Frenk on his computer simulations of the universe. His first big disappointment was a 1980s run assuming dark matter was made of fast-moving neutrinos, which produced a universe nothing like ours. So he went after cold dark matter next, and it keeps matching what we observe. From an archive In Our Time episode on dark matter.
…of one of these lightweight hypothetical particles that emerges from a theory, but it's very difficult to track. And, you know, again, is out of the mainstream ideas of what could cause the dark matter. Carlos Frenk, you've been computer modelling on many things, but including cold dark matter.
We have cold dark matter, hot dark matter, and warm dark matter. So you've been concentrating on cold dark matter. Why is that and what have you found?
…look anything at all like the universe in which we live. So that was a big disappointment. But this is the 1980s. I was young then and cocky. And I thought, right, we now ruled out hot dark matter. Let's go for the next target, which was cold dark matter. Let's rule that one out. That's the way you make science. You rule things out in order to eventually be left with the correct assumption. So I set out in the 1980s to rule cold dark matter out. And now, 35 years later, I'm still trying to do it. So often I say my career has been a failure because I set out to rule this out and I can't. Now, so cold dark matter is a very different kind of particle. And it is exactly the sort of particles that we need to put into our computer simulations to produce these faithful representations of our universe. Now, however, the case is not closed yet because we still get a chance for something in between. And it's fascinating from the point of view of particle physics because when we look, so…
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