A Light Talk on Dark Matter

I gave a semi-popular talk on Dark Matter on Monday afternoon in the department. This talk was organized by Research Scholars Association (RSA), Physics Department and all the research scholars were invited. Although there are more than fifty research scholars in the department, only 15-20 turned up which was however not surprising. There is severe lack of enthusiasm among the people here and some might have been busy with some other important things. Anyway, it was good that not too many people turned up because we could not have the talk in the seminar room (which was booked for a class), but in a small classroom where there were not more than 25 seats. Coming to the main point, the talk I gave was semi popular since people from various working areas were supposed to come and I tried my best to make it as simple as possible. This was my first talk at a popular level and hence was very tough for me. Even after the talk, I was not much satisfied worrying that people might not have got any feeling of such a crucial problem of dark matter in the Universe. My talk went like this: (i) Summary of Standard Cosmology, (ii) Theoretical as well as experimental motivations for Dark Matter, (iii) Role of Dark Matter in the evolution of Large Scale Structure, (iv) Indirect Dark Matter detection experiments and (v) Direct Detection. Most of my slides had diagrams and words only and no equations ;-) Anyway it was a good experience for me to speak at a popular level. I am hopeful of preparing more such talks in future and keep this activity going on.