Dark Matter

It is said that, in order to succeed in life, one must have not only cognitive intelligence (ie the capacity to understand what is happening around), but also social intelligence (ie the capacity to understand what the other people are expecting) and also emotional intelligence (ie the ability to postpone satisfactions). It seems that the last two abilities lacked Li Xing and the result was that, instead of becoming a great scientist, he became a suicidal killer.

Taking a real story (University of Iowa shooting case) as its starting point, “Dark Matter” reveals us how tough the fight of vanities can be into the world of contemporary science. When the coordinator of the cosmology research program (Professor Jacob Reisler) refuses to recognize the scientific merits of the Chinese young student and to support the continuation of his academic work, their scientific dispute turns gradually into a deaf encounter between the oversized ego of the established scientific authority and the ambition of the enthusiast but, unfortunately, impatient young man. And the result of this confrontation is, finally, a tragic one.

The main core of this confrontation is related to the "dark matter", that potential unseen component of the Universe, that Liu Xing hopes to highlight by using mathematical calculations. According to his theory, the Universe is eternal ("God and the Universe are the same thing"), without beginning or end, but this perspective is contrary to the "Reisler model”, according to which the Universe begins with the primordial Big Bang. Nevertheless, according to the view of Liu Xing, the model of his coordinator does not explain the empty spaces which can be observed with the telescope. At this point, the student’s theory comes to state that those spaces are not empty at all, but full of dark matter acting on and modelling the usual matter through gravity.

All in all, "Dark Matter" is a worth seeing film, both due to the scientific issue that is highlighted but also due to the provided insight regarding the functioning of the scientific research within the American academic system, as the film reveals its formal and informal mechanisms and the relationships that are established between the senior scientists and the young aspirants to this status.