Even if it can’t be seen, it’s there. Existence is decoupled from perception.
The tree exists in the middle of the forest
the fish swims in the deep waters of the ocean
the stars are born and die in a galaxy, so, so far way
even when there is nobody to witness it…
Albert E. thought he could name the invisible. All it would take would be to invent new senses. Human-made detectors 100 metres under the Earth, or floating in the vast expansion of the Universe, to help humans enhance their perception and go beyond physical limitations using their limitless creativity. Albert E. would rejoice in this idea in his conscious and subconscious realms: during the day drafting formulae on endless blocks of papers - clipped together to preserve some sort of order within the vertiginous chaos that was his mind - and during the night drafting concepts in that strange ethereal matter that dreams are made of.
A persistent dream in those days of summer 2040 was of a cosmological nature. Albert E. would picture himself as an omnipresent being in the middle of the cosmos, floating in a blue darkness that constantly expanded outwards, a combination of calm and agitation - the perpetual movement. Albert E. would admire his surroundings, the dark blue canvas with lens-like light brushes, the presence of the invisible that cannot hide entirely and is exposed by nearby objects [nearby = 100 light years apart] in the form of gravitational lenses. Even though Albert E. had hypothesised this phenomenon, he would marvel at the curved lights during the eternity of a dream. Just because humans are one step closer to understanding nature doesn’t make it any less fascinating, Albert E. would whisper in the darkness. “But what are you, dark matter?”
Somewhere in the British countryside, Alice returned during the summer to visit her childhood home. It had been a long time since she had set foot on that green grass under the unremittingly cloudy sky. Her career as psychologist had taken a leap and placed her at the heart of international debate amongst renowned experts in the field of dream interpretation. After recurring dreams harking back to her time as a child in the UK, she decided to take a summer break and disconnect from her busy agenda for a whole month. No As a matter of dark Tamara Vázquez
Schröder 1 of 9laptop, no papers, no emails. What should have been a peaceful stay at her aunt’s turned quickly into a new project - even though she didn’t fully realise this at the time.
On a hot August afternoon, in the same tranquil spot where 30 years ago she had fallen asleep and had that bizarre dream of a parallel world of wonders, eccentric creatures and objects with unexpected features, Alice lay down with her book under the familiar old oak tree and let her mind drift into a deep sleep. What a surprise she got when she opened her eyes again to find herself awake and surrounded by salty blue water. After a moment of shock and despair, Alice realised that she could breathe without difficulty in this aquatic world. Following her own manual on how to explore your dreams (if indeed this were one), she followed its logic and swam through a thick coral reef rich in fish, colours, and sounds. She was only partially surprised to meet a succession of characters who resembled old acquaintances: a humongous octopus smoking a pipe while reading a newspaper held by his other tentacle, attached to a rock for comfortable support; a cat-fish smiling broadly, staring fixedly at Alice, but which disappeared when she attempted to swim towards it; a group of crabs wearing hats, drinking from what appeared to be a set of fine tea cups… A little bit too familiar?
Alice swam energetically upwards to reach the surface of the water, but each time she got close, it would recede away from her, leaving her with a pounding heart, the rocks above water, the clouds, and the birds remaining forever in the distance. Once she regained her breath, she moved forward for a while, until she came across what felt like the surface tension of water, which seemed to be separating the body of water she was in from a darker area behind it. She seemed to be up against a vertical barrier which couldn’t be traversed. This other world beyond the vertical aquatic surface seemed to be made of a type of heavy substance, and darkness, so much darkness. Even though it was unreachable, Alice was sure something else existed on the other side.
Why couldn’t humanity see it coming? Mafalda browsed the news stupefied, cringing at every title and storyline: forests devastated by uncontrollable fires, coastal cities disappearing under rising sea levels, mussels cooked at room temperature in the north of the planet, animal species kept as last exemplars in that enormous Noahs’ Ark that planet Earth had become. Correcting behaviours had always taken humanity time, but why weren’t the first signs of
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the impending disastrous future persuasive enough to make humans change their habits immediately? So much technological advancement and creativity and yet such little courage to make drastic and positive changes. Mafalda would go running to the kitchen window of her small apartment in Buenos Aires and shout out as the noisy train rattled by. Cancelling out its sound brought relief to Mafalda, frustrated and ashamed of her own species as it was. Why couldn’t we find a competitive alternative energy source to replace fossil fuels? Why couldn’t we control our energy and resource consumption until we were able to do so? Mafalda would fall asleep every night sighing heavily and wake up seven hours later as if no time had passed, just time crunched together, her body and mind ready for a new day. That moonless night in August was heavy and hot. No breeze flowed through the windows. Hot nights in the middle of wintery August in Argentina had become the new normal. Mafalda would lie on her bed like a penguin might lie on a piece of melting ice, just drifting in the night and wondering. The difference that night was that Mafalda had a dream.
Contrary to common dreams, she was not the protagonist but rather an external spectator in what seemed to be a Swedish city where she was following the life of an undergraduate student in environmental law. Although their physical characteristics were clearly different from those of Mafalda, she could feel some sympathy and familiarity towards her northern friend, let’s call her G. This new parallel-world friend had similar interests to Mafalda and a drive to put things right. Contrary to Mafalda’s declining hope and rather pessimistic attitude towards any possible change, G. seemed convinced that there was still an exit door from the madness that the world had become. Mafalda woke up the next morning surprised and with the strong belief that she had just met her future colleague and that there was a solution for the coexistence of humans and planet Earth about to be revealed.
In search of an unpolluted, harsh and authentic landscape, Mr Phillips had finally built himself a modest house among the cacti of the Mexican desert. “The where reverberates in the what of my paintings,” Mr Phillips would announce in his bi-annual vernissages in the city. The audience would listen to his words, then proceed meditatively through the exhibition, surprised that what the painter was attempting to capture on the canvas was not conscious reality, but a reality revealed to us in other ways. When questioned, Mr Phillips would reply, “They are just two sides of the same page
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which speak to each other.” He also believed that by choosing a pigment powerful enough, one could traverse the page, merge both conscious and subconscious, and find the common point and the access from one to the other, and vice versa. Even though Mr Phillips left his art fans stunned and inspired by his confidence and ideas, he himself would return home full of sorrow, feeling the pain of the seeker who hasn’t yet found the true answer. He was sure there was something inside us, some sort of axis of unknown composition that some would call a soul. As a visual artist, he believed that not knowing the colour of the soul made it impossible to represent, and if he couldn’t paint it, it would fade, like fruit for a still life decays after it has been painted, like when humans grow old and die, and only a portrait remains. Mr Phillips feared that one day he would disappear without trace, leaving no representation or painting of his soul.
That night, in the middle of August, Mr Phillips had sat outside his porch for longer than usual, with a light cover on his legs, staring at a meteor shower crossing the night sky as if painted by an invisible brush on the dark cupola above. Tiredness overcame Mr Phillips, and he fell into the deepest sleep. He found himself blindfolded, with a brush in his hand, starting to paint on a hard surface, maybe a wall? He was excited and immersed in the task, painting without thinking, just being, just feeling. Once the work felt complete, he lifted the kerchief from his eyes and saw, revealed on the canvas, a moving painting, a constantly transforming image. The painting contained a new colour, never seen before. And then he knew: it was the colour of his soul.
Mr Phillips woke at dawn, dazed and sweating profusely. He got up immediately, hurriedly set up a new canvas on his easel and, in desperation, tried to emulate what he had dreamt. He mixed colour after colour unsuccessfully, then in a last despairing move, threw all his colours in one great melange onto the canvas. He remained there immobilised, gasping for air, his face covered in tears of disappointment and despair, watching the oil paint as it spilt from the canvas and flowed down onto the floor like a multicoloured waterfall.
Last day of August 2040.
From that morning on, the world would never be the same again. After years of collecting unique data from particle collisions, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was approaching the end of its planned
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operations, with no new scientific discovery in sight. Physicists were becoming nervous and uneasy at the alarming thought that, with the current machines, no new discoveries were likely in the near future. The four big detectors at the LHC, ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE, had already analysed the data in multiple ways, with the help of advanced machine learning and computing facilities, with so far only a resounding confirmation of the Standard Model of Particle Physics. There was mixed admiration for how well this human-made theory predicted all phenomena revealed by nature and a profound disappointment that not a single significant anomaly was revealed in nature to challenge the physicists’ curiosity and creativity. But that morning, a smaller experiment at the LHC necessitated a press conference. Something new had been brewing in the heart of FASER, a detector placed in the forward direction of the proton beam, 480m away from the interaction point (IP) where protons collide against each other and where the ATLAS detector is placed to surround these collisions. This small detector, hosted by a cavern previously used to connect the Super Proton Synchrotron to the Large Electron–Positron Collider at CERN, had witnessed the production of a new particle not created at the IP, but further downstream. Hypothesised particles called Axions - named after a brand of laundry detergent because they ‘cleaned up a problem’had been produced by photons1, created at the IP and collided with a neutral particle absorber, a barrier in the detector, in a process resembling something like this Feynman diagram:
like this:
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1 Fundamental particles associated to the electromagnetic interaction (“light”). as it would appear in a theoretical particle physicist’s mind and something
in an experimental particle physicist’s mind.
The most exciting part of the evidence for this new particle was that, as the Higgs boson explained the matter that was visible, the Axion was the elementary particle making up the dark matter – 27% of the Universe that we knew existed but could not identify.
Alice spilt the remainder of her morning tea over the table as she read the news in her digital newspaper. As hot liquid dripped down the table leg and through gaps in the floorboards, Alice zoomed into the Feynman diagram, recognising the imagery from her recent dream, as she explored the rectangular aquatic left-hand side of the diagram. She had once stared at that right-hand side which was dark and unknown. Without getting changed, she shot out of her apartment and cycled to the University, taking a right turn towards the building of the Physics Department. She ran up the stairs frenetically and, with her heart pounding as never before, she knocked at his door, once, twice…
Albert E. had just come off an international phone call when he heard the knock at his door. News had been travelling the world and discussed at length behind exclusive government doors even before the official press release had been made public. A worldwide task force was already being created to explore the potential benefits of a manufactured dark matter particle to society. One word, in particular, resonated in the phone call as a whisper of hope: energy. Albert E. had been asked to take charge of the task As a matter of dark Tamara Vázquez Schröder 6 of 9
[Figure from “ALPs at FASER: The LHC as a Photon Beam Dump”, arXiv:1806.02348]force owing to his wide expertise in the subject and his endless creativity in problem-solving. He accepted without hesitation, with no trace of doubt in his voice, but once he'd put the phone down, his body started to shake in pure exhilaration. Lost in thought, he finally heard the persistent knocking at his door and let the visitor in.
Despite having little grasp of the language of mathematics, Alice needed to be able to share her subconscious experience, so was prepared to work as hard as necessary to understand the connection between her dream and the recent news from the LHC. In the past, studying psychology had allowed her to analyse her hyperreal dreams and her worlds of eccentricity, but now it seemed that the answer lay in the domain of particle physics. Fortunately, Albert E. listened to her carefully and with interest.
Once Alice had finished her detailed explanation, Albert E. looked thoughtful, then without uttering a single word, began to delve into some old notes, drafts of previous works, lost in dusty shelves, but still preserved in their anonymity. Between clouds of dust, Albert E. rose up triumphantly, clutching in his hands a folder of notes written 20 years ago. After browsing the notes in silence for a few moments, he pushed one of the papers over to Alice’s side of the table, and said, “Here it is: the Hidden Valley. A hypothesised parallel world, such as ours, but made of dark matter. This might be what was behind that curtain of water, the vertical aquatic surface.“
Alice held the paper closer and looked at Albert E., with a smile spread all over her face.
As the dark-matter-energetic project took shape, news started to appear on the covers of worldwide newspapers, a sign of hope for humanity for those eager to believe in positive change and a disaster-waiting-to-happen for those skeptical readers who feared seeing their hopes crash once again. “Axions in action” was the slogan of the task force, trying to reach out to the wider population with this amusing play on words. Albert E. was, at this point, a wellknown figure in the media, the face of the future, a future where the planet may be given a chance to restore itself and humans could continue to make use of energy for their survival.
Mafalda, while excited about the prospects, also had her reservations about this macro-usage of dark matter… As history has taught humanity (and memory and books are there to avoid
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forgetting it), energy sources can also be easily exploited for the wrong purposes: let’s recall the Manhattan project, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mafalda thought there ought to be some sort of external body to the task force to ensure that the worldwide usage of the findings on dark matter would only have a peaceful scope. Even though she had just arrived as an intern at the United Nations in Geneva, she acted promptly and assertively. She asked for a meeting with her new boss, which was granted, but as she entered her boss’ office, she noticed that a group of workers were changing the furniture and décor, and the name tag on the door was being replaced with one that read: Dr M.
Another group of assistants were helping a tall, fine-boned older lady, with decades of battle lines drawn over her face, leave the office. As she walked slowly and gracefully through the door, she winked at Mafalda in complicity and smiled as she exited what had been her office for the past 30 years. It felt as if they had always known each other, although this was the first time that Mafalda had met her, or that’s what she thought.
The meeting was more diplomatic than effective, and Mafalda left feeling rather disappointed, thinking of the mountains of bureaucracy that her proposals would entail. She was sitting meditatively on a large couch in the foyer of the building when a wrinkled friendly face came and sat down by her side. The woman, who would have been her boss had she come any earlier, began to engage her in conversation. Mafalda spoke without reservation about her all-consuming thoughts, her worries about the imminent changes in energy production and the possible misusages of such new knowledge for the wrong purposes. The old lady smiled as if she had known Mafalda’s intention from the start and explained that she had spoken with Albert E. about the subject a few days ago, before leaving her position. She had been to see him to discuss the desperate need for someone at the UN to follow in her footsteps, since the new project didn’t seem a priority for the current leadership of her organisation.
Words felt unnecessary. The two minds appeared to be merging into a unity that was older than either one of them. Satisfied with the outcome, the old lady stood up and left. Mafalda sat alone on the couch for a moment, holding the lady's card, the card of Dr G.
On a rainy evening in London in the autumn of 2040, art enthusiasts were welcomed into the first exhibition of the work of Mr Phillips to
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be held in the UK. It was a Friday, and Alice was exhausted from overwork but decided to go straight from the University to the exhibition in the hope of clearing her mind of daily worries, and perhaps broadening it towards other dimensions of perception. She had followed Mr Phillips' work virtually for a while and was thrilled at the idea of seeing first-hand his new work, titled, “The colours of my invisible soul.”.
After walking mindfully through the gallery, she stopped abruptly at a painting that captivated her. It had a dark background with an even darker circle on the side and even darker spirals inside the dark circle. Mr Phillips noticed Alice standing frozen to the spot beside his favourite painting, the one he secretly preferred above all the others, and tentatively approached her. But other visitors also began to congregate around the painting. A man raised his eyebrows and mumbled, “It’s all black! Anybody can do that…” and left, complaining sceptically about what currently went by the name of art.
Alice remained in front of the painting, and keeping her eyes fixed on it, she asked Mr Phillips, “This is your soul, isn’t it?”
“Invisible doesn’t mean non-existent, just misunderstood. My soul has a colour, but with my eyes, I can only experiment with it as shades of darkness.”
Alice remained silent, wondering about Malevich, about Soulages; did they also think the same? That rainy night Alice dreamt again, for the first time since that summer night in August, that she was in her Waterland. She traversed her fluid surroundings and approached the well-known vertical fluid walls. She thought of Albert E., she thought of Mr Phillips, she thought of Mafalda’s encouraging words of a youth searching for another future to their world, and this time, without resistance, she traversed to the darkness, a vision of dark on dark. At that moment, she perceived a Universe, dark, but in motion like her own Universe, expanding, with galaxies, and black stars, like our Sun, sustaining themselves with energy. The Hidden Valley.
At that same instant, at 4am, Albert E. woke up panting, and said out loud, “Dark Matter Fusion”⊙
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