The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality
Richard Panek
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0547577575
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Fascinating . . . One of the most important stories in the history of science.”— Washington Post
In recent years, a handful of scientists has been racing to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only 4 percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, and every star and planet. The rest is completely unknown.
Richard Panek tells the dramatic story of how scientists reached this cosmos-shattering conclusion. In vivid detail, he narrates the quest to find the “dark” matter and an even more bizarre substance called dark energy that make up 96 percent of the universe. This is perhaps the greatest mystery in all of science, and solving it will bring fame, funding, and certainly a Nobel Prize. Based on hundreds of interviews and in-depth, on-site reporting, the book offers an intimate portrait of the bitter rivalries and fruitful collaborations, the eureka moments and blind alleys, that have redefined science and reinvented the universe.
“A lively new account of twentieth-century (plus a little twenty-first-century) cosmology . . . The book is as much about how the science got done as about the science itself.”—Salon
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Numbers." The first number was the Hubble constant. The 45-degree straight line that Hubble plotted for the distances of galaxies and their redshifts—the farther the galaxy, the greater its velocity receding from us—implied a relationship you could quantify. If you knew how distant a galaxy was, then you should be able to know how much faster it would appear to be receding, and vice versa. In the 1930s, Hubble himself estimated that galaxies were receding at a rate that was increasing 500
A sound theory needs to make at least one specific prediction. General relativity made two. One involved an infamous problem of Einstein's era. The orbit of Mercury seemed to be slightly wrong, at least according to Newton's laws. The observable differences between Newton's and Einstein's versions of gravity were negligible—except in circumstances involving the most extreme cases, such as a tiny planet traveling close to a gargantuan star. Newton's equations predicted one path for Mercury's
kind of detection, the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, or CDMS. In order to stabilize the target atoms—germanium, in this case—the detector had to maintain a temperature of .07 of a degree Fahrenheit above absolute zero. And in order to block out cosmic rays and other offending ordinary particles, the detector had to be shielded. Under the leadership of the Center for Particle Astrophysics director Bernard Sadoulet, the CDMS project began life in a shallow site on the Stanford campus, seventy feet