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“We are in the dark about Dark Matter”

Staff Reporter

Nobel laureate says empty space still contains a lot of invisible energy

— PHOTO: SUSHANTA PATRONOBISH

Figuring out Dark Energy: Nobel laureate Carlo Rubbia delivering the 45th Meghnad Saha Memorial Lecture at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics at Salt Lake, near Kolkata, on Tuesday.

KOLKATA: The identity of 95 per cent of what constitutes the universe is not known and experiments are being conducted at the CERN (European Organisation for Nuclear Research) and other places in the world to determine the constituents of Dark Matter.

Nobel laureate physicist Carlo Rubbia said this while delivering the 45th Meghnad Saha Memorial Lecture at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics at Salt Lake, near here, on Tuesday.

Very exciting experiment

“Demonstrating in the laboratory that the matter we are made of is not the dominant matter in the universe can be very exciting,” he said during the lecture titled, ‘The Invisible Universe.’

While Dark Matter is an important constituent of 95 per cent of the matter produced during the Big Bang, the primordial explosion, so is Dark Energy, Dr. Rubbia said.

“Empty space still contains a lot of invisible energy,” he said.

Dr. Rubbia, an Italian physicist, shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 with Simon van der Meer.

The Meghnad Saha Memorial lecture was delivered by renowned physicists such as Niels Bohr in 1960, S. Chandrasekhar in 1961, H. N. Sethna in 1970 and C. N. R. Rao in 2000.

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