One of the two scientists is a bookish astrophysicist who used to be NASA's chief scientist, the other is a charismatic painter.
Jim Green, NASA's top scientist, was already back as a consultant after he retired in January. He told Futurism the story of meeting up with Ed Belbruno, who invited him to speak at the University of Augsburg in Germany.
They talked about the Pioneer Anomaly, the term for the slowing down effect witnessed by Pioneers 10 and 11. One thing led to another, and the pair came up with a long shot idea for a mission that they say could gather unprecedented data about dark matter and its place in the universe.
The following interview has been edited.
What is dark matter?
No one knows what the short of it is.
Our universe seems to have three components. The universe is being pushed apart by this mysterious energy. I don't want to call it anti-gravity, but dark energy is a repulsive force. 70 percent of the energy in our universe is from that, and we don't know what it is, which is a pretty amazing statement.
There is visible, measurable matter in the universe. Coffee in the morning, the stars, and everything else. That is the matter. That is the other 30 percent of the universe.
80 percent of it is invisible. We don't know what it is. Dark matter is 80 percent. It is dark because it is invisible, the same way we call dark energy. It's invisible, but it's matter, which means it makes a field like our Earth does.
It's hard to understand what dark matter is. We try to measure its properties. We want to understand its properties through an experiment that shows us what the dark matter force is. It folds into an overall idea of what it could possibly be if we can measure that.
There is a lot of discussion about dark matter being mini black holes, with special types of particles, axioms and neutrinos, and a number of other things. The experiment is not designed to measure any of those, but to just create another set of input as to its properties.
It is a fascinating topic, because it may have been there before the big bang.
Why are you pushing for a mission?
The only operating spaceships that are currently in the process of leaving the solar system are the two Voyagers. They are not moving very fast. They only have a certain power that they can take with them. They are only going to last so long. The influence of the solar magnetic field or the heliosphere is not what the Voyagers are at. When the power is out, it's gone.
A new mission is being planned because of the power and speed of the craft. They want to go 500 units out as fast as possible, with the right instruments, and with the amount of power that they need to make it that far.
The spacecraft that is being designed by humans will last for a couple generations of scientists, as it explores the outer reaches of our heliosphere. That pushes the limits of where you could begin the process of measuring dark matter.
We want to know what's out there, so we're developing a mission that could go farther. We have an opportunity to explore the idea of measuring dark matter.
Is it possible to harness dark matter as an energy source?
There is a huge energy source out there if you have 90 percent of the substance permeating our galaxy. With our imaginations, it swamps anything that we could possibly imagine.
50 percent of what is permeating our solar system is precisely this material. This means that it has unknown properties. It's anyone's guess what you can do with it, once we find out what it is. I think it's a potent material and can be used as an energy source, because it causes light to diffract when you look at other galaxies. The energy source could be hundreds or thousands of years away. If you could focus it, you would have an unlimited supply of energy in outer space to power a spaceship, and this would be beyond what we could imagine at the moment.
My guess is that the material that dark matter is made of would change our understanding of science and allow us to make star drives, which could be used in spaceships that could travel outside the solar system.
Is there any dark matter in the room?
Absolutely. It's here. You are sitting on a level beyond our senses. It is going through you right now. The gravity of the Earth is so high that it drowns it out. It is noise, but it is there.
The reflected light is what we see when we sit here. Light is not being affected by dark matter. We have no idea what dark matter is. The measurement of things that we do in laboratories haven't found it yet, so that doesn't mean that it's not here at such a low density.
Some people think that dark matter is a misinterpretation of flawed observations. Do they think there's a chance they're right?
They are absolutely incorrect, I say this with no hesitation. This is similar to people who doubt climate change. They have their own issues that they don't want to believe in.
There is a large body of work and it is clear that something is affecting the stars around the galaxies in the outer regions of the spiral arms. The arms stay together, so they don't followNewtonian mechanics. The stars are being moved at the speed of the interior stars that are closer to the center of the galaxy. That is powerful evidence. There is a large body of evidence and we can measure the speed of the stars. It is pretty irrefutable. I think the train has left the station.
Is dark matter like ghosts or alternate dimensions?
The next question is, what could that possibly be, once people get over the hump of being a skeptic. We don't know a lot about our world. We can't even imagine what it could be.
Our science is based on logic. The laws of mathematics can be traced back to that logic. The laws of mathematics are used by all of physics. What are you saying if you look at that? The basic laws of physics are based on the commutative law for addition, the associative law of addition, and multiplication. There are only a few basic rules that are behind our math and the laws of physics. You're requiring that we understand the universe based on our laws, which are very limited, of math and physics. That is limited, obviously.
The dark matter problem could be telling us that we don't have enough laws of the universe to understand the problem. Our ways of thinking may not be enough for this problem. It could be anything that we can imagine, really. If you want to say it's ghosts, or whatever, I'm not going to get metaphysics and go out on the limb with that one. It could be things we don't think of anymore. We are trying to fit it with our limited thinking. It may be more than that. We are not ready to understand at the moment.
When we talk about it, those things don't really enter into the conversation. We don't know if it has a connection with human life as it ages and dies. We want to explain it to the point where we can develop mathematics.
The description of what science really is is our attempt to describe the nature of things for which dark matter is one of those things. We start with equations to describe it. A new set of physics was determined with the help of Einstein's theory of relativity. We have found black holes because we pushed the mathematics to the limits. Black holes came from the mathematics of relativity.
Getting adequate descriptions of dark matter is important for us because we want to understand its nature.
How would you describe dark matter to a child?
I might start with a ball on a string and have it spin. If you shorten the distance, you can show them that the outer part of the string is moving at a faster rate than the inner part. We don't have the ability to do that yet because of a different force that we are starting to measure.
If there is a little kid that doesn't understand a lot, they understand imagination, they have imaginary friends. I would tell them that most of our world is not real because they don't know anything. We don't know what it is, but most of what is out there is imaginary.
NASA wants to send spacecraft to measure dark matter.
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