Dr Jaco de Swart

Jaco de Swart is a historian and anthropologist of physics, and currently Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge's Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Institute of Astronomy. He trained in theoretical physics (MSc) and philosophy (MA), and obtained his PhD in history of science at the University of Amsterdam's Institute of Physics.

He previously was American Institute of Physics Helleman Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT's Program in STS and Department of Physics, and a postdoc at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research with Annemarie Mol. He has held visiting positions at Princeton University, the Institute of Advanced Studies, and UC Santa Cruz.

Research interests

At the heart of de Swart's research is the desire to engage with open problems in physics by studying its history and practices. His work focuses on the search for dark matter – one of the central problems in physics and astronomy. In his historical research, he traces the conceptual and material conditions under which the dark matter problem struck root between the 1960s and 1980s, showing how this invisible object reshaped what it meant to do a science of the universe. He is currently finishing his book manuscript with MIT Press.

In his anthropological work, de Swart investigates how, after four decades of null-results, dark matter researchers are running into intellectual, experimental, and environmental limits. To find hints of elusive dark matter particles, physicists crucially depend on keeping out environmental interferences out of their experiments. Yet, these experiments also necessarily interfere with their surroundings. His Marie Curie project is aimed at unpacking these entangled parts of the quest for dark matter.

De Swart also works as a science communicator. He and his work have appeared in many popular media outlets in the Netherlands, including Dutch national radio and television shows (Beau, Studio MAX, Radio 1), various Dutch newspapers (Volkskrant, NRC, Parool), and multiple podcasts and video lectures (Universiteit van Nederland, Verrukkelijke Wetenschap). Recently, he was featured in the NOVA PBS documentary Decoding the Universe: Cosmos.

De Swart is a first generation student and scholar from rural Netherlands.

Key publications

de Swart, J., & Mol, A. (2025). Cleaning a dark matter detector: A case of ontological and normative elusiveness. Social Studies of Science, 0(0).

Argüelles, C, et al. [including de Swart, J.] (TAMBO Collaboration) (2025). TAMBO: A Deep-Valley Neutrino Observatory. arXiv e-Print: 2507.08070.

de Swart, J. (2024). Five decades of missing matter. Physics Today, 77 (8): 34–43.

de Swart, J., Thresher, A.C. & Argüelles, C.A. (2024) The humanities can help make physics greener. Nature Review Physics 6, 404–405.

de Swart, J. (2020). Closing in on the Cosmos: Cosmology's Rebirth and the Rise of the Dark Matter Problem. In A. Blum, R. Lalli, & J. Renn (Eds.), The Renaissance of General Relativity in Context. Einstein Studies, vol 16 (pp. 257–284). Birkhäuser, Cham.

de Swart, J. (2019). Deciphering dark matter: the remarkable life of Fritz Zwicky. Nature 573, 32–33.

de Swart, J. G., Bertone, G., & van Dongen, J. (2017). How dark matter came to matter. Nature Astronomy, 1(3), 0059.