how does it look like on the edge of the sky? let me talk briefly about what our universe, how this incredible universe looks like if you look at it through the thousand words prism if you like. this as picture of dark matter. you expand your hand here in this very room right now, in second there are 100,000 black matter particles going through your hand. per second. here in this room. you don't feel them. where are they and why are the out there? you can see this picture is a representation of that. here's what our student woman has to say about it. it sounds crazy that student people should think there is a lot more stuff that you can't see than stuff that you can see. still, they do.

in fact, they believe there's five times more dark matter than normal matter. if you look around on the far seer -- little brother to big seer -- you realize the wide road is made of many, many stars, four time stenstars in the wide road for each person on or hold world. and if you use the big seer you would find there are as many other star crudes crowds in the sky as are there stars in at the wide world and yet all of this is just a tiny bit of everything there is. when she goes on and explains how we actually now all of that, because far i've only told you what we think the reality is made of, but how do we know snow how we came to believe? exceptional claims require exceptional proof, and the thing is that thanks to modern advances in observations, we can

do nowdays, we can look back in time, cosmology is a time machine. in other words, because the speed of light is finite, very fast, 300,000 per second, seven and a half times around the world in one second, yet it's finite. the user is so big that the further away you look, the further back in time you see. in other words, life coming to us from the sun left our star eight minutes ago. eight minutes is the time it takes for light to cross the 150 million-kilometers, 100 million miles, that separate us from the supplement when we see the sun, we see it not as now but eight minutes ago. so the pictures of the galaxy as they were four, five, million years ago, and if you look even further back in time, in this direction, we are going to pick up light that came from the end

of the visible universe, right across from the big bang, 380,000 years after the big bang we can pick up lying that left 13.7 billion years ago, and this is what it looks like. this is actually an image of the baby universe. an image of the end of the visible universe and i believe this is a metaphor. it's a scientific statement. the very first light, the echo of the big bang which has been picked up bay satellite, and you can see red dots and blue dots. those are not galaxies. galaxies did not exist at the time. stars did not exist. all there was was matter, light, and dark matter as well. and this picture here is a picture of the baby universe of which glasses grew is red, and before this time this was filled with a high energy fog. i say high energy fog but in the book i can't say energy or fog.

i can say high but that not very useful. there are other ways in the book in which all of this is talked about. and so this is as far back as we can now see and we can learn incredible amount of information about the universe. one thing we learn about the universe by looking at the picture is that the universe is 30,000,798,000,000 years old. give or take 37 million years old. we don't know the age of the earth to that precision and we sit on it. that's the same as being able to del the birthday of a stranger in street by glancing at them within one day precision. which is incredible. how we now understand the -- before, 95% of it is totally dark. so what about the other bits in the cosmic pie, the bits that was labeled dark energy.

let's hear what the student woman says about dark energy. and the way student people found out about the existence of what is called the dash push. -- the dark push. she stepped outside in the cold night, holding a coup of hot coffee with both hands. the wide world is beautiful in the dark clear sky. and once again, she can't help but be amazed by it all. doesn't matter how many time she has seen it before or how much she knows about what is out there. the sight of the stars is enough to make her gasp. it's so still and yet it's changing all the time, she whispers to no one. it's hard to believe that everything out there is running away from us. yet, like mr. hubble found long ago, the star clouds are running

away from each other and the space between them gets bigger and bigger. the older it is it growing with time. and so growing with time which is an incredible discovery that hubble made about 80 years ago, which by itself tells us there's amazing fact. if the old is growing with time, and the star crowds are moving away from each other, that means if we look back in time, wisconsin if we reverse the an log of time, going backwards in time, the star crowds were closer and closer together in the past, and closer, until there comes a point at the very beginning, at the bottom of the diagram where they were being on top of each other in a hot dense point, what we now call the big bang. and so there is not only what our observations of the night sky tell us and not of the acre of the big bang, but also we

learn, and our student woman learns, that the universe is not only becoming bigger with time, and at an ever increasing pace, which i the mitt hover the dark push. so let's go back and see how we can tell the dark push is out there in the first place. student people found that the death of stars gave them the right night table light. if you use a night table light, in other words, very luminous source of light, and you measure how bright it appears to you and you know how bright it is to begin with you can work out how far away things are in the universe, and how fast they're moving and that is the discover of theonology i was talking

about before. so not just any stars would do. a picture of a dying star. what they needed was a kind of star that dies in the big show of fire and light and can be seen from far away. they looked at a great number of star deathed and found that some dying stars could be used like night table lights because they all gave out nearly the same light. the student people were unsure why. perhaps because of dying stars are all made of the same stuff and all die when they become heavier by eating up another star. the student people managed to catch a few dying stars. thanks to those they work out how far away the star crowds are. they also knew from the tide light how fast the star crowds are moving, when they put those two things together they found something no one expected.

that's the dark push, of course. and then the dark push itself is the existence of other parts of our universe, multiverse, which in the book -- the book cannot be called a multiverse. it's only explained using coins. in this case, british pounds. i think. in homage to the book. and the book ends in speculation about the reality of our universe or multiverse or -- beyond all that exist. so one of the questions we are very much still investigating, interest controversial, how can we talk in this manner about thing that are beyond our very universe, the existence of thing that are forever away from any possibility of us ever observing

them. so those go across our student woman's mind. but let me leave you with her closing thoughts. after the night observation is over, big seer is on the gray job, and it's time now for the student woman to go back home and reflect and think and work very hard on everything that big seer has done for her during that night. she sits down. the big blue body of water in front of her seems to go on without edges and without end. she can feel the warm hand of the sun on her face. she feels happy. the night work had gone well. big seer did a good job. she can go home now. but the job only just begun. there's much more left to do in the coming weeks and months before she can make sense of what big seer saw that night. letters and words and entire books are hidden in what big

seer has given her, written in the strange tongue of the old. little by little she will understand better and better. a she has to do is ask the right question thursday the right way ask she might learn the truth. she might understand. i leave you with that thought. i would like to thank you again for being with me here tonight, sharing this special day for me, the day when me first book comes out. it's been great, sharing those ideas and thoughts with you, and of course, i'd be very happy to take questions and sign book advertise end. thank you very much. [applause] >> this is a program with a

commonwealth club of california, and you're listening to the "the edge of the sky" all -- we can open it up for q & a. we'll set up a microphone because we're videotaping. if you have questions come up to the front and speak into the microphones we are recording. >> i'd like to know how a normal -- shine shay normal -- a layperson is supposed to conceptualize the stuff that was there that banged, that we understand the smaller than an elooktron or proton and yet contains all the mass of the universal i shouldn't say that's the one thing but that's right up there with everything that's hard to understand. >> thank you for the great question.

let me first say at the beginning that we are normal persons, too. we're scientists. i stop saying i'm an astrophysicist because people ask me what my job is and then their eyes glaze over. so that's a great question. what you're describing is a great paradox. the fact that if dark matter is what we think it is a new type of particle beyond the particles we know about, it's quite possibly a subatomic part tell, point-like particle which has no extent, and yet it takes up 23 or so percent of the entire mass energy of the universe, and the paradox is that to explain this structure that we see in the sky, to explain the galaxy, the entire expansion of the universe, you need a particle that is -- perhaps about a thousand times more massive than a particle that make up the at tom in our bodies. and yet it's a point particle.

so the big question mark nowdays is precisely that how do we close the loop. how do we explain the biggest case of cosmology the entire structure we see in the universe, which is document dominated by the dark matter particle with a opinion-like particle that is of no special extent, and this is why this question is so fundamental for the entirety of physics but a they merge together the biggest case which are ruled by gravity to the smallest cases which are ruled by other force, and to understand it what we really need to do, we need to find a new theory that merges the four forces of the universe, click gravity, which we haven't found yet. and so it -- you're putting your finger exactly on the whole topic today and that's very much a question that remains open. we don't have an answer to that either. >> i'm a write sore i'm cure --

i'm a write sore i'm curious how this project influenced holiday you write and communicate when you write your scientific research papers. >> thank you. that's an interesting angle for me as a writer and -- now i can say i am a writer. wrote a book, therefore i am a writer. so i have been liberated -- i feel liberated. when you put all this strait jacket, it's constraining, at the same time it forces you to find a new voice, it creates a new type of voice that wasn't mine before and came out in the form very much, and then over time, the strait jacket became like a comfortable sweaterment started feeling at ease and didn't need to work at the words so much anymore. so the voice itself grew on me. when i shared that voice, go back to my usual writing, i am more aware of the words i use

and a lot of the sumses assumeses i make as i use the words so i can understand the lexicon but i'm much more soft-feeted with my choice of words because i'm knew more more aware of the fact at that time there are many assumptions in the words i use and i'm -- this pushes me to find the even more clear than before, even sharper and crisper in my writing. i'm not so concerned about my scientific write bought that's a very personalized audience and -- very specialized audience and not much space for writing creativity. there's creativity in science but not writing papers. i'm not determined about that because it's a very different set of skills skills you use. but in my other science writing, it really made me focus very sharply on this hidden layer of

assumptions between us and this invisible bias that sometimes really seen in communication and dialogue. >> one of the things that baffleses me is gravity. and enough -- maybe this is not quite the topic you were addressing but i have heard inferences about gravitial weight. would you comment on where we are solving the problem of gravity and how it works? >> so, gravity is a big mystery. we don't understand gravity gravity in a unified matter. how it binds together with other nonforces. i think your question is two different aspects. one part of your question was about gravity weight, the announce. made in march this year that

people -- student people -- found evidence of ripples in space time in the universe, looking at the kind of light i showed you before-the map. that is a specific claim. the state of the arc of that is that the claim was brought up -- it would have been a very big discovery if confirmed, but the point is that at the moment it seems that what the saw was not actually for the greatest part was not gravity weight from the big bang. it was ripples in pace from the big bang, largely possibly due to dust in our galaxy. although this is not settled, it will be settled as the satellite with pictures -- which are expected to be able to clarify that issue that one thing is very much up in the air and we learn more about it before october time. there's a bigger topic of gravity, though. we have learned some things

about einstein and this is one of the ideas that i explain in the book, about how einstein saw gravity not as a force, but actually einstein understood that gravity is actually geometry of we think of gravity as something that pulls you but it's really the shape of space time. in other words, when you think of the moon going around the earth in a circle, we think of gravity keeping it in orbit around the moon. actually what the moon its doing, it's going as straight as it possibly can, only spates time itself is bent by the presence of the massive object like the earth and that makes a straight path look like a circle, and so the moon actually is going straight. so a revolutionary idea of geometry and space time being the actual nature of gravity, and these ideas have been challenged many times. specifically to try to explain

it away. just forget it and -- but we haven't succeeded. gravity has been tested in many different ways and so far it has always held up. so as far as we know, it's right. but we keep testing this in greater detail and perhaps one day we'll understand gravity in a different way. >> two years ago, professor samuel tinge set up the alpha magnet tech spectrometer satellite and attached tote the international space station. that's been -- goal of that was to see if we could possibly figure out a course -- of court it was not him way. a 60-country, about 200 -- operation. it's amaze he was able to coordinate that whole thing. he is in his 80s.

and it's been collecting dat for two years now, and apparently just very recently analyzing the data has indicated that we are finding out what dark matter is. could you elaborate on that? >> yes. so, i think it was as late as last week that the latest data came out, as i remember, because i was on my way to here. i didn't have time to read the paper. i saw the key part that showed this detactor on the international space addition -- pace station was able to measure the energy of antiparticles to the electrons and i apologize for the jargon but this is a technical question. i take the shortcut. so what -- able to measure them

to higher precision than ever before and higher energy than ever before. the idea behind measurement -- antimatter sounds cool but is actually boring. we produce it all the time. you can go at -- so, antimatter is boring but from outer space is interesting because not many things that produce antimatter. so if you can find more antimatter from outer space then we expect, based on what we know about the usual sources of antimatter, president the antimatter is coming from dark matter particles, kissing each other and then giving out other particles, including that matter. so an indirect signal of the presence of dark matter. but things are more complicated than that because many other possible source and antimatter particles get bounded around so not shura they come from so interpreting the signal is very

hard. -...

>> >> for the average person. so i applied you wish more people could do that. >> that means a lot to meet. [applause] especially my colleagues have been very supportive of my project but some have been quite baffled with the language. so why should i make up new words?

and they think we should not dumb down the things to that extent but i hope you will agree but it is delicate reality and though lexicon. said absolutely agree with you say we have to agree with the policy makers and the people who fund ever research in government but also taxpayers. and in the u.k. and why it is important. there is no question but there is another side that if he is more important

nowadays. but when the lab was asked by congress a 1962 how the money was spent would help the united states during the height of the cold war and he said it will not help but it will make worthwhile of defending. [laughter] >> faq for the talk today i really don't know too much science