Hey there, I'm Scott Mitchell, the editor of Schwartz Media's daily news show seven Am. This is the weekend read Every fortnight on the show, we feature the best writing in Australia, read to you by the people who wrote it. Today on the show, the seven Am Podcast's very own technical producer Atticus Bastow with his piece from the Saturday Paper. Over ninety years ago, a Swiss astrophysicist theorized there was an unseen, unobservable force that sits behind the universe we know.
He called it dark matter, and today we're not much closer to understanding it than he was, but that could be about to change. As a group of Australian researchers a part of our most promising effort yet to uncover the nature of this unseen force. And it just so happens they're doing it down an old, disused gold mine. Atticus will read his piece the Search for Dark Matter. After a short conversation Atticus to begin with, we work together every day on seven Am, or the show's technical producer.
But it took me a while to find out that you have this love about space, astrophysics, dark matter. Where did that love start?
For you. That's a good question, you know. Funnily enough, the first thing that comes to mind is those Richard Scary cross Section children's books. I don't know if you'd remember them.
I do.
I was absolutely transfixed with those books. I think because for whatever reason, I found that idea of kind of adomizing and exploding systems and sort of understanding of how whole things can function as the sum of their parts.
I guess that's a better way to say it. Definitely broad strokes sci fi lover used to just smash anything sci high when I was a kid, and then, I don't know, probably just plenty of holiday trips down at Wilson's prom, getting some great star gazing in and just you know, spending a long time craning my neck and wishing that I was up there in the stars. And a healthy amount of science interest, I think in our
In my family. My uncle was a physicist. He used to work at the synchotron here in Melbourne, in Monash, so I guess it's on the periphery in some ways.
And so this love for it, you know, brought you to report about this lab deep inside an Australian gold mine. To begin with can you just put in context for us how unique this site is in terms of the world of scientific research and how special this research that's being done here is sure.
I guess the first thing that is unique about it is that it's the first of its kind in terms of deep underground laboratories in the Southern Hemisphere. The counterpart of this same research project in Italy was the thing that spurred this whole project on. So that's an existing one that is in the Eponine air Mountains and the
Italian Alps. So it's this sort of you know, science laboratory, deep underground, and it's shielded by the Earth to sort of ward off all the pesky cosmic rays and other subatomic particles that are going to be coming through and messing up people's research. There's a few others in the world. Some of the researchers on this project have spent some time in those labs, but yeah, for the Southern Hemisphere, this is the first. And for it to be in
Australia I thought was exciting. And then the fact that it's just out in country Victoria, you know, in my home state, was even more interesting. Because Stall itself is really unassuming it's a very sleepy gold rush town. You know. The mine sort of is on the periphery of the town. The town itself is sort of classic sandstone brick church country Bakery. You'd never expect there to be this multimillion dollar physics laboratory buried underground there.
Absolutely, And yeah, like what's it like? You know, you mentioned how unassuming the town is. You know, what is it like to think that these you know, there's questions about the nature of reality and the entire universe being being answered in a place that is, you know, a short drive away. Is this unassuming Australian town.
Yeah, I guess I think if I think about that too much, I'll absolutely go off the edge of kind of you know, self realization and what do they call it in Hitchhiker's Guide Total Perspective FOTEX. But yeah, one of the professors in the project kind of describes it as if we get to, you know, have conclusive evidence come out of this project, then it changes the fundamental understanding of the universe, which is some pretty weighty language to be throwing around, But I think that's a valid
thing to say. This research comes as more than fifty separate research projects. In over one hundred years of studying dark matter, not a single one has managed to provide any conclusive evidence on a bunch of different theories. So this in a way is just the latest in a number of research projects, but I think it's the one that is at least the most promising so far.
And so speaking of that, Atticus, just finally, you know, it's a little while since you first reported this piece. Where's the research up to? Now? What do we know about when we're going to maybe get the answers to some of these questions?
Yeah, I mean when I chatted to the team, they were in the process of installing some of the first equipment. I selfishly really wanted to go into the mind, put a hard hat on, and disappear under the earth, but it was so busy with everything going in and out that I unfortunately couldn't get in there. But yeah, some of the first equipment was going in. Then, with the sort of timeline of the piece in relation to present day, they should be setting up and receiving some of the
first data for the project from memory. They said that it would be maybe the end of this year that they might see some of the big picture stuff start to come alive. But the sort of process of putting it together, it's like the most complicated Lego project ever in that you've got all these systems that then have their subsystems, and the subsystems have their own subsystems, so these all have to be set up, calibrated, tested, make
sure that they're not receiving false data. Once they're confirmed, do you go onto the next one and the one that supports the other one. And so finally this extremely complicated thing should come together. Yeah, hopefully at some point this year, and then we can find out whether or not God exists.
I guess well, Attachus. We spend a lot of our time talking about other people's stories. It's a pleasure to get the chance to talk to you about one of yours. So I can't wait to read your piece.
Thanks Scott, It's a pleasure to be on the other side.
Coming up after the break, Atticus will read The Search for Dark Matter.
The Search for Dark Matter. Victoria's Stall gold Mine is unassuming in its operation. Distant beeps from Earth movers disrupt the otherwise constant background drone of the rotating ball mill that processes the extracted raw materials. The buildings and mining artifices are rich with patternation, a marker of the slow, uninterrupted nature of the work. A sign over a small ramp reads Magdala Decline in honor of the fault that borders the Stall Goldfield load. That's the entrance between the
gravel car park and the corrogated steel equipment sheds. The only other evidence of the multimillion dollar facility, buried more than a kilometer below ground, is two weathered information panels strung to the security fence. It seems a fitting parallel to the hidden nature of the Stall Underground Physics Laboratory's
primary research focus dark matter. In close to one hundred years since Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zvicki made his case for the existence of an unseen mass in space Dunkel matterie, science is yet to provide a conclusive explanation for what is thought to account for a staggering amount of our whole picture, about eighty five per cent of the matter
in the universe. What is understood so far about dark matter is observed in the interactions between cosmological bodies in space, namely interactions that cannot be explained with what is visible using accepted theories of gravity, dark matter's presence is implied as the missing piece of these celestial dancers. The first potential evidence of dark matter was recorded by the Dama Libre experiment at the Laboratory Nazionale del Gran Sasso in Italy,
situated underneath the Appennina Mountains. Substantial evidence has eluded more than fifty major experiments in a century of research. Dama Libre's observations note consistent yearly patterns in data, with the team believing it could be a marker of the Earth's movement through a substrate of dark matter in our galaxy. On our yearly orbit around the Sun, we effectively move
with and against the current. Skeptics have posited that the findings could be disproved by seasonal variation, and so the experiment is being replicated in the Stall lab, the first of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, in order to rule this out. If the Italian laboratories data can be replicated here, it will herald a new chapter in the fundamental understanding of our universe. The resulting joint experience is titled Sodium Iodide with Active Background Rejection Experiment or saber
A fitting title for such cutting edge research. Doctor Terresa Fruth is a specialist in astroparticle physics, working closely on Saber South, the counterpart to Italy's Saber North. If you look at it historically, there might be things out in space we cannot see at the moment, she tells me, seems kind of reasonable, right, But the more we got access to it really clarified over the past hundred years that there must be something actually quite new, something which
does not fit into our current models and understanding. Professor Philip Ercio is the technical coordinator of Saber South. Like many on the research team, he has an impressive resume of particle physics experience, most notably at the Large Hadron Collider as part of the Atlas experiment, and more recently with the development of the new hyper Cameo Kande Neutrino Observatory in Japan. Those experiments are some of the biggest
in the world. He tells me, I mean the Large Hadron Collider is this twenty seven kilometer ring smashing together protons at close to the speed of light, recreating the conditions of the Big Bang. Stall's lab is small by comparison, but the significance of the research is comparable searching for the fundamental building blocks of the universe. The problem is the building blocks Saber is looking for are invisible. What we can see is the visitation of dark matter at
a sub atomic level. As our planet moves with the Sun through the galaxy at seven hundred and ninety two thousand kilometers an hour, dark matter flows through us. As such, dark matter particles occasionally bump into ordinary mata particles. Doctor Fruth uses a sports analogy. Imagine the dark matter particles coming in and just like a billiard ball bouncing off the nucleus of an atom, and the recoil of this nucleus.
That's what we're trying to detect. The interactions are so rare that she suggests little more than a handful of collisions could be detected over the life of the project. The collisions give off heat, which in turn is converted to light. In an astonishing feat, the apparatus at the core of Sabers experiment is able to observe these infantesimally small glints. The backdrop large transparent sodium iodide crystals, seemingly
plucked directly from Superman's fortress of solitude. The extreme precision of the experiment's design means that an incredible amount of countermeasure is invested in warding off false positives. As Professor Okeeo explains, we're looking for such feeble and rare interactions that can really easily be mimicked by very tiny amounts
of radiation in ordinary matter. The layers of earth above the lab act as a shield, blocking the unwonted imposition of cosmic rays and background radiation, the eternal reverberation of our earth primordial universe. Bananas are forbidden in the lab due to their high potassium levels, a small amount of which is radioactive. Even the steel used for the detector is of a bespoke purity, as a majority of steel produced from World War II onwards contains remnants of nuclear
weapons testing fallout. The main detector itself has a strategy of mitigation, with discrete ancillary detectors waiting for interactions with muons stray subatomic particles that can make their way through the one kilometer of earth shielding. It is an arresting amount of complication failsafe upon failsafe, subsystem upon subsystem. The muon paddles are in the process of being installed, to the excitement of the team, with the full system expected
to be operational this year. SABER represents the flagship project for the Stall Underground Physics Laboratory, but the unique nature of the lab's design presents an opportunity for other leading edge research to be conducted in Australia. Deep underground facilities have been used to study quantum computing and astrobiology. The extreme nature of these sites provides a way to observe how life operates without cosmic radiation. Professor Occhio doesn't rule
out the possibility of additional discoveries. His face lights up as he describes the potential of dark photons and a new fundamental force. Above all, the Stall LAD presents the potential for Australia to make an enormous contribution to the broader scientific canon. As Professor Occhio tells me, it's because we're searching so broadly everywhere. If we can finally say
that dark matter interacts like this, it changes everything. The tradition of Australian Sister cities locales bound by cultural exchange has nurtured connections with more than fifty countries internationally, so now a Sleepy Victorian gold Rush settlement shares bonds with the Italian app Anina Mountain Range. At both sites, the
earth rises to protect the most precious of interactions. Install The pursuit of rare materials began one hundred and seventy years ago, but the years ahead may be a witness to something far rarer.
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