We went to Tullie House on Thursday night to hear Dr Laura Kormos and Dr Ian Bailey from Lancaster University lecture on Particle Physics. Dr Bailey was talking about Dark Matter. What he said was that we need to look for fields and interactions that are similar in some ways to the 4 interactions that we study at A Level but are different. We may not yet have found them because they are at such high energy. The plot in the photograph shows where they have looked so far. What he is looking at is the idea that a photon could change into a darks sector photon. Photons can't get through opaque matter because they are the force carriers for the electromagnetic force and so interact with the charges in the matter. However, a dark sector photon won't feel charge so it won't notice the solid wall. He is trying to get photons to go through solid walls from one box to another in the hope of showing that something must happen in the middle, and that the something might be dark sector particles. Thanks to both Tullie House and Lancaster University for putting this on, and it was free! And we were fed ice cream! The best feature was that the lectures were not dumbed down in any way.
