Just finished the book by Richard Panek “The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality”  I enjoyed the backstory and history of the search for Dark Matter, Dark Energy.  I learned a lot and the book encouraged me to want to learn more about the topic; what a really good book always does.

Since I will not be able to attend lazy readers this month, I wanted to send this to the group.

The end of the book finishes with the following quote. 

“So: Let there be dark. Let there be doubt, even amid the certainty. Especially amid the certainties—the pieces of evidence that in one generation transformed cosmology from metaphysics to physics, from speculation to science. In early 2010, the WMAP seven-year results arrived bearing the latest refinements of the numbers that define our universe. 

It was 13.75 billion years old. Its Hubble constant was 70.4, and its equation of state (w) -0.98 , or, within the margin of error, -1.0. And it was flat, consisting of 72.8 percent dark energy, 22.7 percent dark matter, and 4.56 percent baryonic matter (the stuff of us)—an exquisitely precise accounting of the depth of our ignorance. How the story would end remained a mystery, for now and possibly forever. The astronomers who set out to write the final chapter in the history of the universe had to content themselves instead with a more modest conclusion: To be continued.”  …

 “I have this three-year-old daughter at home,” Perlmutter said now, sitting in Smoot’s office, “and we’re just at that stage where she’s asking us, ‘Why?’ It’s pretty obvious that she knows it’s a bit of a game. She knows that whatever we say, she can then say, ‘Yes, but— why?’” He laughed. “I have the impression that most people don’t realize that what got physicists into physics usually is not the desire to understand what we already know but the desire to catch the universe in the act of doing really bizarre things. We love the fact that our ordinary intuitions about the world can be fooled, and that the world can just act strangely, and you can just go out and make it good over and over again. ‘Do that again! Do that again!’” Smoot agreed. “They’re always testing the limits. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re babies in the universe, and we’re testing what the limits are.”

If our luck did hold, and another Newton did come along, and the universe turned out once again to be simple in ways we couldn’t have previously imagined , then Saul Perlmutter’s daughter or Vera Rubin’s grandchildren’s grandchildren would not be seeing the same sky that they did, because they would not be thinking of it in the same way. They would see the same stars, and they would marvel at the hundreds of billions of galaxies other than our own. But they would sense the dark, too. And to them that darkness would represent a path toward knowledge— toward the kinds of discoveries that we all once called, with understandable innocence, the light.”

Richard Panek “The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality”

“Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;

God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.”

Alexander Pope Newton's epitaph