YouSaid · the spoken record

Don Lincoln

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2026-05-29
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2026-05-29
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  1. “I think that's true for an artist or something. You know, anybody, a musician, you know, musician, they just keep practicing because”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Intensity of trying to get the answers, you know that person's a winner. And so if some student out there, if it doesn't bring you joy is, what's her name, the Japanese scale says. If it doesn't bring you joy, then it might not be for you. And then you could be a person who reads about it and, you know, is involved. But if you want to be a real scientist, it has to be just part of what you are here.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Beat me. And you know, some people, if the thing breaks, it's like, oh man, that didn't work. And a lot of people, well, I'm going to go home. I'm fed up. Nah, it would just kind of make me mad. And I put more effort into it I was crazy. I worked long hours, but I think the people who are really good at this will do maybe not that much. You know, some people have to have a better life than that. But a lot because it's just, you can't imagine not knowing the answer. And that when you see that as an older guy, you don't maybe not to that degree, but when you see that kind of drive.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And I still love it. I can't do that anymore, but that's simply because I have other obligations. But had I been rich, I would have done the same thing. You know, it's something I truly, truly loved. And the I mean There is absolutely nothing more fascinating to me than having a hard problem in figuring it out. And that work ethic. Well, there's a couple of things that separate smart people from no kidding scientists, because all scientists are smart. But the thing that separates that many scientists have is a drive and a real grit. For me and for so many scientists that I know Trying to measure something and having it not work just kind of ticks me off, and I am not going to let the universe in my lab or whatever”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Well, yeah. I mean, obviously being smart, if you're Einstein, then maybe you can slack, I guess, although even he didn't do that. But I'm not Einstein. But the fact is, when I was young and I was unencumbered, no family, no kids, or something, I couldn't imagine anything I wanted to do more. I mean, some people, they want to go out to the club. They want to, I don't know, play soccer or something. But I wanted to make measurements and I wanted to understand and learn. And that was fantastic. And so as a graduate student, and this isn't for everybody, but I worked outrageously. I would, from Monday through Saturday, I would be at the lab voluntarily because I wanted to be from 8 a.m. to midnight. And on Sunday, I would work from 8 until about 5. And that's because from 5 to midnight, I had to wash clothes and buy groceries and things like that. And I loved it.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And I'm hoping that some of them will have read some of the things I've written and will find their own path forward because I found it very rewarding over the years. And I've been doing this long enough that I'm sure this is true. I've had kids come up to me at the lab and say, hey, I'm a summer intern because I saw your video, I read your book, or, you know, whatever. So I know that at least I've made a small impact. I mean, I always would like to do more. And, you know, I appreciate the opportunity that your audience affords me. Because I think it's important to talk about these things. These are really cool, fascinating questions. They are unanswered, and they are just waiting for youngsters to come and spend some time thinking about them. Because one of your viewers might be one of the people who answer these questions.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Mentors or anything like that, but I managed. And that actually is why, while I'm here and why I've spent a fair bit of my time writing books and so forth, because I figure that there has to be some other kid out there in Iowa or Kansas, Montana, somewhere out in some little town without a lot of access to the kinds of thing that people, you know, who have highly educated parents do.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “For were not to be found in those directions, but I still learned about how those questions have been asked in the past. And so I became a scientist. And the only question was, was I going to be a cosmologist slash astrophysicist or a particle physicist? And when I had to make that decision, it was the mid-80s. And at the time, there were a lot fewer cosmology measurements. There was an awful lot of thinking about the universe and not enough measuring. Whereas with particle physics, by God, you could do experiments. And so what attracted me was the ability to actually get an answer and not just mull over what an answer might be. And so I became a particle physicist. It was difficult without having family.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Irrepressibly curious about everything. And I had sort of a quasi-philosophical mind. I mean, I was interested in things that questions that have in the past been theological and then philosophical and now are more scientific, questions about how did the universe come into existence? Why is the universe the way it is? Why are the laws of the universe, what we see them to be, how will the universe, was it created, how will it be destroyed? These are big questions that have bothered humanity for, well, thousands of years. And so, you know, I did. You said I had philosophy and religion minors in college, and I did because I was curious about that. I was hoping that learning that history might help me understand these questions. And it was in college where I came to realize that the answers that I were searching.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Science communicators that were popular in the 1970s, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, a guy by the name of George Gamma, they wrote books about science aimed at a layperson. As a kid, I surely couldn't read a textbook and understand it, but I could read and get a hint of what science was. And on top of that, I was as most”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Well, you know, I grew up a poor kid in the Boondocks, great parents, but not once that could guide me terribly academically, but very, very nurturing. You know, my mom would laugh that she could stop helping me math after like sixth or seventh grade, you know. But they were supportive. And there were a couple of things that... Couple three things I think that folded into it. One is I was a voracious reader as a kid. I loved science fiction. I would read a book a day. It drove my mother nuts because she would try to be nice. She'd buy me a book. And I'd say, thank you, and the next day it'd be done. It just drove her completely nuts. But anyways, but science fiction is good for... Fostering imagination. And so that's precisely what it did. In addition, and this is where the more serious science came along, there were lovely”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “We did that in the 90s with experiments called macho ogle and some others. They looked for a black hole that you just can't see. You know, a black hole you can't see. It's perfect. It's a perfect candidate for dark matter. And if there's enough of them out there, remember, there's five times the number of stars, which means there's a whole lot of freaking black holes out there. We should have seen them and we didn't.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Or you have to come up with that really cool theoretical idea that everybody's overlooked, which is another possibility. And there are people who are really, really religiously hating dark matter, largely because we've looked so hard for so many years in the experiments in today's world are a million times more sensitive than when I was a starting student, and they still haven't seen anything. And that's why people really hate dark matter. I mean, some of them because they think we should have seen it by now, but. I don't know.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I mean, I don't know what it is. I think it's cool. It's very, very fascinating. That is one thing I really do hope in my lifetime is understood because I'd like to know the answer to that.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And with all that said, until you see it, there still is the possibility that maybe we don't understand gravity or inertia right. You can't rule that out.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And that's why it's cool. So if someone out there is a young person wants to get into this, understanding dark matter is a big deal. I mean, it's five times more prevalent. The problem is, as I told you, if the mass is ranging from an asteroid to far lighter than an electron, if you get on an experiment that looks at one little range of mass, maybe you weren't the lucky guy that measured the right place. And that's one of the reasons why as fascinating as I think it is, I'm not doing dark matter experiments because if you make an experiment that searches one mass range, it'll be blind to another mass range. So what you need is you need many groups doing all sorts of radically different experiments exploring all sorts of parameter space.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “See some, you know, black holes pass in front of stars, and we've seen them, but we just haven't seen enough. And for very low mass particles like asteroids, they just wouldn't make enough brightening effect to see. So there's like a minimum sensitivity of brightening. And that about a third the mass of a moon are moon is about the sensitivity that we had. Nobody, I think, really thought that these low mass guys were likely what they thought was more likely they were just unseen black holes, which I thought, you know, I think it's completely reasonable. And when that got ruled out, I thought, okay, modified gravity or... Or inertia, well, now bullet cluster and dragonfly seems to have ruled that out. So I'm stuck in my head with dark matter seems to be real. And we don't know what it is.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “The astronomical searches were not sensitive to that level of dark matter. But then you would expect that there would be some of those in the solar system. And if they're what we think, like asteroids or something, then we'd heat them up and we'd eventually see them. But if they're really truly dark matter doesn't interact with matter, which means they wouldn't absorb energy from the sun. So they'd be really dark. I don't know, maybe they're out there. But the only way we searched for them was a thing called microlensing. So if a massive object, you have a distant star and a massive object pass between that star and your eye, that star will momentarily brighten. And so you just look for what they call microlensing events and you count them and you see some.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “See more, and then that might be dark matter. Again, that hasn't worked. So we've ruled out some dark matter particles, but the problem is the range of space of possible mass if dark matter is of a particulate form. The range of viable dark matter ranges from something like the mass of an asteroid to far lighter than an electron and everywhere in between. And we have looked, we've ruled out some little spots in that phase space, but that's a big range.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Announcements of, oh, we saw it, oh, we didn't. Oh, you know, the problem is that way of looking for dark matter is hard because there are other ways of making, for instance, gamma rays like neutron stars and stuff. And you really need to understand the details of galaxies really, really well to believe that. And then the final option is what I do where we smash particles together at high energy. We try to make dark matter particles. If you make dark matter particles because they don't interact except via gravity, they escape with your detector. So what you're seeing, what you hope to see is an event where you collide particles, a dark matter particle escapes and you don't see it, but the recoil you see on the other side because momentum is conserved. So you see a blob of energy on this side, nothing on the other side. Maybe that's dark matter. And that also happens with neutrinos. So you need to understand everything about neutrinos and calculate how many of those you see and then hope you see.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Right, neutrinos are indeed wimps of a sort. Now, we have to be careful what we mean by wimps. They are weakly interacting massive particles. But we can calculate, and there's just not enough mass in them. It's not in it. So we need another form. And we have seen zero evidence of this wind of dark matter through the earth. Another possibility is you look where you think dark matter might be concentrated at the center of galaxies. And if dark matter exists and there's antimatter dark matter, maybe they annihilate and make photons. And so we look for gamma rays and various other signatures of annihilating dark matter. And there are always constantly”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “We've done that for many different types of dark matter. We just simply put detectors in labs deep underground, and we can see neutrinos in them, it's true, but dark matter would have especially heavy dark matter, what these WIMPs, they have a different signature. And we've seen no evidence of dark matter interaction in these detectors.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So then you're left with the idea that dark matter is a particle. And that's what we've thought about. The name for the dark matter particle that we've called for a long time is a wimp for a weakly interacting massive particle. And we have spent the last God, 30 years looking for them in the various ways. There are three ways that we might see dark matter. The direct way, which says that dark matter exists literally everywhere in this room, in our laboratory. And the dark matter is passing through the earth like a wind, and we put up detectors trying to see those. We have done that, and we've seen nothing.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Dark matter is likely a real thing. Now, that's great. I've taken you all the way to dark matter. So now you're going to ask me, you're going to say, Don, what is dark matter? I'm going to, I don't know. But I know what it isn't. Okay. I know that it is not black holes. I know that it is not rogue planets. I know that we've done the measurements. We've looked across nearly every mass range for compact objects and ruled them out. So if dark matter is real, it can't be made of those.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And so the fact that they rotate exactly according to Newton's laws says that whatever's causing galaxies to rotate too fast is not a property of matter. But if you had a galaxy where there was no dark matter, for whatever reason it got stripped off or something, this is one of those lovely ironies that the existence of a galaxy with no dark matter is very strong evidence that dark matter is real because you can take the dark matter out. So the DF2 and DF4 also suggest to me that dark matter is real. So now while it remains possible that we need to modify the laws of inertia or we need to modify the laws of gravity, those are possible still in my opinion, and now this is Don's opinion, but it's probably the opinion of most of the scientific community.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Where the galaxies are. And that's what we see. So that is a strong evidence, in my mind, the bullet cluster is strong evidence that dark matter is a real thing. And there is another example, which is much more recent. Dark bullet cluster was a while ago called the dragonfly galaxies. There's Dragonfly 2 and Dragonfly 4. These are galaxies that rotate exactly according to Newton's laws.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “And if dark matter is real or dark matter is not real, you will get different answers if those two galaxies pass through one another. The galaxies themselves should pass through one another, basically not interacting, but the big thing is the gas clouds. So if there's big clouds of gas as the galaxy is pass through one another, the clouds should interact and the gas cloud should stop in the middle and be really, really hot. So then you would see if there were no dark matter, you would see a cluster of galaxies, cluster of galaxies, a big gas cloud in the middle. And because the big glass cloud in the middle is much more massive than the galaxies themselves, you would expect to see distortions that we call dark matter distortions in the middle. If, however, dark matter is real, the galaxy is pass through one another, the cloud stops dark matter, doesn't interact with the clouds, so it passes through. In that case, you would expect to see the distortion.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Now, I personally, if you ask me this, oh, I don't know, 25 years ago, I would have said the most likely answer is that we don't understand inertia or gravity. 20 years ago, 25 years ago, that's what I would have said. No problem. However, there have been a couple of observations that Have caused me to change my thinking, and I think that dark matter is more likely. One of them is called the bullet cluster. So the bullet cluster, there are two large clusters of galaxies. In these large clusters of galaxies, well, any galaxy consists of a couple of components. They're the galaxies themselves. There is the hydrogen gas that surrounds the galaxies, and maybe there is dark matter.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Or maybe there's more mass than we can see. So these, you know, I mean, it's nice that you can look at this really simply and come up with a list, a cookbook, things we can test. And so we've done that. We've gone and said, what are the possibilities? Well, the most obvious possibility is that there is more mass than we can see. There's black holes. There's hydrogen gas that we can't see, whatever. There's something out there. So that was the first thing. So you go and you look and there's no hydrogen gas because we can see that Ruth radio waves. That's not it. In the 90s, we went looking for black holes, rogue planets, things like that. Those exist, but not enough of them. That's not it. And so now we're left with there's some sort of matter that we can't see, or we don't understand gravity, or we don't understand inertia.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “So one possibility is simply that Newton's law of gravity, mass times the mass over r squared times the constant, that's just wrong. Another possibility is Newton's f equals ma that we are taught in introductory physics is wrong. Both of those are eminently possible.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Two spinning galaxies, just easiest to talk about. So Galaxies are observed to spin more quickly than they should if we add up the gravity we see. By all rights, galaxies spinning that fast should blow themselves apart and they don't. So what can be the answer? Well, you have the force required for a star to orbit to move in a circle. You have the force due to gravity, and they're connected by an equal sign. And the prediction is wrong. So either the force due to gravity is wrong, the force needed to move in a circle is wrong, or the equal sign is wrong. I mean, this is really simple. One of those things is wrong.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Oh gosh, what is dark matter? A, I don't know. B, it's terribly fascinating. All right, so first thing, and the most important thing, because I'm an experimentalist by God, the first thing is why do we believe there's dark matter? And the reason is that astronomical measurements do not agree with predictions by Newtonian or relativity theory. Galaxies spin too fast. Clusters of galaxies move too quickly, and the distortion of very distant galaxies due to the gravitational field of near galaxies disagrees with the prediction from what we see from the observed matter. So there are three very distinct reasons why we are predicting that something is wrong and our understanding of either philosophys or the matter budget of the universe. The easiest one to talk about is the spinning galaxies. Now, this is what I'm saying is not unique.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “And that is potentially a measurement that could be done soon ish because the technologies of inherent in all of this recent work on quantum mechanics is allowing people to be able to make Instrumentation that might be precise enough to do this measurement. Now, this will not tell us what quantum gravity is. It will not tell us anything, but it will tell us that gravity is quantized. And just knowing that, well, for one thing it shuts out a whole realm of continuous gravity and theoretical community will then turn its attention, forget this stuff, and think over here. Now that doesn't tell you that space is quantized, but it tells you that gravity is quantized if it bears out. And if gravity is quantized, then people will start thinking more about space being quantized.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I mean, people have been talking about quantum entanglement of gravity. In standard quantum mechanics, a particle can be in two places at the same time. So now you have two particles. So this particle can be in two places in the same time. This particle can be two places at the same time. If you put them near one another, well, if they're close to each other, there's a certain gravitational force. If they're far apart, there are certain. And if one is close and one as far, you have another one. You can calculate the effects of gravity having to do with quantum entangled particles being in two places. And people are talking about doing this and trying to see if in doing such a measurement they might be able to definitively determine whether gravity is a quantum phenomena or a continuous phenomena.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “They'd be quantum of space. I mean, the idea is you look at a sand dune and it looks smooth and continuous, but you can see individual grains of sand. And so what this is saying is as this dune expands, new grains of sand are appearing and each one of them is a quantum of space”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Yeah, I mean, that's kind of what it looks like given that it seems to be constant density that seems to me, now this is not something anybody should believe. Please, nobody believe this. It seems to me that this is leaning towards the idea that A, it's a property of space, B, space is quantized, C as space is expanding, little quantum of space are appearing, and D, each one of those quanta has a certain amount of energy associated with it, and that would kind of explain the constant density. Now, please, that's not, anybody should, nobody accepts that. This is just nonsense.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Unfortunately, I think it's both Well, I mean, it is. It's describing a reality, but it's also maybe telling us something about space.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Increase in interest. And so that's a weirdness. And that then ties into the nature of space. Why does that tie into the nature of space? Well, because if dark energy is a field in space, if you increase the volume, you would think the energy density would drop. But if space is increasing as space is quantized, and I don't know if it is, then maybe what's happening is spaces and stretching, but like little space particles are appearing as the space, you know, there's like bubbles of space appearing and each bubble contains a certain amount of dark energy. And so therefore that would give you a sense that dark energy is a property of space rather than a field in space. But that's all very hand-wavy guesswork-y stuff.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Energy is volume times density. If the universe gets bigger and the density is constant, that means dark energy is increasing. It's not just increasing as a fraction, an overwhelming ordinary matter, but ordinary matter, as the universe expands, its density decreases because it's constant and the volume gets bigger, the density drops. Dark energy until recently is thought to be constant density.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Right. And there has been a recent measurement that suggests that dark energy is getting smaller. However, that is a new measurement not confirmed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Nobody should believe it. But it's a hint that maybe it's changing, which is kind of cool in itself because the current bias until recently is that dark energy is constant. Now, I want to be super careful because it's misleading. say dark energy is constant. Dark energy is a density. Think about that. You have a certain density. Let's start with that. Then the universe expands”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Absolutely. As it stands right now, if dark energy is real and who knows, if it's real exactly as we've measured it, then as the universe gets bigger and bigger, dark energy becomes bigger and bigger component of the energy balance of the universe. And it takes over and it drives the continued accelerated expansion of the universe. And if dark energy gets lower, you know, for some reason that we don't understand, maybe it changes over time, gets smaller. That could change things. If it gets bigger, it could change things.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “And so that's the first step what should the real answer look like, or what is a possible real answer. And then once you kind of know that, then other people can look and say, well, let me think about a theory that kind of has the required properties to do what we need it to do. So it's a multi-step process, but the first step is how do we tame this problem without coming up with really terrible predictions that we've already ruled out. And so that's what you do. And that is literally a sensible, viable, theoretical thing, you know, because you have to explore cool ideas.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Like all theorists do. Well, let's add something to my equation and see what happens. I mean, and that's okay. I mean, I'm being glib about that, but that is precisely what you do. You say, what? We have this thing that works quite beautifully, except it fails here. What is the addition that we need to make that changes very little in the realm that we measured and yet fixes this hard thing? And so you literally just go, okay, what do I need plus six or something? And as long as it makes no changes where it would hurt our measurements and fixes the big thing, then that is at least a candidate theory. Now that doesn't mean it's right, but at least gives you an understanding of what the right answer should look like.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “But not to zero. But if you had it to go to zero, sure, maybe there's a field that exists at really high energies that we haven't seen yet. I don't know, but it cancels things out and we're cool.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Well, what you would do is you would hypothesize that there existed some other field that had the reverse effect of existing quantum fields.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Dark energy is a little bit. So if it cancels, it doesn't cancel exactly because it left over that little bit of dark energy. So that is its own curiosity. Perfect cancellation, pretty easy. Theorists do that, you know, eight times before breakfast. Imperfect cancellation. Much harder.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Even if we say Don, he's brilliant, he's going to find something at the LHC tomorrow's going to solve all this problem. Now we've solved it. It's much better. It's only different by 10 to the 60 power, which is still pretty bleeding big. So the short answer is there is very clearly something going on, something wrong, very badly wrong in the quantum field theory. You know, we have to have maybe there's another field that balances out the energy, that cancels it down. And even that, you know, that's not so outrageous. You know, you could imagine that there's another, you know, like we have matter and antimatter, they balance pretty well. Okay, maybe there's something going on. You could cancel that out. That'd be perfect. Canceling something to zero is easy because, you know, plus one and minus one, zero, plus two, minus two, zero. But we still have dark energy.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “So, that's where you get that awful number. Now, if it turns out that there is some new physics that's just about at the energy scale we can measure using our biggest particle accelerators, remember I told you that that was a factor, the maximum energy scale Planck scale is 10 to the 15 times bigger than what we can measure now. Let's say that we don't have to calculate up to the Planck scale because something happens, something changes at the energy that we know right now. Well, then that means we don't have to integrate to Planck scale. We integrate to 10 to the 15th less of the Planck scale. And this thing is to the fourth power, so 10 to the 15th to the fourth power is 60. So now...”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “And each wavelength adds a certain amount of energy. And if you add that all up, then you get a number. And that number is the rather embarrassing 10 to the 120 power times, that's a 1 with 120 zeros after it, bigger than the measurement of dark energy So you go yuck. That is not fun at all. And that is because the equation comes to the highest energy or the smallest wavelength particle that you can imagine to the fourth power, since anything to the fourth power is a big deal.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Well, there's a measurement, and you can measure how fast the universe is expanding, and from that, you get a measurement of dark energy. However, if you then say, well, suppose the dark energy is due to fields in space. So that's quantum field theory. Hey, I know a lot about quantum field theory. And so we can take the quantum field theory and we can calculate what the density of energy is due to quantum field theory. And basically what you do is you take within a volume all of the wavelengths, the longer wavelength, the shorter wavelengths, the shorter and shorter, and you can add them all up.”

    2026-05-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #497 – Biggest Mysteries in Physics: Antimatter, Dark Energy & ToE – Don Lincoln · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source