 Okay, welcome to Nerd Nights. You got us started, so we do this the last Monday of every single month. You can actually get really cheap $5 tickets for the very next show in July right now during this show. So if you go right to that link, we'll put up also who the speakers are during the break, but you can get a five. That is literally the best way you can spend $5 in Oakland on a Monday night. That is legal. Actually, that's not so true anymore, but you get the idea, right? Also, Facebook sucks, and so we're having some trouble getting the events out to you guys because they make us pay a lot of money to get the events out to you. So you guys don't get to see the events. You don't get notified. We can't actually invite you unless you are already friends with me or Rick or Ann-Marie. So the best way to avoid that issue is you can actually go get our email list. So you can go to our webpage, eastbay.nerdnight.com. You can also do this. So if you just text Oakland to 345-345, it'll give you a link and you can get on our email list. Email's free, which is great, and it also lets you're going to see every event. We're only going to send you two emails a month for our events, but it'll avoid this Facebook monopoly problem that we're all currently dealing with. So we would love for you guys to get on our email list so we can avoid Facebook as much as possible. Yeah, screw Facebook. My parents are totally in the audience. I was going to say, yeah, fuck Facebook. My parents are totally in the audience tonight, so I'm not going to say that except I just said that. Sorry, mom, that is literally my first swear on stage ever. Yeah, exactly. So we have a great speaker tonight. Bob Calhoun is going to talk about the first science fiction convention and how cosplay got popular and how it led to this massive cultural thing where Comic Con is this gigantic thing and comics and sci-fi are part of our culture now. So I was thinking about this and it's like, you know, there are a lot of really famous superheroes and there are a lot of really canonical superheroes. You have Wonder Woman and Batman and Superman. You have great sci-fi characters like Buck Rogers and Paper Girls. Like these awesome characters. And so that kind of implies that when something's lasted a long time that these are good, well-thought-out, clever characters. So I went to the web and I was like, I wonder what happens when comic book and sci-fi characters go wrong. These are all real characters that appeared in actual comic books and actual sci-fi novels and comic books. These are terrible. So his one superpower was ripping his own arm off and hitting people with it. Which is kind of what arms do anyway. I mean, when you're fighting, it doesn't really make sense. Not a great thought-out character. There was Asbestos Man, who literally every comic, every episode, every issue would fight the human torch and only the human torch because he was Asbestos Man. So this character lasted for like four or five different issues. And then like 25 years later, I think it was Marvel totally threw in that he died of cancer. He just threw it a line. That is true. Hey man, the 70s were weird. There was a character called Dazzler. Dazzler's superpower is that she could take disco beats and turn them into lasers. So she had to hear the beat. She had to hear the beat and she could turn it into lasers. And that was the one thing she could do. That was also the one good thing about disco music. There was Bouncing Boy, which is sort of like Bubble Boy except he was the bubble. And the only thing he could do was be thrown by other people, other heroes at enemies and nothing else. He was basically a giant overweight Bouncing Superhero. This is Madame Fatal. So Madame Fatal was a comic book character that was actually just like a 45 year old man who dressed up sort of like a Mrs. Doubtfire thing. The crazy part of this went on for like seven different issues. And in every issue, he didn't have any superpowers. Like every issue he would just dress up as an old woman and then just like be talking to the enemy and then all of a sudden just like rip his wig off and hit them with the cane. And they were fooled in every issue. So not going to make the human centipede joke now that my parents are in the audience. Matter, Eater, Lad, his one power is he could eat lots and really quickly. Definitely a guy you do not want to share a two bed one bath apartment with if you think about it. And finally Hindsight Lad. Hindsight Lad's superpower was that when a plan went wrong, after the plan had gone wrong, he could use his superpower to tell you why it went wrong and what you should have done differently. And I got to say they nailed the face on the right there perfect because we all know that guy. And that's his face right there. No question. Bob Calhoun has an awesome backstory. He was a wrestler in the 1990s in the professional wrestling league in San Francisco. He wrote an awesome book about it. He's another awesome book called Shattering Conventions. He'll talk a little bit about that tonight. He also writes the SF Weekly Yesterday's Crime column and just an all around cool guy. Please welcome Bob Calhoun to the stage. I not only want to thank Scott for having me but he like put my book on the wall which I was not smart enough to do. You know like putting the image of the book that is for sale later on tonight. Three whole copies for the low low nerd night special price of ten dollars. So talk to me after the presentation. Now originally I thought I was going to be talking about the origins of Comic-Con like the San Diego Comic-Con itself. But when I was researching this talk I decided to go back a whole lot further to the very first science fiction con ever. So as we know there's San Diego Comic-Con. It's behind me, behind you. San Diego Comic-Con it's getting bigger and sweatier and more packed in and this is an experience of con going in the 21st century as every year it's just how much of a congealed mass of humanity can be crammed into these convention centers. But you know we talk about the San Diego Comic-Con, maybe Wonder-Con, Emerald City-Con, Seattle, New York Comic-Con. But you know there are comic book and science fiction cons like Scott said like everywhere now in every corner of the country if not the world. So we've got Constellation in Huntsville, Alabama. You know and then Mysticon in Roanoke, Virginia. Life, the universe and everything in Provo, Utah. Now see people thought they had to escape from Provo to come to the Bay Area to do cool things but you could just wait around Provo all year long and go to life, the universe and everything. It's there for those people. It's there for you. And Lubbock-Con, yes there is a Comic-Con in Lubbock now. Lubbock, Texas, home of Buddy Holly. You know so there we go. Here is just the crypt from Wikipedia list of cons. That's only about a third of it. The Wikipedia moderators have taken a lot of comic-cons out. This is just science fiction-con. But then like Wonder-Con is there. So it's typical there are Wikipedia wars going on back there somewhere over what constitutes a science fiction-con and what doesn't. And of course there are Star Trek cons. There are you know there are Brony cons. There are all kinds of offshoots of these cons. And in my book and in my column in meetings today, the magazine of the conventions industry, I've been to Juggler's cons and I've been to a few Republican conventions. You know those are always those you know you want to go to a fantasy world folks. Okay so science fiction conventions believe it or not all started at the world's fair. Now what's the world's fair? It's kind of like a county fair that you may be familiar with but it's only very very big and it goes on for six months. They started in basically the mid-19th century and all the nations of the world would show off what they had developed technologically like there's definitely a steampunk bent for at least the first 50 years of these things. Prince Albert you know was very big into these world's fairs. And you know there was also of course a lot of stereotypes because somehow the nations of the earth that weren't so white tended to show off themselves through stereotypes that they thought that Europeans and Americans could understand. So we've got Elvis there and what did the world's fairs bring us besides technology and stereotypes? Well we got the Eiffel Tower, if I can read my sheet here. The Eiffel Tower, the 1889 World's Fair in Paris. That's what we got out of that World's Fair. San Francisco got the Palace of Fine Arts from the 1915 Pan-Pacific Expo. And then there's that Space Needle from the 64 World's Fair which is kind of the end of World's Fairs as like a big deal. Now there are still World's Fairs going on but the United States didn't even participate in 2000. Minnesota tried to get the 2023 World's Fair and failed and lost to Buenos Aires. I kind of think that was a Trump thing because you know Trump remembers stuff from his past and decides we need to bring it back again. That's a thing that goes on a lot. That's not a commentary on him for Republicans in the audience today. We're not allowed to chase you out of restaurants. No, we can't do that. Okay. So the first, oh and there we are at the Seattle World's Fair. There's a young snake, Plisken, kicking Elvis Presley in the shins. That's another thing that went on at the 1964 World's Fair. There's Kurt Russell, about 10 years old there and Elvis pays him to kick him in the shins. Come on, why don't you kick me in the shin? Because it gets sympathy, he's basically gaslighting some woman so he has Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China kick him in the shins. So that's the kind of thing that was going on at these things. The first science fiction convention, the first one ever. Now, there will be the actually but people, the actually but people. We all know them. We might even be them at various points in our life who will tell you, well, there was a previous science fiction convention held in Frederick Poll's parents' backyard and three people showed up to discuss a astounding science fiction magazine. And that didn't, that did happen. The first, you know, science fiction convention with a program that people took trains or maybe tramp steamers to get to was at the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens, New York. Now, as we could see here, here's some of the young lads from the science fiction convention. That is a young Ray Bradbury, 17 years old. We can tell he's from California because he's not wearing a button-up shirt. What's with this, the Beach Boys here? Ray Bradbury and the Beach Boys, you know? So he's from Los Angeles, and that's just how people from Los Angeles looked for the first two-thirds of the 20th century. What happened, Los Angeles? They're all going, they didn't have enough of the fair, so they all went to Coney Island. You know, they just didn't have enough of the fair. They're at the damn fair, and they gotta go to an amusement park. Now, the theme of the 39 World's Fair was the World of Tomorrow. So the whole thing was really a science fiction convention. The whole thing was, we have, let's see, you have Electro, the Westinghouse Moto Man. He performed 26 mechanical tricks, including walking, talking, smoking, cigarettes, and counting. And that was on May 8, 1939. A lot of guys with fedoras were checking out Electro, the Moto Man. So it was all very, very pulp science fiction forward-looking. And one of the things that you had at this convention, now the convention happened July 2nd through 4th, so it's almost kind of the anniversary of it is coming up. What would it be, Scott? You're better with numbers than I am. Okay, forget it, somebody with a calculator, figure it out. 1939, 2018, 79 years, almost the 80th anniversary. And one of the things you had at this first science fiction convention, surprise, surprise, was conflict. The futurists were denied entrance into the convention. Now these futurists, they might be different from the kind of right-leaning futurists of later years. They were very pro-Trotzkyite futurists. That's maybe something you don't really see at science fiction conventions. And they had agitated the convention organizers, and they distributed this pamphlet, and they were talking about the, you know, beware the dictatorship. And the dictatorship they were talking about was the Queen's Science Fiction League, like the Queen's New York Science Fiction League. This was the great gathering danger at our shores, which it might seem a little insensitive of the futurists, because Hitler invaded Poland just two months after this. But the dictatorship of the Queen's Science Fiction League was very much on their minds. Now the futurists staged their own separate gathering, kind of in some other part of the fair. Some futurists were allowed back into the con, others weren't, you know, they weren't going to go back in there. So there you have conflict like a bunch of science fiction nerds all getting together the first time ever, and there's factionalism. You know, it's still happening now, it'll keep happening. The other thing that was a first at the 1939 World Science Fiction Convention, the first cosplay. Were you booing the cosplay? Oh, okay, yeah, yeah. So that's Forest J. Ackerman. He later became the publisher of Famous Monsters of Film Land, which was like a zine that you could buy at 7-Eleven throughout most of my childhood. Like, you know, like you didn't have to hunt in some weird bookstore, like weird monster movie mags, you know, they were basically zines, but they were freely available even at Safeway sometimes. And that was his girlfriend at the time, Myrtle R. Douglas. She was known as Moroyo because they were really into Esperanto. And Esperanto was supposed to be this international language. We were going to get rid of English, Spanish, Japanese, Russian, and everybody would speak this language of the future. So all the early science fiction fans, at least the LA contingent, were way into Esperanto. Now, the only kind of cultural legacy of Esperanto is in the 60s, the producers of The Outer Limits made a kind of very strange fantasy film called Incubus with William Shatner, and all the dialogue is in Esperanto. I suggest you, you know, I suggest you seek that film out. Everybody who watches that film uses the subtitles. So Moroyo designed these costumes. They are the only two people dressed up at this thing, and they were based on basically the pulp magazine covers of the time. You had lots of capes, although I couldn't find capes here, but, you know, these kind of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers costumes. They were also way into Things to Come, a 1936 HD Wells film, which is also the first movie with kind of a plague of zombies. There's these kind of zombie guys, you know, it's after the apocalypse, and there's all these people living in squalor, kind of a Mad Max thing on one side, but then you have the kind of science fiction people wearing capes and togas and showing off their knees, Raymond Massey there. It's in public domain, so I know Scott has been on programs that have hosted this film before, Creepy Coffee Movie Time. They've definitely shown the living shit out of this movie because you can just show it anytime you want, anywhere you want. We can even edit ourselves into it if we want. So, let me see where's my quote. My Fourier Ackerman quote here, it was sort of like Clark Kent when he steps into the telephone booth and comes out with a Superman suit. When I got into that costume, I walked to the streets of New York and little children crying out that it was Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers. Ackerman also showed up, dressed with that, with his fake ray gun, well, real ray gun, who knows. He showed up in an automat, which is kind of like one of those iPad restaurants where you don't see people make or serve your food. Like those are coming back, but this was all with mechanical technology and conveyor belts where we're back to that again. And he showed up there and people thought he was the moto man that had gotten free from the Westinghouse exhibit and police were called and it was a whole big brouhaha. So, but that's like the very first cosplay, the very first science fiction convention, you have the very first cosplay. And I want to have another note on Moroio because she was definitely, she gets lost in this as so many pioneering women do get lost in the narratives. She did the sewing, it was probably her idea to go in costume or at least I hope it was because she's the one who worked her ass off for it. But she had produced several zines. She worked on a zine with Julia Schwartz who later became the head of DC Comics. And his big innovation with DC Comics was to scrap all of the supernatural origins of Hawkman, the Flash, Green Lantern and replace them with sci-fi origins because in their mind, you know, getting a bunch of chemicals dumped on your head and being able to run super fast from that was a lot more realistic than the God Mercury giving you those powers. That's how into science fiction these guys were. These guys hated, like they would practically protest movies that, you know, it was all a dream, like they hated that. That was a thing they were really on about. But yeah, she produced a bunch of zines. She was Fori Ackerman's girlfriend for a couple of years around this time and then they had a bad breakup which is kind of hard not to see in a kind of Dykstra hardwick kind of light now because she probably didn't feel too good about being part of the scene that she had helped to build. She became a nudist act advocate and she died in 1964 but I'm not sure we, you know, so many things we take for granted in science fiction fandom culture now, I'm not sure we'd have without her. So a round of applause for Moroio. So when they did the first science fiction con, they didn't really plan on a second one but it kind of had momentum for another world con. And that was, I think, what was that? Was that in Philadelphia? No, it was Chicago. But more people showed up dressed in costume. Now this, it's kind of looking a little Halloween costume like here but this is like a 1946 convention. There was a brief respite for World War II in these things. Of course, World Con is coming to San Jose this August. You know, so that is the linear, that is the same convention as that which we were talking about now, August 25th, San Jose McKinney Reconvention Center, my home away from home. So yeah, I mean people just started coming to more cons and there was a, Fori Ackerman and Moroio were still together the very next year, the very next con and they acted out a scene from things to come like nobody was sure where we'd be going with this stuff so they started like doing plays with this. Another thing at the very first science fiction con that I forgot to mention is there was a all science fiction pulp writer and fanboy baseball game that is maybe one of the traditions that didn't quite make it. You know, that Comic Con baseball game that, you know. So yeah, cosplay just from the beginning like you know, Fori Ackerman and Moroio show up dressed in costume and then people are like I want to do that too and it keeps going and there was a year at the Chicago con either the second or third one where Ackerman marched all of them into the Chicago Tribune office and they claimed to be from the future and they were trying to run a scam on them but then it didn't even make it to the paper because some more sober editor than the night editor was like this is nuts, I'm not running this. So it was all for naught. So you have these cons in the early 70s you have the San Diego Comic Con happening you have the early Star Trek cons there I am in 1992 at San Diego Comic Con meeting Mr. T the great meeting of the minds there folks great meeting of the minds I'm sorry if I keep pointing I know it's behind me but that's what I'm looking at. Yeah, you know, a lot of those cons that I went to back then Forrest Ackerman was there he was holding court at those and he also had his own famous monsters cons that I attended and you used to be able to go to his house when he was alive and he would show you all these Ray Harryhausen figurines because Ray Harryhausen was also an early member of this fandom he wasn't at the first con he did make a mask that Moroille wore at the third world con like a weird frog person mask that there are no pictures of but I really want to see it. So there you go today Comic cons are a part of our culture part of American culture the press will still cover them as if they're like what are these weirdos doing even though they're happening in Provo, Utah and they're happening in Huntsville, Alabama they are you know there is going to be a point very soon I'm going to leave you with this where the Klingons and the 501st Legion stormtroopers are going to be if they aren't already like the Rotary Club the Lions Club and when you drive into every town you'll see their little emblem on that big old kiosk they're just another service club folks I mean and whatever the stormtroopers are doing is not half as weird as what the masons are doing in those damned aprons books available for me for a couple minutes after this thing does anybody have any questions and I cannot see anybody so just shout out any questions out there oh there you go right there I'll get to you next you right there which movie things to come oh Incubus with William Shatner it's like 62 to 64 somewhere in there I should have put a clip of it eclipto like there's an eclipse and he's like eclipso eclipso it's a weird just to tell you it's a weird movie is really ridiculous at this point but it's a weird movie you back there you're going to get my bad shit theory because I'm on stage and that's all I've got the same year that Mr. T was there you know a gentleman showed up to that con named Francis Ford Coppola in 92 and he was previewing his Dracula movie with Keanu Reeves kind of miscast in it yes kind of miscast you know he's held on to showed up and that was like just being around that like I saw him talk you know you waited in a big line it was maybe one of the first truly big lines at San Diego Comic Con to get in but we still got in I didn't have to wait for six days to see Coppola but you know it's like Francis Ford Coppola legitimized us you know all of a sudden it was this kind of you know con where you could go you know hang out at the pool with Jack Kirby you know at the Coronado Hotel Hotel Coronado you know for years and now all of a sudden Coppola shows up and that's putting the the seed into Hollywood's mind that you can use this thing to promote movies the next year or the year after that Van Damme showed up which seems like a joke like you know now you need a restraining order probably to keep Van Damme out of Comic Con but you know Time Copp was a big deal this was a big release it wasn't quite Arnold Schwarzenegger showing up but all of a sudden you kind of it's a slow burn through the 90s into the 2000s to where we get to where we are now and then every studio every network every cable network is doing these big rollouts and of course the movies now are patterned to fit into Comic Con in a way that they they weren't quite back then now every year there's you know maybe as many as two Star Wars movies and Lord knows how many superhero movies so there you go thank you and in this case we have a physicist stocking and a dark matter physicist I seem to remember the last time we had a dark matter physicist this guy coming up Fred Swicky so he he discovered dark matter but perhaps if anyone was there when we had this presentation you might better remember him for coming up with the phrase spherical bastards and that is your bastards whichever way I look at you I'm going to quickly lower the font size on this so Swicky was kind of a fuck I feel I feel a little bit bad for him because he he basically wasn't allowed to do science for a while and if I lower the font size you can kind of see why riff riff yes I hate to see the photos tomorrow yes so Swicky claims that he was barred from research basically because of his citizenship so he was Swiss and he was like all these Americans only want American science so I can tell them all my ideas but I can't actually go and see what they're up to other people said that this is why he wasn't allowed in the lab he basically banned the military leaders actually funding his work saying that generals and admirals weren't scientists and so they wouldn't know what they were looking at so he's a character and I thought that this sort of paradigm of the corruption scientists the physicist who was an asshole that must hold for everyone so I'm like Swicky didn't actually come up with the term dark matter that was this guy JC captain he basically said there's this there's potentially dark matter in the telescope but when I calculate the mass of everything that I can see with the telescope I basically know that there's probably not much dark matter out there so turns out he was wrong I bet he was an asshole in life in other ways and so I did countless hours of research trying to figure out how this guy was an asshole and the only thing I came up with was a letter from another physicist saying it was dated in May he says I have received your letter dated 11th July whatever whether it's astral development of what you will in the future write on that date I don't know but I think it's probable that you intended to write April instead of July so apparently apparently it is completely possible to be just you know a nice guy who's a physicist who is wrong not only in his conceptions but also in his correspondence now for someone who is both right and nice please welcome to stage Lucy scientists count everything in the universe when they look at stars and planets and the earth and grass and people and light and protons and everything all that adds up to only 20% of matter and so my job is looking for the remaining 80% of matter and so why do we think we only know about 20% of matter that's out there and what's the remaining 80% of matter well part of that job is the job of the Lux and LZ which are the direct dark matter experiments and Lux was for a long time the world leader at looking for dark matter and we are currently working on LZ which is soon to regain our first spot in fierce competition of dark matter so what is dark matter well you're no experts with this awesome introduction but just one of the other pieces of evidence that's out there when scientists look at galaxies you can actually see it very well here they rotate and what they notice is that the stars the velocity of the stars stays constant as you move further away from the center which is not expected because according to Newtonian dynamics you would expect the velocity to fall down and so really if this is the case the stars should kind of all fly away and the galaxy should shrink and it doesn't and so scientists postulate it there is some invisible perhaps dark matter out there that has some mass that would make up for the difference between Newtonian dynamics work and that thing has been called dark matter and there's much more evidence about dark matter but there's also many theories about what dark matter could be and so this illustration shows some of the particles here in the center are the particles we know about it's the particles you I'm sure are very familiar from your everyday physics life that's all we know about or rather we know all about them or a lot of them about them and so everything else is are some of the dark matter theories of what the dark matter particle could be and so you can see that there are many choices and we in particular have decided to look for WIMPs the weekly interacting massive particles they are the preferred theory they kind of fit nicely into the current physics and so that's what we are looking for so now how do you look for it well there are many ways we can look for them using the production where you can use the large Hadron Collider at CERN that's smashing particles at each other and then you can look for missing mass and that might be you might see dark matter there or you can use indirect detection where you can send satellites to space telescopes here on Earth and look again for some signals that the dark matter particles could create or which I think is most fun you can build detectors here on Earth and directly try to detect dark matter and so that's what I will talk tonight about because that's the most awesome way to do that there are many materials you can choose from and again the most awesome material to choose is liquid xenon that I will talk about and so the way we detect dark matter with our direct detection is that we fill, we create a detector and we fill it with matter that's well characterized that's well described and then we wait for a dark monoparticle to hit one of the atoms of the material in our case xenon and this interaction produces light charge and heat and we can then try to detect the signature of this interaction and hopefully detect dark matter and so the important point to stress here is that we are actually even though it's called direct detection we are not going to see the dark monoparticle itself we will see the interaction of the dark monoparticle with the material in the detector so for that as I mentioned we have chosen xenon and we also go a mile underground so we do all these crazy things because xenon is a very, very expensive noble gas it's kind of boring when you look at it, it's transparent and it bubbles but it is very, very pure and it's not very radioactive so it's also very clean and so we do all of that because there are all of these dark monoparticles out there quite likely but we haven't seen any of it so all of this is in the field of rare event searches and so because these events are rare they are quite likely hard to see and so we need to go to great lengths to reduce background to only focus on these very rare events so we use xenon which is awesome and then we go a mile underground because it's very, very bright here well actually it's very bright here but it's not very bright over there because there's all the cosmic rays and all the radioactivity from everything, bananas and buildings and whatnot and that's very noisy and it will create too much light for our detection so we need to go deep and use awesome materials to kind of cut out all of this noise so that's why we built the large underground xenon experiment it is, or it was located in Leeds, South Dakota in a mile underground it's a collaboration of about 150 scientists here are just some of them at one of our collaboration meetings in South Dakota at the place of detector and the detector itself is not only a mile underground but to further reduce background we go inside of a water tank that's full of super-cleared water and the detector itself is right here you might be better looking at a better resolution screen but the center of the detector is what really, really care about it's about half a meter you guys don't know meters, there you go it's this wide and this tall, it's a cylinder it has about 370 kilos sorry, I think it's like 500 pounds of xenon and most importantly we experimented with two photo-multiplier tube arrays it's a fancy work for a very sensitive light detector and then we use grits to set an electric field to look for light and charge and so Lux, the detector itself falls into a broad category of what's called a time two-phase time projection chamber and so the way these work is that when you have a particle come and interact with a xenon atom let me play that for you so when you have a particle come and interact with a xenon atom it creates three things, light, heat and charge we cannot ignore the heat but we detect light with the two photo-multiplier tube arrays at the top and the bottom and then the charge, the electrons that are produced are drifted along the electric field to the top of the detector here you can see them the secondary scintillation light is two and that gets again detected with the photo-multiplier tube arrays so the reason this is really really cool and really interesting is that these two light signals the S1 and S2 light signals give us the ability to reconstruct the precise location of the event on a millimeter again, tiny millimeter scale precision so that's very helpful again to cut the background so we can easily tell if an event happened near the center of the detector or if it happened near the walls where it was more likely to be some radioactivity furthermore we can also use the ratio of these two, of the S1 and S2 signal to tell between two types of recoils so when a particle comes and hits a xenon atom it can hit two things, it can either interact with the electron cloud or with the nucleus luckily for us the ratio of the S1 and S2 signal is different for these two recoils, for the electron and for nuclear recall and actually so that's what we can see here there's the blue, the electron-recoil band and the red is nuclear-recoil band and so actually the electron-recoil band is mostly background, it's mostly betas and gammas, which is mostly kind of radioactivity background and the red here are either neutrons, which is also background or wimps, the dark matter particles we're looking for and so now we have this awesome detector able to detect possibly dark matter and so all we need to do is go have a look at it so I would like to take you to South Dakota on picture and so here we are this is a picture of the Sanford Underground Research Facility lab in Leeds, South Dakota it actually used to be a gold mine, no gold left in the shafts I've asked and so what we need to do is take the cage to go a mile underground to see Lux right here in the Davis Cavern so let's do that and so what you can see here is a bunch of scientists dressed in coveralls getting onto the cage, which is like a city elevator it's kind of noisy you can kind of hear it, it's a little wriggly it takes about 10 minutes to go down and once we go down you should hear you can hear the spraying it's because we go a mile underground it's about 40 to 50 feet and there is underground water constantly pouring from the walls and so once we go underground we take over our coveralls and become people again and here we are at the lab so I've been at the lab many times, I actually really like it I've been there every time in the summer it's like the perfect vacation spot on the top and a lot of fun on the bottom there is a fridge and a microwave and a kettle and a coffee machine if you're fancy underground so really kind of all you need and more importantly there are these gigantic water pumps that keep pumping the underground water constantly out so we don't drown also good and so here you can see is the top of our lab here is the top of the water tank and the like oh, oh the light detector lives right under here so we can go take the yellow staircase down and this is the bottom of the lab so a lot of the space or most of the space is taken by a lot of the structure that's there to constantly circulate the xenon because we want to keep it clean and that's the easiest way to keep it clean is just circulate it and then if you look to the other side of the lab there is the outside of the lax water tank and so we can go inside to have a look at lax itself so in white here is the inside or the outside of the inside of the water tank and here is lax itself and so one step further and here is the inside of lax so here is actually combinations of pictures from the assembly and from the disassembly so I of course participated in the disassembly of the detector right in the assembly and so you can see here is the, this is the volume that's ultimately filled with liquid xenon which is where we collected our data and so here is a picture of the grid here is me and here is the detector copper rings help shape the field the electric field and the photomultiplier tube arrays live kind of here and the copper up top and then not shown at the bottom here and so what's important to understand here is that this when we, so we made the detector out of the purest possible materials to have no radioactivity and there's a lot of effort that goes into the assembly and construction because once the detectors assembled and put into the water tank we might have as well just shot it into space because there's no going back and fixing it if you try to fix it we've tried it, you're more likely to break it so you're kind of lost once it's closed and so we closed the detector, just as shown here where we closed it for real and then it just sat there in the water tank for three years collecting data and this is the data we ended up with so this is the actual data from our publication and now we are skilled physicists so you might recognize here on top in blue is the electron recall band I showed you, so that's mostly background we don't care about that and in red here is the nuclear recall band so it's either WIMPs or neutrons so to be really really safe we look for events underneath the nuclear band the solid red line and so you can see that there is one, two, three, I guess depending on what screen you're looking at you can see one, two, three a handful of events so this is a really happy talk because we found dark matter except that we didn't otherwise I would be too busy receiving a Nobel Prize or you know my PI it's life if you kind of go back why did we bother going underground to reduce background why do we use all these super pure, radioactively pure materials to reduce background seeing the pattern here why do we use very very clean xenon reduce background and so even though we put all of this effort to eliminate all the background we can never actually entirely eliminate it we expect some background events to leak into our signal region and this is all well modeled and well understood and we actually do expect some events in this region how many events? about this many so unfortunately there's no discovery at least not tonight but also not lost because what you can do instead of claiming discovery is you can create what we call the exclusion curve and this is what it is this this is actually not that far from the actual thing you'll see shortly so on the X axis here is the mass of the dark matter or the size of the unicorn kind of interchangeable at this point in time and on the Y axis the likelihood of the dark matter or unicorn interacting with our detector and so what we do we create this yellow region this exclusion region where we can say we are very very confident that there's no dark matter here and that's what we publish and so we can publish this but then there's still left this region where maybe there might be dark matter okay so this is not actually what we publish though it would be pretty awesome but this is what we publish as you can see pretty similar and this is actually what allowed us to be the best in the world not see anything for few months so this result is actually over a year old now and it was an awesome result but the competition in the liquid xenon world is fears for real and we have since been taken over by a couple other detectors the xenon experiment in Italy and the Panda X experiment in China you can again see the same curve and people just kind of pushing lower excluding more and more stuff and so we obviously want to be back to be best at not seeing anything again or finding dark matter particles it doesn't really matter I wouldn't say that to my professor so we have set out to build a bigger or better detector because we have learned all this information while building LUX and so we are now building the LUX Zeppelin experiment or LZ and so as you can see here LUX is now in a museum in South Dakota it's a hotspot I highly recommend it and here in the picture you can see LZ it's about 40 times the size of LUX which you can see right here and will contain about 10 tons of liquid xenon 10 metric tons I don't know if it's more or less than local tons doesn't matter and 10 tons actually turns out is about one fifth of the yearly world market of xenon so you can't just go and buy it all it's like a whole planning that goes into buying the xenon and it's all a big big thing and so here is LZ itself it's pretty similar in design but kind of more awesome it lives in the same water tank that LUX or it will live in the same water tank that LUX resided in South Dakota detector itself is now much bigger one and a half meters much much bigger and there's just other upgrades there that are cool to make it a better detector I'm not going to talk about the details of the design instead there's actually some really cool pictures because the LZ construction has begun because the data collection should be starting in two years so we are all busy building a new Austin detector here on the left is the cryostat in Italy at the manufacturer where it's actually made out of the world's purest titanium there you go this is the same cryostat in South Dakota getting leak checked ready for the assembly here on top are gigantic grids that have been woven at Stanford lab here we have actually had a loom made to weed these grids it's all really cool and kind of innocent here in the corner in a very innocuous looking trailer under a medium sized block is about six tons of xenon worth tens of millions of dollars and so this is all under construction and the construction should finish next year and then we should start collecting data soon the design details of LZ have been published in the LZ TDR as we like to call it the technical design report it's a 400 page page turner and really I think the word cloud is just as interesting so you can see that it's a technical TPC PMT system report energy PTFE gas and really that's all you would learn by reading the whole thing you're welcome and so that brings me to the end we live at a very exciting time in physics where we know how much we don't know we know we are missing 80% of matter and that's really exciting we're trying to see it and we are learning about physics something new every day and so hopefully I have convinced you that not seeing anything is actually a good thing because it opens up all these new spaces for imagination and so hopefully this is a very exciting time to be working in physics because as we learn more about about physics and about dark matter we will eventually see dark matter because it's out there and the more surprising the discovery will be the more we'll learn about it thank you questions many there was right there was a quick hand we probably are but that's why the field is oh yeah sorry the question is if there is 80% of matter missing why aren't we swimming in it we are we just don't feel it which is part of why it's called dark matter and rare event searches is because we don't know much so it's really hard to detect and feel and swim in it's not like salt water be cool though many other questions sorry didn't mention salt anyone they are not yet but they will be for LZ so question is are neutrinos a problem neutrinos are pretty cool particles though not as cool as dark matter because we know a lot about them they are also they also fall into the category of rare event searches because they also don't like to interact very much but once you build a big enough detector you can actually detect neutrinos and so LZ should be able to see neutrinos so it and that actually kind of places a limit on how big your detector can be because eventually neutrinos will just be a big background that you can't really deal with well yeah right there there is a whole field of astronomy and cosmology doing that we can talk after one more so question is is there a reason to believe a dark matter is not uniformly distributed we actually think it is not uniformly distributed again there's a lot of theories about it because we haven't detected it it's quite likely in some clumps and we are hopefully flying through some of the clumps occasionally one of the theories why we might not be seeing it is because we are not flying through any clumps I'm not a theorist but I also brought some of my co-workers here for support so if you guys have if you guys have any questions or any more questions I will hopefully now be drinking beer not water and I'll be happy to answer questions after the talk thank you let's give a hand for Lucy so Lucy is going to be at the foot of the stage so I saw lots of hands up please come ask her questions she is super eager to answer all of them we are going to be back in 10 with a talk about ancient history if you filled out one of these comic-con bingo cards you should turn it in now it turns out that Bob sold out of all four books that he brought we are going to give the winner of the lottery that filled out one of these bingo cards two tickets to next month's NerdNight and we will have a book for you then so that's it please put these cards on essentially the table over by the door where you got them from in the first place there is already a pile going there is going to be a NerdNight boss there who will actually draw it we will be back in 10 with a talk about a badass Athenian welcome back and thank you for playing NerdNight bingo for those of you who have go back into the light so I can read it's in bright blue Dane check a little bit different so since obviously a very popular book with the comic-con here tonight if you'd like to buy one and didn't get one send us a message either through our facebook page which as we admitted facebook sucks we also have a website and if you just by default of being here you are obviously a nerd which means you have something interesting to say so if you'd like to give a talk we'd probably like to hear what you have to say so give us send us an email through one of those sources we'd love to get you into the schedule next we have the insatiable and I'm going to say this wrong a sublades of Athens so a sublade? yes an amazing polymath that you're going to hear way more about but Athens in and of itself totally a weird funky place that we should all check out a little bit more doing research we have a 2,000 year old version of a computer in Athens that you can go and see and we think we're all part of my nerdiness I have on my EFF thing here computers not quite as brand new as we all think the Athenians they had some ideas magic spheres also a big thing in Athenia probably at that point nearly as good as the computers so Athens they were predicting things long before we had any concept but what they were also really good at really amazing was some of their engineering good engineering will outlast us all and water systems old time water systems are spectacular I'm a water nerd so finding things like the fact that there is actually a water system under their metro is super exciting probably developed by the guy we're going to hear about later because he developed all these things from the sound of it they also had a long history of co-opting other religions and their symbols so that you can actually go to churches where they had taken apart other churches put them back together and relabeled them so if you don't like already the predictions, the computers you can go from the science into the religion they've covered the whole bit just like our next speaker is going to so I want to introduce Teddy to Groot I'm sure he's already tired of all the Groot jokes it was super tempting to come between that and Comic-Con dressed as Groot didn't go there it's a little awkward running down the streets of Oakland dressed as Groot but anyways, Teddy, brand new to California so we want you to welcome him he's out of Wisconsin most recently just settling into the Bay Area so we want to make him feel extra welcome so Teddy if we can get you up here hello, oh perfect does this have a laser yes, nice alright hello Oakland we're good at basketball here so I'm here to talk to you about alcabaites and I'm a biomedical engineer by training, I've been one since, I don't know 2005 but also I have this weird interest in classical studies especially classical Greece and I'm here to talk to you about one of the most interesting human beings that we have the data about, I'm not saying there are more interesting people than him there probably were but this is the most interesting person we have data about and his name is alcabaites and alcabaites was not only an amazing politician, an amazing orator an amazing general but a general badass he is the kind of person who's like a spoiled brat and a playboy a little bit of archer a little bit of someone a little bit more competent than archer and but he was also he was also the embodiment of this logical fallacy called reductio ad absurdum which means taken to the far extreme so he is what happens when you take Athenian democracy to the far far far extreme the logical restraints at which it could be confined to so it's going a little bit about the background in the history and where we are currently and so we're in about let's say 430 BC this was a generation after the events of the tragedy that occurred in the graphic novel slash movie 300 in which the Greeks essentially bonded together in order to repel a Persian invasion force from the Persian Empire to the east and so what that leaves us with in the aftermath of this war is we have essentially two factions the first faction is Athens and the Delian League is what they call all the people that they collect taxes from and Athens is about over here and all the red are the Delian League's athai allies and then you have the Peloponnesian League which is led by Sparta and Sparta you know Sparta and they're they're a little bit less you see they're mostly focused on land whereas the Delian League is a lot of different islands and also the Greeks fought the Persians and I really don't want to leave the Persians out of here because they do play a big role even though when we talk a lot about the Peloponnesian War it's mostly like Sparta versus Athens but if we actually look at it this is the Persian Empire as it stands 430 BC and this little circle over here is Greece and so they have a lot of influence even though they weren't able to take over some like shitty little mountains like in the middle of the sea they are an economic and military power in the region and they control a lot so let's just sort of focus a little bit more on the importance of Athenians and Spartans and if you remember from school there's a lot of if you break it down to its most basic the Spartans are like Klingons they're very very warlike they devote their entire lives to training for battle it wasn't until a couple maybe 200 years after the events that Sparta was actually defeated they weren't really good at sending boats but if they were eager to fight them you'd lose and then of course we also taught the converse to that which is Athens and Athens is more like the Federation they value learning they value education they have things like democracy and freedoms things like that if you're a citizen and just a side note the card is better than Kirk if you have your own Nerd Knight presentation or anything else but he's just a better captain anyway Athens Athens is a direct democracy a direct democracy is far different from what we call our democracy this is every single citizen has to participate in making laws and this is often done at random so instead of jury duty you instead get an invitation to come and be at the Cropolis and you have to be on what is essentially the Senate and they decide the law for the day and so Athenian principles are built over rationalism we need an educated populace we need equality for all those who are citizens and a citizen is how they kind of restrict restrict rights to only like property owning males who are of Athenian descent so I mean it's a little bit like our democracy is but this direct democracy itself is built on sort of this war machine and since Greece is essentially a just an archipelago full of islands Athens collected taxes from people after the Persian war is like well we need more money if we're going to keep the Persians that day and when you didn't pay up your taxes your sin taxes which is English for everybody pays together when you didn't give Athens your tribute they send your boats after you so again a lot like our democracy because you know if you don't really want to be part of it or you want to not trade with us it's not it's your problem so this is the environment that young Alcabaites grew up in Alcabaites was born about a generation after the events of 300 he was born to a general who was killed in battle so he got handed to Pericles which was one of the the most influential general leaders of Athens ever and he is a very very small brat he is insanely rich and also one of the key defining characteristics of Alcabaites he is super super good looking and this comes back again and again and again so early to be an Athenian citizen you need to actually fight you need your own armor and you need to fight to defend your city state there is no regulated army there's no there's no fatigues everywhere everyone as long as you were able to afford a spear and a shield you needed to show up for battle and whatever that styling was was sort of what Alcabaites would be hanging out so did you imagine just showing up showing up to battle you get your blinged out Mercedes your gold plated Mercedes you come up there with your golden plated shield with Eros the god of love and the one that Alcabaites is said to have is actually completely bedazzled as well so he comes out there in style in all godiness and he meets Socrates on the battlefield and Alcabaites is injured and Socrates comes and he rescues Alcabaites and they actually start to form this bond based on the fact that you know Alcabaites owed him his life he was just a young boy and Socrates aches on Alcabaites as a student they had sex a lot it was different back then they were like a traumatized culture where pedestrian was the thing that was very very common and accepted but Alcabaites really just wanted to have fun and party while Socrates was all like oh like I'm gonna be your teacher you need to learn how to be a statesman and there's this really really fun theme in 19th century art which involves Socrates trying to drag away Alcabaites from his consorts and like this is a pretty substantial theme this one is one of my favorites because he just looks so fed up at this point and we're still going with this I mean if you're interested in 19th and 18th century art about Alcabaites not wanting to learn from Socrates this is a place for you this is great I mean what is gonna happen here if Socrates didn't come and interject and want to teach him about morals and principles I don't know and there's something else about I thought I took the slide out I'm just gonna Alcabaites had a magical penis everybody wanted us to leave with him regardless of your gender your social standing and he could convince people to do really really weird things with his penis things that they wouldn't normally do and so part of that is sort of like what would the young Alcabaites do in Athens so from the toolage of Socrates and also just from his upbringing he became a master of manipulation and the manipulation of individuals and crowds and when you're gonna direct democracy or any yahoo it's just randomly selected to show up to senate one day and you can make a very convincing speech that becomes the law and Alcabaites realized this and was able to do make a lot of his plays out that way and he was absolutely loved and part of it was also he was a very good Athenian he was beautiful and vain he was well educated he was just the embodiment of Athens first example is he in school in Athens has to learn how to play the pan flute it's a little different than the pan flutes that I usually see at malls but it's still a pan flute nonetheless and Alcabaites just, he doesn't like playing the pan flute and he puts up such a stink about having to learn how to play this flute that nobody ever has to learn to play the pan flute ever again in Athenian school so Alcabaites so if you could imagine your friend goes and you go see, I don't know say Bob Ross we're still alive I'm making an analogy in your drunk you're walking down the street you see Bob Ross your friend sees, yo I bet you won't punch that dude he is like what Bob Ross everybody loves Bob Ross he's so sweet and Alcabaites goes fuck it I'll do it and he goes up and he clocks Bob Ross right in the face goes home wakes up the next morning remembers did I punch Bob Ross last night and it turns out that he did and he went to go to apologize to Athenian Bob Ross and he's like I'm so sorry I was like totally hammered and I had my friend anyway and Bob was oh you're so sweet why don't you just marry my daughter this is the kind of shit Alcabaites gets into so Alcabaites once got so drunk that he interrupted a symposium and for those of you who don't speak like classical Greek symposium is English for to drink together and it was a party that people had where they would get so drunk that they would need to hire slaves and servants to hold back their hair while they vomited and Alcabaites managed to get so wasted at one of these parties that he ruined it he and no one's safe from Alcabaites I mean like he fucks Socrates I don't know what else who else did that it's not many so Alcabaites grows up a little bit just a little bit and he has his eyes set on kind of taking over the known world and the first step into taking over the known world is to invade Sicily and Sicily is going to be a jump up point after Sicily he's like we're going to go to Sicily then we're going to go to Carthage and then we're going to go to Italy and we're going to have the entire Mediterranean and it's going to be awesome and he convinces a whole bunch of people because he's really good at speaking whatever we're going to do it let's just take it and so here is our little map of the Aegean and Athens over here just need a sail over there go to Syracuse and Sicily and just like beat some people up and then they have silver or somebody has told me they had silver and we'll get it and it'll be great and then the Herm incident happened and though so the night before the expedition somebody decided to just like cut off all the dicks on all these Hermes statues and that was like really really really bad juju and some people blamed Alcabides for it and he went to court the next day and they're like you know what you're supposed to leave this expedition you should just go anyway just go and everything will be great and as soon as he left whatever oligarchic elements in the government came back and they were like yo lay listen like we actually want to just try you in absentia and convict you as guilty and so instead of going helping Athens like taking Syracuse he was like no fuck this I don't want to go back to trial I'm going to become a Spartan and so he became a Spartan and since he knew all of like Athens um like strategy he was able to really really help the Spartans like kick the Athenians ass after they went and did this thing where they fought their friends in Syracuse and it was going pretty well for him but Alcabides has a tendency of being Alcabides and he knocked up the wife of one of the kings of Sparta and so he had to just peace out and it's like well he already like ruined his things with the two major Greek powers in the region where else is he going to go and the answer is Persia and so Persia was just hanging out in Turkey there are people who consider themselves Greeks there Alcabides had this like really like nice thing where he was making gardens um but he got kind of homesick and he didn't really like just like being just a courtesan for someone he wanted to be someone better and so the tides kind of turned on him he felt that he needed to just get the hell out of there and go back to Athens and so now we end up on Alcabides the asshole which is where he needs at all costs just to get back to Athens um and so Sparta is doing really well at this point in time and he's trying to convince like well like I've been hanging on Persia forever so why don't you just invite me over back to Athens I get some support we could just be at these Spartans because Persia has all the money and um then eventually without him the scene changed from an oligarchy in Athens back to a radical democracy and Alcabides finds some pro democratic rebels out in the sea and they pick him up and he just needs to he wants to go back to Athens but he's kind of discreet so he needs to prove himself and so then we go to Alcabides the military genius and he was such a genius that Wikipedia has this really awesome block diagram on how Alcabides done did good at sea battle so here's a small Athenian force and here's a big Spartan force and it was like oh look you're so much bigger and then oh surprise we actually had more people and now you're flanked and you're dead and so Alcabides started winning these really great battles at sea he kicked some major ass all across the Aegean he got Athens Constantinople which gave you access to the Black Sea and all the farmland up there which allows you to feed an army and actually do some like if you could feed an army you could move an army and then he's with all these accomplishments he just goes back to Athens and he's like hey guys I'm back and everyone's like holy shit Alcabides we love you so much we never didn't love you and he's like I know he went out and after this one he started back to general everyone was happy with him he was a general again he went out into the sea trying to fight Spartans there was some island he went to I don't know there was probably someone he wanted to bang there but he left somebody else in charge and this guy thought well you know what remember this time when this thing worked like four times before I'm going to do it again and I'm going to be the hero now but he failed miserably and Alcabides actually got the blame for it because he was supposed to be the commander of the fleet but he was off doing who knows what so he was exiled from Athens and then one of those castles he captured up one of the places where he was off proving that he was a really great military guy he goes hides out there doesn't want anything to do with anyone else anymore he may be traced to stick his fingers into local government but it doesn't work out super well for him the Peloponnesians and like the Spartans are like he's very dangerous we should just probably get rid of him and he got shot by a bunch of arrows this only has one arrow but the Thucydides says he got a lot of arrows and he set his house on fire and he killed like half of the people but anyways Alcabides is dead and so now sorry Alcabides so he's no more Athens actually loses the Peloponnesian wars after this they have an oligarchy an oligarchy as the government that Sparta has so it kind of seems that Sparta made of one Athens and Sparta both are never as strong in and Persia continues to apply their like little economic warfare as supporting people that they like or whoever they think will destabilize the region pulling sort of a page from the US foreign policy book and eventually there is no more classical Greece because Athens and Sparta the pillars of classical Greece become useless and ineffective and just one last thing is that I've read a couple articles about how Donald Trump is Alcabides of the 21st century and that's bullshit because Donald Trump sucks and Alcabides rules so thanks and I'll take any questions raise hand person in the center who is the most like Alcabides in the modern world and that's a very difficult question because he is the embodiment it's just I'm not sure nobody the answer is nobody because I don't think anyone could convince a country just to go like let's go get some silver and like launch a foreign like launch an invasion I mean oil George Bush is the modern Alcabides you've heard it here he loved butts there is one more question I think there is one more question what was that Aristotle would be a little bit too young for this but all right cool yes thank you so much for joining us at Nernite this was the first event where we had the like Madonna style mics did that sound okay okay so we love audience feedback so please email us all of the criticism you have because we're eager to make this a better show for you we always close the event on things that you guys should check out for the next month including our show but before our show there's lots of things coming up one of our alumni Karo Plotani who talked about cyborgs is giving a talk in SF she's gonna give a talk like tomorrow with a whole bunch of San Francisco based comedians dorkbot having fun with electricity is turning 100 so that's going to be a big event the bay area open forum on tech won't build it is basically about how google and yahoo have turned down government contracts to build essentially weapons of war so if you want to hear that go do it cocktail robots grand challenge happens at dna lounge it's a great chance to have a cocktail made by a robot we've had the long time winner of this in knee barrier at this event several times the one of the main builders of a knee barrier is now in Chicago so now someone else is going to take the title if you're going to hit one cocktail robot grand challenge ever you might as well hit this one because it's going to be a new person Nernite Sacramento just took last month off if you don't mind traveling all the way to Sacramento you should check them out this month because they have had two months to basically plan an amazing event and of course Nernite San Francisco happens every month we also happen every month last Monday every month please check us out we'll be talking about the key system so potentially better I would say train based public transit than we currently have right now we're going to talk about the deep space network and we will have a talk about yes art and healing so please check us out next month you can get tickets tonight only for five dollars and you can join our email list by texting to that number see you next month