Marmite Easter Egg

According to a team of astronomers, the Milky Way is surrounded by a shell of invisible "dark matter" (Htp: Yves Smith).

But the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy is gpoing to take longer to shloop us up than we thought previously.

We have a bit more time to eat that strawberry.

Death to the Higgs boson!

Police foil Al-Collider plot to blow up sub-atomic particle.

The world may not be flat, but the universe is... or maybe not

(picture source)

Does dark energy exist? And if it doesn't, what about dark matter? These two are supposed to constitute 96% of the universe - and we get to see the other 4%. Or is it 5%. Or maybe not.

I'm sticking to Marmite. Though even there, theological problems rage.

Swirly Marmite

According to this and this, the "dark matter" (that nobody can observe directly) influences the distribution, spin and orientation of galaxies. As Haldane said, "The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

A Marmite Backwater

Dark Matter, Dark Energy, now Dark Flow... my brother directs me to a new discovery/theory.

It seems that a great cluster of galaxies that is halfway towards the edge of the observable universe, is moving in a different direction from the general stretching of space-time. It's like a little boat caught in an eddy.

Cosmologists theorise that there may be massive, unobservable structures hundreds of billions of light years away, pulling these galaxies in their direction. They imagine that the universe beyond what we can see (c. 17 billion light-years) may be very different from ours.

And some of us laugh at mediaeval theological speculation. How foolish those people were, building elaborate worlds of internally-consistent ideas, applying nothing but logic to extend their understanding beyond the few things they were certain that they did know, attempting to move from the seen to the unseen.

And now we lift our gaze from the CERN to the unCERN.

I wonder what Ben Jonson would have made of it all?

May I prevail on you all for charitable contributions to fund a new chair of Marmite Studies?

"Marmite" exists, probably

My brother (why are my wife and family all cleverer than me ?) tells me that "dark matter" is implied in all the modern cosmological models, it's just that no-one knows what it is: "At one point, they thought it was neutrino flux, but that doesn't account for enough energy. Maybe it's The Force." I await further information.

Meanwhile, Professor Brian Cox (billed by the Sunday Express as former drummer for D:ream - keyboards, according to the Mail) did a broadcast last night on the Doomsday Marmite Machine and explained that it's all about trying to find the giant and unstable Higgs particle. Even if successfully created in the device, its existence will only be confirmed by the myriad better-known particles into which it disintegrates - only the intense pressure of the early Universe was capable of sustaining the so-called "God particle."

In the Sunday Express article today, the seemingly perma-upbeat (if only we all had his secret) Cox tells us that there are 12 sub-atomic particles, yet I could have sworn that the TV programme listed 16 in a four-by-four arrangement - Cox struggled to recall the last one, which turned out to be the gluon.

Irrelevantly (perhaps), some shots of the Large Hadron Collider remind me of a wonderfully atmospheric scene in "Alien":

His Dark Materials don't exist

My theory: there is no such thing as dark matter, so the Large Hadron Collider won't find it.

Albert Einstein found a better way to describe observable phenomena, and another Einstein will one day improve the theory to include the effects for which the existence of dark matter has been postulated.