Dark matter sounds like some physicist’s tall tale: There’s this invisible matter, see, and it has this powerful gravitational effect on galaxies. That’s why we know it exists. In fact, it outweighs ordinary matter by about five to one. Problem is, dark matter doesn’t reflect or absorb light, so we can’t see it. Oh, and it rarely interacts with conventional atoms, so we can’t feel it, either. However, we know it makes up a huge part of the universe, so we keep looking for it.
As mind-bending (and perhaps logic-challenging) as these ideas may seem, a lot of physicists are searching for this elusive matter. Elena Aprile is one of the leading lights in this dark business. She heads a prominent dark matter experiment called Xenon, which is based 5,000 feet underground in Italy’s Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, one of the world’s largest subterranean physics labs. Aprile, who is ...
