Marathi movie Court திரைப்படம் : கோர்ட்

திரைப்படம் : கோர்ட்
இயக்கம் : சைதன்ய தமானே
மராட்டி மொழி (ஆங்கிலத் துணைத் தலைப்புகளுடன்); 1 மணி நேரம், 58 நிமிடம்; 2015

 கிண்டல், கேலி மாதிரி ஒரு அட்டகாசமான உணர்வு எதுவும் இல்லைன்னு நினைக்கிறேன், மனிதனுக்கு மட்டுமே உள்ள ஸ்பெசல் உணர்வு அது.

கோர்ட்'ன்னு ஒரு மராத்தி படம் இந்தியா சார்பில் ஆஸ்கார் விருதுக்கான கடைசி சுற்றுக்கு போயிருக்குன்னு கேள்விபட்டு அதை பார்த்தேன்.. செமயான Sattire - Sarcasm flow... எப்படி விவரிக்கிறதுன்னே தெரில...

இந்தியாவின் red-tapism முறையை ஓட்டு ஓட்டுன்னு சீரியஸா ஓட்டுறாங்க... ரொம்ப மெதுவா போற படம், ஆனா ஒவ்வொரு ஃப்ரேமிலும் தெரிக்கும் எகத்தாளம், கிண்டல்.. படம் முழுக்க சீரியஸா போகும் ஆனா நம்ம முகத்துல புன்னகை தான் இருக்கும்...

எந்த காட்சிக்கும் விளக்கம் கிடையாது, ஜட்ஜ் ஒரு சீரியஸ் விவாதம் பண்ணும் போது அவருடைய உதவியாளர் பின்னனியில் மொபைல் ஸ்க்ரீனை பாத்துட்டு இருப்பது கிண்டல்ன்னா அந்த பொண்ணு முகத்துல இருக்கிற புன்னகை மகா கிண்டல்...

ஒரு கேஸ் அறிமுகம் ஆன உடனே ஜட்ஜ் இன்னிக்கு உங்க கேஸ் விவாதம் பண்ண முடியாது உங்களுக்கு வாய்தா தாறேன்னு சொல்வார்.. அந்த பொண்ணு எதுக்கு சார்ன்னு கேக்கும் அதுக்கு ஜட்ஜ் சொல்ற பதில் " நீ ஸ்லீவ்லெஸ் சட்டை போட்டிருக, இது கோர்ட்டை அவமதிக்குது'ன்னு.

சரமாரியா சரவெடி லந்துகள்... படத்துல இன்னோரு அம்சம் அதன் இயற்கையான சவுன்ட். தேவையில்லாத இசை எங்குமே இல்லை.. அதனால படத்தோட நாம ஒன்றிடறோம், எந்த அளவுக்குன்னா ஒரு காட்சியில கோர்ட் ரூம் லைட்டை எல்லாம் அணைச்சிட்டு பணியாளர் கதவை மூடிட்டு போவார், நாம ரூமுக்குள்ள இருக்க இவர் கதவை மூடுறாரேன்னு தோணும். அந்த அளவுக்கு...

படத்தோட கதையே செம நக்கல், ஒரு துப்புரவு தொழிலாளி குழிக்குள்ள இறங்கி துப்புரவு செய்யும் போது இறந்துடுறார், அவர் எந்த பாதுகாப்பு சாதனங்களும் அணிந்திருக்க வில்லை. அதுக்கு 1008 காரணம் இருக்க அதை எல்லாம் விட்டுட்டு அரசாங்கம் அந்த ஏரியாவில் தெருப்பாட்டு பாடும் ஒருத்தரை கைது செய்கிறது. அது சொல்லும் காரணம் இவர் பாடிய பாட்டில் இருந்த கருத்தினால் தான் தொழிலாளி தற்கொலை செய்து கொண்டார் என்பது.

அந்த காரணத்தை நியாயபடுத்த அரசு தரப்பு எடுக்கும் கோமாளி கூத்துகள் தான் படம். ஆனால் எந்த இடத்திலும் இது புரிய வைக்க முயற்சி இல்லை.. திரைப்படம் அதன் போக்கில் இயங்கி நம்மை உள்ளே இழுக்கும் வகையில் ஒரு மேக்கிங். அவசியம் பார்க்க வேண்டிய திரைப்படம்.
கதைச் சுருக்கம் :

நாராயண் காம்ப்ளே எனும் ஒரு வயதான, மராட்டிய நாட்டுப்புறப் பாடகர் மீது ஒரு விசித்திரமான வழக்கு பதிவு செய்யப் படுகிறது. அவர் பாடிய ஒரு பாடலைக் கேட்டு மலக்குழியில் வேலை செய்யும் துப்புரவுத் தொழிலாளி தற்கொலை செய்து கொண்டார் என்பது தான் அந்த வழக்கு.

நாராயண் காம்ப்ளேவுக்கு ஆதரவாக வினய் வோரா எனும் வசதியான, மெத்தப் படித்த வழக்கறிஞர் வாதாடுகிறார்.

அரசு வழக்கறிஞராக நூதன் எனும் பெண் வாதாடுகிறார். காம்பளே பற்றியும் இந்த வழக்கின் அனர்த்தம் பற்றியும் எந்த அக்கறையும் கொள்ளாமல், எப்படியாவது பதவி உயர்வு கிடைக்க வேண்டும் என்று நினைக்கிற மத்தியத் தர வாழ்க்கை வாழ்கிற, குடும்பம், வேலை இவற்றுக்குள் அல்லாடுகிற பெண்மணி.

இவர்களை எதிர்கொள்கிற நீதிபதி சதாவர்தே எதைப் பற்றியும் கவலைப் படாமல் தனது பழமை வாய்ந்த மதிப்பீடுகளையும் சட்டப் புத்தகத்தையும் நிலைநாட்ட முனைபவர்.

இந்த வழக்கைச் சுற்றியே அமைக்கப்பட்ட அரசியல் முக்கியத்துவம் வாய்ந்த, எள்ளல் நிறைந்த, நம்மை மூச்சு முட்ட வைக்கிற திரைக்கதை கொண்ட யாரையும் வில்லனாகக் காட்டாத, நீதித்துறை எனும் எந்திரம் எதிர்கொண்டிருக்கும் வியாதியை வெளிக்கொணரும் படம் இது.

கதாப்பாத்திரங்களின் பின்புலம், தனிப்பட்ட வாழ்க்கை அவர்களின் வேலையிலும் பிரதிபலிப்பதை நாம் உணரமுடிகிறது.

ஆனந்த் பட்வர்த்தனின் "ஜெய்பீம் காம்ரேட்" எனும் ஆவணப்படமும் மும்பையில் தலித் மக்கள் மீது நடத்தப்பட்ட போலீஸ் துப்பாக்கி சூட்டைக் கேள்விப்பட்டு மனம் வெறுத்துப்போன விலாஸ் கோக்ரே எனும் இடதுசாரி அரசியல் பாடகரின் தற்கொலையிலிருந்து தான் தொடங்கும்.

கோர்ட் எனும் இந்த முழுநீளத் திரைப்படமோ ஒரு பாடகரின் புரட்சிப் பாடலைக் கேட்டு ஒரு துப்புரவுத் தொழிலாளி தற்கொலை செய்து கொண்டார் என்று தொடங்கும்.

கோர்ட் வெனிஸ், வியன்னா, ஹாங்காங், மும்பை, மாஸ்கோ, சிங்கப்பூர், மெக்சிகோ திரைப்பட விழாக்களில் விருது பெற்றது.

சிறந்த படத்திற்கான தேசிய விருதும் பெற்ற படம் கோர்ட்.

இந்தியா சார்பாக ஆஸ்கார் விருதுக்கு பரிந்துரை செய்யப்பட்ட படம்.

A courtroom drama usually offers at least some of the following elements: a fiery orator, high stakes, an evolving case, thrilling arguments and some degree of resolution—even if it’s not a happy one. “Court" offers none of these elements. The oration from the lawyers practically dares you to stay awake. The case itself is jaw-dropping in its staidness. The arguments are routinely filled with jargon, and this jargon may even be irrelevant. For most of its 116-minute runtime, a resolution appears quixotic.
And yet, Indian filmmaker Chaitanya Tamhane’s first feature is a masterpiece, one of the best films of the year. How did this happen?
“Court” deals with an aged Marathi folk singer living in Mumbai, Narayan Kamble, who’s arrested on a bizarre accusation. The state alleges that a song he performed drove a manhole cleaner to commit suicide, and that he is therefore responsible for the man's death. The case comes to the attention of Vinay Vora (Vivek Gomber), a well-educated and well-off lawyer who picks up Narayan’s fight. He’s up against the public prosecutor Nutan (Geetanjali Kulkarni), who couldn’t be bothered with the plight of Narayan or the logic of the case. Together they’re in front of Judge Sadavarte (Pradeep Joshi), who doesn’t care for anything except upholding his archaic morals and interpretation of the law. In the funniest scene in this surprisingly funny film, the Judge refuses to hear a case because the plaintiff, a woman, is wearing a sleeveless top. There are times when it feels as though the real accused in "Court" are India's judicial system and society.
Nearly 60 years ago, Sidney Lumet locked the “12 Angry Men” of a jury inside one room. The setting’s claustrophobic nature would help viewers understand why people’s lives deeply influenced how they interpreted the law and cold, hard facts. Tamhane takes the opposite means to achieve a similar end. His script, carefully structured but not gaudily so, considers the characters’ lives outside the courtroom as essential to comprehending what they do once inside it. This approach is integral to the movie’s humanistic tone. No character is a villain hell-bent on destroying Narayan’s life. They are all just cogs in an unfair machine.
The viewers follow Vora as he attends a posh club with his bourgeois friends, and shops for cheese and wine without looking at the price tags. Clearly, he can afford to pick up a case so obviously headed towards a dead-end, and no wonder he continues speaking English in the courtroom even though it wins him neither favor nor friend. “Court” also shows Nutan for who she might be in real life: a competent woman who tries to juggle her professional duties with her responsibilities as a mother and wife, all while working for a promotion. Forget ignoring the price tags, for her even using olive oil in cooking is a matter of fantasy to be discussed with commute buddies.
There is a moment where it feels like “Court” could end. It seems to have made a point. The viewer has understood what this universe entails. And the filmmaking builds up to a memorable closing shot. But then the film goes on. Over a coda that’s perplexing at first, Tamhane unveils his trump card. With a series of scenes that are remarkable in their assuredness, he underlines, emboldens, and italicizes the purpose of his film.
The acting elevates the words on the page and makes them sing. Gomber, who also produced the film, brings a sense of lumbering calm to his affluent lawyer character. At one point, after being shockingly reminded of what a regressive environment he lives in, he breaks down. It’s not just his sadness that’s moving; it’s his exhaustion. Kulkarni is pitch-perfect as a middle-class Maharashtrian woman. The way she reads out the list of charges against the accused in fluent but monotonous English, only to segue into Marathi when she’s done, is hilarious in its accuracy. Some cast members were untrained, non-professional actors. In the case of the woman who plays the deceased’s widow, it’s eerie how unaffected the scene is before you realize that it’s reality. (The woman is widowed in real life. Her husband was a manhole worker.)
The seemingly interminable drawl of the case is echoed in the filmmaking style, with cinematographer Mrinal Desai utilizing lengthy, static takes. Scenes continue a few seconds or even minutes after the point where other filmmakers might have opted to cut. This ends up adding to the film’s authenticity; the action doesn’t feel directed by force as much as it feels captured by fluke. It’s also a showcase for the impeccable detailing in the film’s environment. As one character gets assaulted outside a restaurant, the framing allows you to see the security guard escape into the safety of the building, while the unending take forces you to watch what he’s successfully hiding from.

That, perhaps, is why “Court” ends up being a great courtroom drama: it treats the audience as both witness and jury and lays out a sprawling argument for them to ponder over. It’s hard to shake this one off long after the credits have rolled.

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Phagocytosis (White Blood Cell (Neutrophil) Chasing and Eating Bacteria)

What is Phagocytosis?

Aside from being one of the most fun words to say in science, the process of phagocytosis is pretty cool in itself. Remember the old video game Pac-Man? You guide the round, yellow character through a maze, dodging ghosts and gobbling up little dots. When Pac-Man opens his mouth and consumes one of the dots, it's a little bit like phagocytosis.

Phagocytosis is a type of endocytosis. Endocytosis is a process through which a cell absorbs a particle, molecule, bacterium, or other type of matter by engulfing it. Phagocytosis refers to the engulfing of larger, solid particles. Often the engulfed particle is another cell, like when a white blood cell, which is a part of the immune system, engulfs a bacterium to destroy it. 

The Process of Phagocytosis

Let's use the example of a white blood cell engulfing an invading bacterium to illustrate the process of phagocytosis. A cell that engages in phagocytosis is called a phagocyte. First, the white blood cell has to recognize the invader and realize that it needs to be destroyed. It recognizes signal molecules released by the bacterium and is drawn toward it.

The white blood cell then has to attach its membrane to the membrane of the bacterium. It does this by using molecules called surface receptors. These are molecules embedded in the white blood cell's membrane that are designed to detect and attach to molecules in the membrane of the bacterium. The two cell membranes link up and stick together.

Once attached to each other, the membrane of the white blood cell swells outward around the bacterium and engulfs it. The membrane enclosing the bacterium pinches off and the result is a little pouch, called a phagosome, that contains the offending bacterium inside of the white blood cell.

With the bacterium safely imprisoned inside the white blood cell, it can now be destroyed. The white blood cell brings digestive enzymes into the phagosome. These enzymes break up the bacterium and the resulting harmless particles can either be used by the cell or released out of the cell.

Old god Ganapathi statues and Images

The statue dates back 800 years and is from eastern India

காந்தஹார்- Kandahar Film (ஈரானிய திரைப்படம்) by Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf

2001ஆம் ஆண்டில் திரைக்கு வந்த படம். பல மிகச் சிறந்த திரைப்படங்களை இயக்கி, உலக அளவில் புகழ் பெற்ற இயக்குனராக ஒளி வீசிக் கொண்டிருக்கும் ஈரானிய திரைப்பட இயக்குனர் Mohsen Makhmalmaf இயக்கிய ஒரு மாறுபட்ட கதைக் கருவைக் கொண்ட இப்படம், வித்தியாசமான படங்களைப் பார்ப்போர்கள் மத்தியில் பெரிய அளவில் கொண்டாடப்பட்டுக் கொண்டிருக்கிறது.
பொழுது போக்கு அம்சங்களைக் கொண்ட படங்களை உருவாக்கி விட்டு, ஏதோ பெரிதாக சாதித்து விட்டோம் என்று மார்பைத் தட்டிக் கொண்டு ஆர்ப்பரிப்போருக்கு மத்தியில், யாரும் எடுப்பதற்காக அஞ்சக் கூடிய ஒரு பேசப்படும் கதைக் கருவைக் கையாண்டு, அதை ஒரு நேர்த்தியான திரைப்படமாக எடுத்திருக்கும் Mohsen Makhmalmafன் அசாத்திய துணிச்சலை நாம் பாராட்டியே ஆக வேண்டும்.

''Kandahar'' is bound to attract potential audiences, if only because it may be the only film whose name gets more mentions than Harry Potter on CNN. Though the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf's picture was filmed long before today's breaking news from Afghanistan, it is worthy of some attention because it happens to portray the culture -- specifically the treatment of women in that Taliban stronghold -- in forceful and dramatic terms.

An Afghan journalist, Nafas (Nelofer Pazira), who left Afghanistan and is now based in Canada, goes back home to find her troubled sister. Mr. Makhmalbaf isn't much of a storyteller, and Ms. Pazira is more than his equal in her lack of acting ability. She looks slightly distracted when staring into the camera; she seems to be waiting for instructions to change expression to come over an ear piece, and the instructions never quite get there. Yet she has the command of someone who is accustomed to sitting before the camera and holds positions as if she were born to be there, which makes her the film's star by sheer power of concentration. (In real life Ms. Pazira, who grew up in Kabul, is a Canadian television journalist.) To say that she doesn't lend a great deal of emotional credibility to ''Kandahar,'' which opens today at the Lincoln Plaza, is an understatement.

As Nafas slips into Afghanistan to begin her search, she runs into a number of situations that almost make the movie seem to be taking place on a back lot, a dreamy Never-was Land where each scene is a setup for another surprise. (The movie was filmed in Iran.) But the bleached, sun-beaten landscapes are undeniably real, as are the hardships that the women suffer as they battle to survive the inhospitable land and the rigidity of the Taliban. Children play and pray while machine guns, worn and obviously used, sit near their feet. Desperation has a ghostly presence here: it's never spoken, but we can feel it nonetheless, and it's a part of the everyday life in the encampments where these women live.

Nafas meets a doctor who treats women in a most unusual fashion, at least to Westerners, and who isn't what he seems. He talks to his female patients while they're under a sheet -- he views them through a hole -- and the low-key assurance in his voice is a marvelous contradiction to the strangeness of the situation. By this point Ms. Pazira's vacant stare has become a part of the texture of ''Kandahar'': you almost can't imagine anybody else -- certainly not someone who might actually react to these unusual proceedings -- as the lead.

On this level the director displays talent by providing notes of absurdity and unforgettable visuals. Somehow it's as if he is cognizant that his star, and most of the rest of the cast, for that matter, simply can't carry a scene. His compensatory touches have a jaw-dropping power: for example a shot of prosthetic limbs parachuting onto the bleak desert landscape as scores of handicapped men on crutches await the legs as they fall from the sky. When he pulls off things like this, ''Kandahar'' feels like a Magritte painting rendered in sand tones, and your eyes are drawn to the screen.

There aren't enough of these moments, though, and Mr. Makhmalbaf lessens their power by repeating them. He knows he is dealing with a hot, potent subject, and he has an eye for astonishing imagery, which he integrates into ''Kandahar'' in such a way that the film occasionally succeeds on its own made-under-a-full-moon terms: it's a wide-screen daydream. But the way the film works defeats any melodramatic urgency in this tale of enduring punishment. The awful moments he creates have the time-delay impact of a nightmare: the potency of the horrors hit and linger after the freakishness of an image or a moment fades away and the creeping realization of exactly what you've just witnessed finally hits you. Sometimes that impact comes like a blow to the back of the head.
KANDAHAR
Written, edited and directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf; in Farsi and English, with English subtitles; director of photography, Ebraham Ghafouri; music by Mohamad Reza Darvishi; produced by Makhmalbaf Film House and Bac Films; released by Avatar Films. At the Lincoln Plaza, Broadway at 62nd Street. Running time: 85 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Nelofer Pazira (Nafas), Hassan Tantai (Tabib Sahid) and Sadou Teymouri (Khak).

The film Kandahar serves as a timely memorial to the brutality of the Taleban regime, and its release comes as the world's attention is focused on the town after which it is named.

One day the world will see your problems and come to your aid

The acclaimed Iranian director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, described Afghanistan as "a country without images". Under the Taleban there has been no cinema, no television, photography was banned, painting was considered "impure", and books were burnt.

Makhmalbaf is very well known in his native Iran

Yet, in one of his most polemical films to date, Makhmalbaf secretly entered the country and made one of the very few films ever to have been set inside Afghanistan. Watching a film about a country in which films are banned lets the viewer share the thrill of defying the censor.
But it is given added edge by the knowledge that the Taleban regime is collapsing in real life as the movie unfolds.
At the beginning of the film one of the characters tells a crowd of Afghan refugees that "one day the world will see your problems and come to your aid".
But when the film was made, few people would have been able to find Kandahar on a map. The world had turned its back on Afghanistan.
Beneath the veil
The film tells the story of an Afghan-Canadian journalist, Nafas, who returns to Kandahar to rescue her sister who is so depressed that she has threatened to kill herself before the last solar eclipse of the 20th century.
As she enters Afghanistan, Nafas is told she must wear a burqa - the all-encompassing veil - to protect the honour of her male escort.

Women were also made to wear the veil before the Taleban

It becomes a symbol of the stifling oppression of women - the most invisible group of people in this "country without images" - and at the same time their defiance of this oppression.
Her veil is not one of the now familiar blue nylon burqas, but a woven muted green and pink veil. In one scene she joins a large group of women going to a wedding party, all wearing brightly-coloured burqas.
The women may be faceless, but the veils themselves are strangely beautiful.
By ordering women to be fully covered, the religious militia also never quite know what is underneath the veil.
But the audience is permitted to look inside: girls secretly apply lipstick and paint their nails; Nafas carries a tape-recorder; and a man uses the subterfuge to escape arrest.
Surreal
The journey to Kandahar must be completed within three days if Nafas is to rescue her sister, which gives the film an urgency that highlights the unbearable timelessness of Afghanistan - a country where time seems to have stopped.

This surrealism is not an aesthetic device, but a straight portrayal of a people pushed to the limits of survival.

Nafas falls sick along the way, and has to visit a doctor. Because men are not allowed to look at women who are not related to them, she must sit on the other side of a cloth partition from the doctor, who speaks to her through her child escort. "Ask her what she has eaten," says the doctor. "What have you eaten?" asks the boy. "Tell her to put her mouth to the hole," says the doctor. "Put your mouth to the hole," repeats the boy.
The laboured repetition dramatises the absurdity of daily life in Afghanistan in a way in which straight reporting can rarely do.
As the journey continues we are taken on a tour of the surreal land which decades of war and the Taleban regime have wrought out of Afghanistan.
This surrealism is not an aesthetic device, but a straight portrayal of a people pushed to the limits of survival.
In one of the most memorable scenes, a group of one-legged landmine victims race on crutches to claim pairs of false legs that Red Cross helicopters have dropped from the sky. It could be from a Fellini film, yet it is quite likely to be real.
Although a feature film, Kandahar is half documentary, and many of the characters are not actors but refugees that the crew met along the way.

The latest weapon against climate change? Turning carbon dioxide into stone better than basalt.

Carbon dioxide has been pumped underground and turned rapidly into stone, demonstrating a radical new way to tackle climate change.

The unique project promises a cheaper and more secure way of burying CO2 from fossil fuel burning underground, where it cannot warm the planet. Such carbon capture and storage (CCS) is thought to be essential to halting global warming, but existing projects store the CO2 as a gas and concerns about costs and potential leakage have halted some plans.

The new research pumped CO2 into the volcanic rock under Iceland and sped up a natural process where the basalts react with the gas to form carbonate minerals, which make up limestone. The researchers were amazed by how fast all the gas turned into a solid – just two years, compared to the hundreds or thousands of years that had been predicted.

The Iceland project has already been increased in scale to bury 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a year and the basalt rocks used are common around the world, forming the floor of all the oceans and parts of the land too. “In the future, we could think of using this for power plants in places where there’s a lot of basalt and there are many such places,” said Martin Stute, at Columbia University in the US and part of the research team.

Testing has taken place in the Columbia River Basalts, extensive deposits in Washington and Oregon in the US. India, which has many polluting coal power plants, has huge basalt deposits in the Deccan Traps.

One potential challenge for the new technique is that it requires large amounts of water: 25 tonnes for each tonne of CO2 buried. But Matter said seawater could be used, which would be in plentiful supply at coastal sites. Another is that subterranean microbes might break down carbonate to methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, but this was not seen in the Iceland research.

The research, called the Carbfix project, took place at Iceland’s Hellisheidi power plant, the world’s largest geothermal facility. The plant pumps up volcanically heated water to run electricity-generating turbines but this also brings up volcanic gases, including carbon dioxide and nasty-smelling hydrogen sulphide.

The researchers re-injected 230 tonnes of the gas, which was dissolved in water to prevent it escaping, down into the basalt to a depth of 400-500m. They used tracer chemicals to show that over 95% of CO2 was turned into stone within two years, “amazingly fast” according to Matter. Edda Aradottir, who heads the project for Reykjavik Energy, said: “It was a very welcome surprise.”

The Iceland project has now begun scaling up to bury 10,000 tonnes of CO2 a year, plus the hydrogen sulphide which also turns into minerals. The Columbia University group are also investigating another rock type, found in Oman, which may be able to turn CO2 into rock even better than basalt.

In conventional CCS, the CO2 is stored as a gas in sedimentary rocks such as exhausted oil fields under the North Sea. Unlike basalt, these rocks lack the minerals needed to convert CO2 into stone. Such sedimentary reservoirs could potentially leak and therefore have to be monitored, which adds to costs.

They have also raised concerns from the public and projects on land in the Netherlands and Germany have been halted as a result. “In Europe you can forget about onshore CCS,” said Matter.

Conventional CCS also requires the CO2 to be separated from the mix of gases emitted by power stations and industrial plants, which is expensive. But the basalt-based CCS does not require this. However, Matter said there would still be a role for conventional CCS in places where power plants are close to good reservoirs. 

thanks  https://www.theguardian.com

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The dark side of the universe – a primer

With dark matter, dark energy, phantom matter and even a dark force, physics news can sometimes sound like the voiceover for a superhero movie. So what’s behind all the ominous-sounding jargon?

Over the past 40 years astronomers have realised that everything we can see – all the stars, planets and galaxies – make up less than 5% of the entire universe. What is the rest? The short answer is, we have no idea.

What we do know is there are two gaping holes in our understanding of our universe. As a placeholder, physicists call them dark matter and dark energy.

In a nutshell, dark matter is the invisible stuff which we can only detect from the way its immense gravity moves stars and galaxies.
Dark energy, on the other hand, is the mysterious something causing the universe to expand with ever increasing speed.
We don’t know if dark matter and dark energy are related – in fact they’re probably two completely different phenomena, both called “dark” just because we can’t see them.

Dark matter

How was it discovered?

Since the 1930s astronomers knew that the way galaxies spin did not make sense. The stars at the edges of galaxies were moving much faster than expected – so fast they should have been flung off the cosmic merry-go-round and out into deep space.

But these strange motions could be explained if there was a bunch of extra matter in and around the galaxies – matter that we can’t see. It’s this “dark matter” that holds galaxies together.

Since then, many other observations beyond the scale of whirling galaxies, from the choreography of galaxy clusters, to the collision of nebulae, all suggested the same thing.

Although some physicists have entertained other theories, such as modifications to gravity, by now most are pretty sure dark matter exists. It’s the only explanation that suits all the data.

What do we know?

We know dark matter doesn’t emit light (nor does it absorb or reflect it), so it can’t be made of rogue planets or clouds of normal matter. We know it’s “cold” (which in physics-speak means it moves slowly compared with the speed of light). We know it has gravity. We also know it doesn’t interact very strongly with anything, even itself – otherwise the dark matter would collapse into flat structures such as galaxies, rather than the spherical haloes we detect.

Oh, and it makes up about 27% of the universe
.
What could dark matter be?

The bottom line is it is probably some new kind of particle (or a whole family of particles) that we have never detected before. Dark matter particles could be all around you, and floating through your body right this second.

This means the answer to this grand cosmological puzzle, affecting the universe on scales of mllions of light years, could lie in the physics of tiny particles, much smaller than an atom.

Over the past 30 years physicists have sifted through dozens of different dark matter candidates. The prime suspect at the moment is a kind of particle called a weakly interacting massive particle, or WIMP. This is a kind of heavy particles that feel only the weak force.

One of the goals of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is to look for WIMPs (the same way it found the Higgs Boson in 2013) – the elusive dark matter particles might be created when protons are smashed together at near the speed of light.

Can we detect dark matter?

Besides CERN, there are more than 30 experiments around the world devoted to finding dark matter.

Some of these are dedicated telescopes searching for the signature of particles created when two particles of dark matter annihilate.
Others are giant vats of liquid xenon watching for a telltale flash when a dark matter particle nudges an atomic nucleus. None has yet made a convincing detection of a dark matter particle, although some of the experiments have ruled out various possibilities of what dark matter might be.

It remains a possibility that dark matter may never be directly detectable – especially if it turns out to be a particle that does not even feel the weak force.

The dark force and dark photons
Some physicists have proposed that dark matter particles can interact with one another via a new force of nature – called, yes, the dark force and transmitted by dark photons (aka dark radiation).
There may even be different kinds of dark matter, some of which feels the dark force, and some do not.

Dark energy

How was dark energy discovered?

In the early 20th century, physicists including Albert Einstein imagined the universe as static and unchanging. But in 1929 American astronomer Edwin Hubble observed the motions of exploding stars and discovered the universe was expanding. In fact the universe must have had a beginning – a moment of creation called the big bang.

We can imagine the big bang a bit like an explosion. But after that initial burst, physicists thought the expansion should begin to slow down over time, as gravity acted to pull everything back to a single point again.

The question was whether the universe would ever stop expanding and reverse direction, falling back into a “big crunch”.

Then, in 1998, things got a bit more complicated.

Using the same method as Edwin Hubble (and with the telescope named after him) astronomers found that the expansion of the universe was not slowing down, but instead was accelerating. Galaxies are flying away from each other faster and faster each year.

It was a strange and unexpected result. A bit like if you were driving on a flat highway, took your foot off the accelerator – and then your car began to speed up!

Yet the data were convincing. Physicists realised this expansion must be driven by some sort of energy, and they called it “dark energy”.

What we know

We know that dark energy affects the universe as a whole. We know it acts a bit like a negative gravity pushing galaxies away from one another.

We also know that dark energy did not kick in until a few billion years ago. (For the first half of its life, the expansion of the universe was slowing down due to gravity pulling everything together.)

This makes physicists think dark energy is somehow tied up with space itself. This means its density in space is always the same, but as the universe expands (that is as more space is created), the amount of dark energy also increases.

This would explain why the amount of dark energy was insignificant when the universe was small.

What could it be?

The answer to the mystery

of dark energy might also lie in the minuscule quantum realm.
In quantum theory, “empty space” is not empty at all, but filled with a soup of particles continually popping into and out of existence. As weird as it sounds, physicists have actually measured the force created by these so-called “virtual particles” in the lab.

The problem is, when physicists try to calculate how much energy these virtual particles contribute to each cubic metre of empty space, they come out with a number that’s a factor of 10120 too large when compared to the density of dark energy (as measured from the accelerated expansion of the universe). That's a 1 with 120 zeroes after it, a ludicrous answer called “the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics”.

Quintessence

Some physicists think dark energy could be akin to a fifth force of nature, pervading all of space. They call it “quintessence”, after the fifth element predicted by the Greek philosophers. As opposed to the cosmological constant, the quintessence is imagined to change over time – it was once attractive, but is now repulsive.

The big rip and phantom dark energy

In some theories, the quintessence can continue to grow stronger (in which case it’s called phantom dark energy).

This could destroy the universe.

If the expansion of the universe continues to accelerate, eventually reach the speed of light – first galaxies and stars would be cut off from one another, then eventually the space between the sun and the Earth would expand faster than the speed of light and individual atoms would be torn asunder as the space within them expanded at faster than the speed of light. This is the big rip.

A new gravity?

Dark energy might not be a new force, it might just be a sign that, at very large scales, gravity does not behave as Einstein’s theory of general relatively describes.

The ΛCDM (lambda cold dark matter) model

This is the name for the astrophysicists’ current best picture of the way the cosmos is screwed together.

Λ (or lambda) stands for dark energy, while cold dark matter describes the consensus that dark matter must be made up of some kind of slow moving, previously unknown particle.

In this picture, dark matter makes up 27% of the mass-energy of the universe, dark energy makes up about 68%, and ordinary matter – that of the stars and galaxies and our own flesh and blood – makes up less than 5%.

thanks 

Cecile G. Tamura