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I study tiny bits of matter that are all around us but that we can not see, which we call dark matter. We know dark matter is out there because it changes the way other big far away things move, such as stars, and star groups. We want to understand what dark matter is made of because it could tell us about where everything around us came from and what will happen next.

To study dark matter, people like me use big things that have taken lots of money, thought and people to build. Some of those things fly way above us. Some are deep inside the ground. Some are large rings that make tiny pieces of normal matter kiss each other as they fly around very, very fast – almost as fast as light. We hope that we can hear the whisper of dark matter if we listen very carefully.
We take all the whispers from all the listening things and we put them together in our computers. We use big computers to do this, as there are lots and lots of tiny whispers we need to look at.

I go to places all over the world to talk to other people like me, as together we can think better and work faster. Together, perhaps we can even find new, better ways to listen to dark matter. Most of them are good people, and after we talked we go out and have a drink and talk some more.

If the above sounds a little weird, it’s because I’ve written it using only the most common 1000 words in English. In fact, I’ve just written a book that explains the entire All-There-Is (ooops, I meant the Universe!) using only those 1000 words.