Fermilab’s Scott Dodelson on Cosmology’s Crisis - #565

About this episode

Scott Dodelson discusses the implications of the Dark Energy Survey results on cosmology and the search for dark matter.

Scott Dodelson spent ten years on the Dark Energy Survey testing the standard model of cosmology. It passed and missed by 2.5 sigma. The Director of Fermilab’s Cosmic Physics Division on why the theory he helped build may be wrong, why nobody can find dark matter, and what it takes to change a scientific consensus. Subscribe if you want science with evidence, not speculation. Dodelson is Director of the Cosmic Physics Division at Fermilab, Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, and author of Modern Cosmology, the textbook a generation of cosmologists learned the field from. Lambda-CDM predicts how the early universe’s tiny fluctuations grew into the structure we see today. The Dark Energy Survey was designed to check that prediction. The answer came back two and a half sigma off. That is both the most precise measurement ever made of how the universe grew, and a crack he cannot stop looking at. His question is not whether the model is close. It is whether close is enough to trust. We get into the Sigma-8 tension and what it actually takes for a scientific community to change its mind, the Dodelson-Widrow mechanism and his 1994 proposal that sterile…

People in this episode

Host: Brian Keating

Guest: Scott Dodelson

Topics covered

• cosmology
• dark matter
• scientific consensus
• Dark Energy Survey
• Sigma-8 tension
• neutrinos

Keywords

• cosmology
• dark energy
• dark matter
• Sigma-8 tension
• neutrinos
• Fermilab
• scientific consensus
• Modern Cosmology

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Fermilab, University of Chicago

Books & works: Modern Cosmology

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