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The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

Richard Panek

3.88 · Rating details · 6,513 ratings · 403 reviews

The epic, behind-the-scenes story of an astounding gap in our scientific knowledge of the cosmos.

In the past few years, a handful of scientists have been in a race to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only 4 percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, our books, and every planet, star, and galaxy. The rest96 percent of the universeis ...more

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Hardcover, 297 pages

Published January 10th 2011 by Houghton Mifflin (first published December 11th 2010)

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Mar 18, 2012 Riku Sayuj rated it really liked it

Shelves: r-r-rs, science-gen

Now this is how an honest-to-goodness popular science book ought to be like. The book basically tracks the same story as A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss and even has Lawrence as a character every now and then. Because I was familiar with the story and its ending, this time around I could concentrate on the telling of the story more than the actual events themselves and I was struck by the high contrast of how Richard Panek handles the material and how Krauss had presented it in his ...more

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Sep 17, 2013 Manny rated it liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: People who want to know how science really works

Shelves: science, history-and-biography

What a very strange book this is, and what a very strange guy Richard Panek seems to be. I know many autistic-spectrum people, and I wonder if he isn't a little autistic. One of the most characteristic things about autistic people is the unevenness in their range of abilities. They are usually extremely good at some things and staggeringly incompetent at others. Panek is definitely a bit in that direction.

Panek sets out to tell us about the most recent chapters in the exciting history of What a very strange book this is, and what a very strange guy Richard Panek seems to be. I know many autistic-spectrum people, and I wonder if he isn't a little autistic. One of the most characteristic things about autistic people is the unevenness in their range of abilities. They are usually extremely good at some things and staggeringly incompetent at others. Panek is definitely a bit in that direction.

Panek sets out to tell us about the most recent chapters in the exciting history of cosmology, the discovery of dark matter and dark energy. As everyone now knows, most of the universe is invisible. The 4% in the title is the part we can see: planets, stars, nebulae, things like that. Then there's about another 25% which is dark matter - we can't see it, but we can quite easily see the gravitational effects it causes - and the rest is dark energy, the evidence for which is considerably more indirect. The greater part of the book is about the discovery of dark energy during the 90s. Its presence is detectable by the fact that it acts to stretch the universe apart over time (you sometimes see it called "anti-gravity"), and finding proof that the stretching existed was very difficult. It involved accurately measuring the distances to galaxies which are many billions of light years away, obviously a challenging thing to do.

But scientists can be ingenious when there is a good reason for displaying ingenuity. The brightest things there are (simplifying a little) are the huge stellar explosions called supernovae, and it turns out that a certain type of supernova has predictable enough behavior that it can be used to carry out the accurate measurements that were needed. A supernova is so bright that you're able to see it more or less literally from the other end of the universe, and because their behavior is well understood you can also figure out from careful examination of the rate of change of intensity what their true brightness is. Comparing the true and apparent brightness gives you their distance. But the details are complicated.

So why are Panek and the book strange? Well, let me start with the good news. He is an incredibly dogged and hardworking journalist. He seems to have talked with virtually everyone who was involved in the story, he has read their papers, he has looked at their emails and PowerPoint slides, and he is certainly able to present you with some rather striking details. Where Vera Rubin was standing when she received a critical phone call; Alan Sandage's loss of his sense of balance causing him problems on the high telescope platform towards the end of his career; how the cosmology community reacted when they heard that David Schramm's private plane had crashed. He's got all the gossip, and, given that the discovery of dark energy was an acrimonious race between two teams, there's plenty to write about. On all of this, I can't fault him. He's booked you a ringside seat, and you can see the drops of blood flying every time someone lands a solid punch.

Now for the middling news. Panek, alas, is not a particularly gifted writer. His prose is cliché-ridden and pedestrian. He is not good at sketching character. There are a bewildering number of people in the story, and it's frequently impossible to tell them apart. A lot of the time, you just have to remember that X is the person who's responsible for Y on the blue team, and Z is the person responsible for W on the red team. Luckily, a few people are such appalling assholes that their personalities shine through. (I hasten to add that there are also some truly admirable characters; the one I liked best was Vera Rubin). But they're the exceptions.

And finally for the bad. Oddly enough, for someone who's an award-winning science journalist, Panek seems to be rather sketchy on science. There are some remarkable bloopers. He says that the Casimir effect integrally involves gravity. He tells us that the hypothetical neutralino (important to dark matter theorists) is the supersymmetric partner of the neutrino. Most astonishingly of all, he misquotes Kepler's Third Law - something your average scientist learns in their early teens - and even gives some incorrect examples of how to apply it. So, unfortunately, when he's explaining something I don't already know, I'm never sure whether to trust him. I doubt I've spotted all the glitches.

To summarize, then, a mixed bag. But despite the weaknesses, I give him a clear thumbs-up. He's got an incredible story to tell you about how science actually gets done.
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Jun 17, 2012 Trevor rated it it was ok

Shelves: science

This was another book that ended up being sold on false advertising. Now, you might be forgiven for thinking a book called the 4% universe is going to be about, well, cosmology or something crazy like that. This was mostly about the infighting between groups of cosmologists and as such it goes to prove that a physics degree is no protection from being a wanker. The cosmology, far too often, comes second.

That a tedious obsession with being first and beating the other guy is as bad for science as This was another book that ended up being sold on false advertising. Now, you might be forgiven for thinking a book called the 4% universe is going to be about, well, cosmology or something crazy like that. This was mostly about the infighting between groups of cosmologists and as such it goes to prove that a physics degree is no protection from being a wanker. The cosmology, far too often, comes second.

That a tedious obsession with ‘being first’ and ‘beating the other guy’ is as bad for science as it is for, well, everything else in the world should hardly come as too much of a surprise. That it makes for tedious reading too should also hardly come as a surprise.

The best bits of this book where the bits where he discussed the cosmology, he is actually very good at this and incredibly clear. Now, it might just be that I find the sort of business school stuff so boring that I’ve exaggerated how much of this book seemed to be devoted to that rather than the science, but I don’t think I have, to be honest. When the science is so infinitely interesting the idea you might spend any time at all talking about the all too human nonsense and fluff about whose name should go on which discovery or all of the back-biting and funding applications and whose name goes first on a paper – my eyes just glaze over, I’m sorry, but then, I have spent a lifetime in similar meetings wishing for sudden and painful deaths – either mine (sudden) or someone else’s (painful) – so this generally isn’t how I like to spend my recreation.

My favourite paradox which was explained in this book is the horizon problem. You look south into the night sky as far as you can see, then you look north into the night sky as far as you can and the universe is at exactly the same temperature and looks exactly the same – but the light that reaches you has taken the life of the universe to have travelled to you and the two distant and opposite parts of the universe have not had time to be in any contact with each other – so, how did they get to be quite so ‘the same’? This is explained by inflation – and the idea of inflation is explained beautifully in this book.

What is also really interesting is how recent most of these discoveries are – as he points out, a young man getting shot in WW1 knew nearly as little about the universe as someone looking out from his cave 300,000 years before. Not quite true, obviously, but then given dark energy only became accepted in about 2006 the shocking recentness of this all is quite something. The idea there dark matter must be other than actual matter is something I hadn’t quite realised previously either – that so much more of the universe needs to be something other than the stuff we see and eat and love and dream about, well, that’s a tad disturbing.

A lot of this is written with a bad attitude, not quite Phillip Marlow, but heading down that path – again, it is a book with too much fluff so as to provide atmosphere and it really could have done without that as (and, again, it might just be me) but surely people would read pick up this book for the science, rather than the fluff. All the same, there is my favourite Australian expression included (when something is obvious it is said to ‘stick out like dog’s balls’) – and it is an expression that needs further publicity. But this really could have done with someone attacking it with a red pen reading it before publication. Or it could have been subtitled, ‘all is vanity’. Some warning would have been nice – as I had thought I was going to read a book on science.

(A better review of this book – and more forgiving of the fascination with the personal stories involved - is here http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...)
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Jan 31, 2020 Lindsay rated it it was amazing

Shelves: science

This is a superb look at the one of the principle mysteries of modern science: that the observable universe is dominated by matter we can't directly see (dark matter) and a bizarre unexplained force that drives the expansion of the universe (dark energy).

The book is broken down into three main parts, the first part looking at the origins of the science of cosmology and discoveries around the existence of other galaxies, the expansion of the universe and the cosmic background radiation. The ...more

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Jun 18, 2014 Becky rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2015, audiobook, yay-science, non-fiction, reviewed

I've been on something of a science kick lately. This is my third science-based audiobook this year, and it's only early April. I've enjoyed them all, even if I can't say that I understood everything in them. This book, though, felt like a desert triathlon compared to the other two leisurely strolls in the park. This book was exhausting. But I say that in the best way possible. I think.

First, let me just say that this book is seriously fascinating. I love astronomy and cosmology, so I'm I've been on something of a science kick lately. This is my third science-based audiobook this year, and it's only early April. I've enjoyed them all, even if I can't say that I understood everything in them. This book, though, felt like a desert triathlon compared to the other two leisurely strolls in the park. This book was exhausting. But I say that in the best way possible. I think.

First, let me just say that this book is seriously fascinating. I love astronomy and cosmology, so I'm fascinated with books and shows about what exists beyond our planet, as well as how it came to be. So books like this one are always going to strike my fancy. I just like to learn about what there is!

And this book definitely provided information about the cosmos, for sure. It's well researched and so very, very, very, very detailed. I don't know if all the details are accurate, because I think I only really understood 4% of this book (the real meaning of the title!), but that was not for lack of trying on Panek's part. Not only was this a science book about dark matter and dark energy and the universe's creation and make-up, but it's a history of the science along the way, as well as more than a little bit of the drama involved in the competitive arena of science.

And keeping all of these things straight in my head was exhausting. There were a ton of people involved, a whopping shit-ton of science and physics and astronomy and math and math and math for days, all of which was more than enough to make my brain cramp up, but then there was a whole lot of the bitchfighting between teams and specialties because everyone wanted to be first. Which I get, I do. Everyone wants their name marked down in the logs for posterity... but a little professionalism would be nice, gentlemen.

This is definitely a good read, but so technical that it was a bit overwhelming at times, especially in audio format, so I think I'd like to re-read this one day and maybe snag some additional understanding from the air above my head. Still, I can't blame the book for my lack of knowledge; that's a shortcoming on my part, because I lack even a single doctorate degree. Some of the INTERNS in this book were on their 3rd or 4th doctorate, so right away I knew that this was going to be over my head. I still really enjoyed the 4% I could understand though... so 4 stars. ...more

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Jan 30, 2011 David rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: astronomy, physics

This is really an enjoyable, easy-to-read book on the recent history of cosmology. Read this book and you will understand the big questions in cosmology--there are no answers yet. I especially appreciate the descriptions of recent advances in astronomical observation techniques, and the telescopes (optical and radio) that are used. I thought that a bit too much of the book is devoted to the competition to find and measure supernovae, and the squabbles that ensued.

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Oct 25, 2012 Eric Rasmussen rated it it was ok

I have a lot of respect for this book, but after reading it (and rereading large portions of it), I was unable to retain anything from it. First, it is primarily the story of the scientists behind the recent advances in cosmology and the search for dark matter and energy, and without the benefit of any character development, I was unable to keep anyone straight. I could not recount any of the story of discovery, the teams involved, or the people that won the awards, as there is not much ...more

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Jun 29, 2016 Zanna rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: stem

This book has been hanging around on my shelf for a while, and I finally picked it up after having an amusing conversation about spherical cows which reminded me that I should really re-read The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics

Let there be dark. Let there be doubt

I have chosen this quote because it links contemporary cosmology with my current favourite book, The Left Hand of Darkness in which my favourite character prays at night praise This book has been hanging around on my shelf for a while, and I finally picked it up after having an amusing conversation about spherical cows which reminded me that I should really re-read The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics

Let there be dark. Let there be doubt

I have chosen this quote because it links contemporary cosmology with my current favourite book, The Left Hand of Darkness in which my favourite character ‘prays’ at night “praise now darkness and creation unfinished”. Indeed, let there be dark, doubt, and creation unfinished, futures unknowable because the timing of any particular interaction can by no means be predicted. Let there be deep knowledge and stirring mystery.

It’s me, not the author, but I was pretty disappointed with this book. The resonance of the glorious physics therein was muffled for me by three factors:

The absence of diagrams – even though there are innumerable references to graphs, curves on graphs, points on graphs, crucial data from images and so on. Please, SHOW ME THE DATA. I can’t think of any excuse for this

The absence of equations, although there are many references to equations. I understand that many people are put off by the sight of equations in a book, but if the aim is to write something that appeals to and can be understood by a wide audience, then it would be better to include at least the simpler equations and thoroughly explain them, or to at the very least put them in an appendix so those who would like to see them can have a look.

The excessive focus on the soap-opera of rivalry between teams of physicists and astronomers (who coalesce into cosmologists by the end of the story, perhaps?). This bored the hell out of me. I couldn’t care less who came up with a theory first or found the most supernovae. This stuff just gets in the way here. It’s not that I want a textbook - Leonard Susskind does a perfect job of dramatising the oppositing between himself and Stephen Hawking in The Black Hole War ,and I think it’s essential to have texts that reveal and remind that science is a human activity and has a sociology that affects what it produces. But I want more physics, less jockeying.

At times, the tone is comically overexcited which might be considered a noble effort to enliven the material:

On this occasion, however, Alan Guth received a midnight visit from the Muse of Maths. The next morning he bicycled to his office at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (in the process establishing a new personal best of nine minutes and thirty-two seconds) and immediately sat down at his desk to summarize his long night’s work

“SPECTACULAR REALIZATION” he wrote near the top of a fresh page, and then he did something he’d never done before with a notebook entry. He drew two boxes around it.

I did stash away a couple of gems from Vera Rubin’s biography for feminist history:

When an admissions officer at Swarthmore College told her that because astronomy was her profession of choice and painting was one of her favourite hobbies, she might want to consider a career as a painter of astronomical scenes, she laughed and applied to rival Vasser. When she got a scholarship to Vasser and a teacher told her, “As long as you stay away from science, you should do OK,” she shrugged and pursued a degree in astronomy (with a heavy load of philosophy of science on the side). When a Cornell professor told her that because she had a one-month-old son he would have to take her place at the Haverford AAS meeting and present her paper in his own name, she said, “Oh, I can go,” and, nursing newborn and all, she went.

:)

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Jan 12, 2013 Steve rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: popular-science, organizations, nonfiction

This is a deeply frustrating book to read because Panek took no time to craft an overall meta-analysis to tie together all of the elements of his story. This is a subtle point and I will try to briefly explain what I mean below. I am all the more frustrated because the story of dark matter and dark energy, however the scientific understanding plays out in the future, is absolutely fascinating. But upon reflection, I have to issue what is perhaps the most damning verdict that can be passed on a This is a deeply frustrating book to read because Panek took no time to craft an overall meta-analysis to tie together all of the elements of his story. This is a subtle point and I will try to briefly explain what I mean below. I am all the more frustrated because the story of dark matter and dark energy, however the scientific understanding plays out in the future, is absolutely fascinating. But upon reflection, I have to issue what is perhaps the most damning verdict that can be passed on a book: after reading The 4% Universe, I could not tell a friend how the story of dark matter/dark energy hangs together. I will return to the “hang together” notion presently.

Just to make clear, while I am a layman in physics, I am a doctoral student in sociology with an interest in science and technology studies and organizations. That makes me a professional writer and I may be somewhat more sensitive to the weaknesses of Panek’s argument as a result.

When I say that Panek’s story does not “hang together”, I mean to say that the events that Panek presents come forth from the prose in a breathless way and there is a rush from event to event without anywhere near enough discussion of how to understand the event in question and how it relates to other events. (For an example of this sort of analysis in physics, I would refer you at the very least to Brian Greene’s work. In engineering, Henry Petroski does a very nice job of providing analysis.) What this means is that I don’t have an overall sense of the story. When taking on a task like this, namely presenting a complicated argument in physics and cosmology to a lay audience, the writer must be an experienced and solicitous dance partner and have in mind both the overall pattern and structure of the dance as well as to be able to “cue” the reader/dance partner as to what is coming next.

Panek on the whole falls down on the “cue” part and as a result, I have no intellectual structure to tie the material in the book together in my head. In fact, the book reads like a long newspaper article rather than a book, and that is not a good thing. In a newspaper article, the lack of length is both a detriment and an advantage. The brevity of the format means the writer cannot supply much information but that same feature means that the article does not need the same type of narrative structure that holds a book together. The reader can be expected to fill in the missing structure and in any case because an article is short, the reader can re-read it a second or third time without too much of a time penalty.

The same does not hold true of a book. A reader cannot be expected to read a book two or three times in one sitting. Consequently, the book author must take pains to supply an overall narrative structure – like a dance – and to supply cues to the reader to enable the reader to know what is coming next as well as to how it ties in with what has been said before. If this is not done, then the result is a chaos of information without structure. That is how I felt with respect to 4% Universe. Just as a measure of how much this book challenged me, in my time with social theory, I have read a fair amount of Marxism, a discipline (in)famous for the turgidity of its prose, and I have to say that Panek – for different reasons – was about as challenging.

There is much information that is useful in this book and I intend to retain it for two reasons. The first is that as a student of science and technology, there is a huge amount of evidence for how science is a social enterprise as well as being a search for the truth. But second, I keep it as a warning and a lesson for how not to write and for why a good narrative structure is absolutely essential in long-format writing. If you, the reader of this review, are looking for a general book that will educate you on dark matter/dark energy, then I would advise you to look elsewhere.
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Mar 12, 2017 John rated it liked it

This is an attempt to tell the human story behind the discoveries that led to our modern conception of the universe being made up mostly of dark energy, plus about 25% dark matter, and finally about 4% in the form of the matter and energy that we can directly detect, including ourselves. In addition, Panek goes some distance toward explaining in simple terms some pretty abstruse cosmological concepts.

So far, so good. I read the book for relaxation as much as anything else, and at that level I ...more

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Dec 01, 2010 Paul Preuss rated it it was amazing

Shelves: hard-science

For 20 years or so after the first Star Wars movie came out, most people who mentioned "dark" and "universe" in the same breath were talking about Darth Vader and the Dark Side. Doubtless some of the movie's fans were also astronomy fans who'd heard about the evidence for real dark matter -- not what it is (nobody yet knows what it is) but what it does, flattening galaxies, speeding up their rotation, and invisibly sculpting the structure of the visible night sky. Yet the import of that ...more

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Dec 05, 2011 Todd Martin rated it it was ok

Shelves: environment-science, history

The 4-Percent Universe The 4-Percent Universe begins with the story of the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964 by Bell Labs employees in Holmdel, New Jersey. This isnt what I was expecting, but often science books set the stage with a little history as a prelude to the science. The next chapter? ... More history.

Unfortunately, and contrary to all expectations (I was expecting a science book), the entirety of the book is dedicated to a description of the people who made ...more

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Nov 10, 2011 Ilsa Bick rated it liked it

This year, the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics went to three men--Saul Permutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess--for their discovery of what 96% of the universe is composed of: dark matter and the much more elusive, dark energy. Does anyone really know what these things/entities are? No, but they do make up the majority of the cosmos and dark energy appears to be responsible for the fact that our universe is neither static (as Einstein thought) nor are its boundaries beginning to collapse (as might ...more

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May 30, 2012 aPriL does feral sometimes rated it really liked it

Shelves: science, non-fiction

A very readable history of the discovery of dark matter and dark energy, including brief biographies of the scientists involved. Particularly, it illuminates how the pressures of being a human being afflict those who are gifted intellectually and pursue astronomy and physics just as much as us more ordinary types who can't balance our checkbooks and can only recognize the Great Dipper constellation.

By the last chapter in the book, this will make sense to you: "In early 2010, the WMAP seven-year ...more

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Apr 03, 2012 Glee rated it it was ok

A funny thing happened to me on the way to.... seriously, this book was given high marks by two friends. I tried listening to it, and abandoned the effort after 3 (out of 9) discs. A lot of the time, I could follow but then had no idea what it was that I had just heard. And sometimes I couldn't follow at all. And occaisionally (but not frequently enough), I understood it perfectly. So not a great experience.

However, (back to the "a funny thing....") over the next couple of weeks I kept hearing ...more

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Apr 11, 2011 Sam Webster rated it it was ok

I don't consider the two star review a qualitative measure of "4 Percent Universe", so much as an indication that it failed to deliver what I expected. It is exceptional as a series of biographies of the scientists involved in the search for dark matter, dark energy, and supernovae; it is passable as a layman's course on modern cosmology and the techniques that are being employed; but it falls far short of being a useful study on dark matter and dark energy themselves. These concepts don't even ...more

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Jul 17, 2012 Arvind Balasundaram rated it did not like it

This book was a disappointment. While it begins with a flourish, and introduces the reader to the notion of dark matter and energy, it quickly digresses into a manual of academic politics between rival labs. It would have been better to stay with the development of the so-called "missing" mass in the universe, or inferences from redshift/blueshift observations of the dynamic universe. The key word in the title of this volume is "the race to discover" rather than the discovery itself. This book ...more

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Feb 08, 2011 Gendou rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction, physics, cosmology

This book focuses on the history of the discovery of dark energy and dark matter.
It provides a sufficient if not dry survey of historical astronomy in the first half.
The second half goes into some of the yummy meaty details of the arguments for these two dark mysteries.
Though, the last chapter of the book digresses into a history of ugly bickering over who discovered dark energy.
Richard Panek obviously has a bone to pick, and it's a disgusting waste of the reader's time.
My advice is to just skip ...more

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Aug 14, 2016 Charlene rated it it was amazing

Shelves: chaos-complexity-emergence, physics

Best history on Vera Ruben that I have read to date. That alone made this a 5 star book.

This elementary introduction to the discovery of dark matter is easy to understand, well written, provides a really nice history and would serve as the perfect book to read in preparation for more difficult books on the subject (e.g. Cosmic Cocktail, A Perfect Theory, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, Gravity's Engines, Warped Passages, Particle at the Edge of the Universe, The Infinity Puzzle, etc).

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Feb 12, 2017 Kathy rated it it was amazing

A remarkable book, allowing the uninitiated into easy comprehension of developments over time that led to current beliefs about the universe. It is almost like reading an action novel as a variety of worker bees announce new discoveries, competing against each other and against time. I have tried and failed to read about quantum theories, getting easily lost. This book manages to take us live into the action and dialogue over the years as theorists, astronomers, cosmologists present papers and A remarkable book, allowing the uninitiated into easy comprehension of developments over time that led to current beliefs about the universe. It is almost like reading an action novel as a variety of worker bees announce new discoveries, competing against each other and against time. I have tried and failed to read about quantum theories, getting easily lost. This book manages to take us live into the action and dialogue over the years as theorists, astronomers, cosmologists present papers and schedule telescope time in the search for proof.
Clips: "they could take some comfort from the possibility that they were the first persons in the history of the world to understand the history of the universe." and "That remnant energy--assuming it existed; assuming the Big Bang theory was right--would be measurable. And now, apparently, Penzias and Wilson had measured it. Their antenna was picking up an echo, all right, but this time the source wasn't a radio broadcast from the West Coast. It was the birth of the universe."
"Both the Steady State and Big Bang interpretations had relied not just on math and observation but on speculation. They were modern counterparts to Copernicus's attempt to save the appearances; they were theories in need of evidence. And just as Galileo, with the aid of the telescope, had detected the celestial phenomena that decided between an Earth-centered and a Sun-centered cosmos, forcing us to reconceive the universe, so radio astronomers, with the aid of a new kind of telescope, were now detecting the evidence that decided between the Steady State and Big Bang cosmologies, necessitating a further reconception of the universe."
"...the universe (yet again) wasn't what it appeared to be. It wasn't static. It was expanding, and that expansion was outracing the effects of gravity --for now, anyway."
"Any changes in the universe's rate of expansion wouldn't be discernible unless astronomers could find standard candles in galaxies significantly farther than Hubble's sample, the deeper the better. How much those supernovae--and therefore their host galaxies--deviated from the straight-line Hubble diagram would tell astronomers the rate of deceleration....Pennypacker and Perlmutter now knew they could do an automated supernova search; they had added two more supernovae in 1986 and another in 1987."
"But back in Berkeley, the overnight delivery of data was becoming routine. After all, in a universe full of billions of galaxies, stars were exploding all the time. Supernovae were out there by the thousands, by the millions, every night, waiting to be harvested...Somewhere in the universe, a civilization died. In Berkeley, they yawned."
"In 1988, the National Science Foundation awarded the University of California, Berkeley, six million dollars over five years to establish the Center for Particle Astrophysics. The center would take multiple approaches to the mystery of dark matter."
"...the autumn of 1997, the two teams had enough data to try to find at least a preliminary answer to how much the rate of expansion of the universe was slowing down, and therefore whether the universe was heading toward a Big Crunch or a Big Chill."
"They looked at the error bars and figured that the matter, dark or otherwise, was maybe 20 or 30 or 40 percent. Which left 60 or 70 or 80 percent...something else. As for the fate of the universe: They had their answer. Maybe even the answer--one they could quantify: It would expand forever. What they didn't have--between the dark matter they couldn't see and this new force they couldn't imagine--was any idea what the universe was."
"Theorists are always saying something. That's their job. They don't need to believe what they're saying. The theorist's goal isn't to be right but to be reasonable--to make an internally consistent argument that observers can then go out and reinforce or disprove."
...more

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Nov 28, 2011 Marjorie Thelen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: theoretical-physics

This spring I read the non-fiction book by Rickard Panek with the alternative title, Dark matter, dark energy and the race to discover the rest of reality. Pretty big title and the mystery still is what the rest of reality is. But he did cover the race to discover it between a group of physicists and astronomers which in the process birthed the science of cosmology. Read the epilogue first. In there on page 242 Panek says, In early 2010 . . . the results arrived bearing the latest refinements of ...more

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Jun 30, 2011 Carrie rated it really liked it

This is now the third or fourth book I've read on the modern history of cosmology, particle physics, etc. I keep hoping that if I read enough of them, I'll eventually catch on. Some I learned in the book (which I dearly hope are reasonably accurate, even if garbled in writing):

* Only 4% of the universe is actually observable. The rest is dark matter and dark energy.

* I had heard before that there wasn't enough observed matter in the universe to keep it from imploding (exploding?), but I hadn't ...more

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May 15, 2011 Linda Robinson rated it liked it

Science written by a science writer who gets the facts all right; the universe is vast and galaxies are many, but the breathlessness and wonder of the decades-long sprint are missing. Facts are dry, although when 96% of the universe is stuff we cannot see and know nothing about, facts are sparse in the sky. I expected more juice from a title that includes "race" in it. That's my issue. The book is good reportage. I was looking for the brilliant light shed by Carl Sagan's awestruck "billions and ...more

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Feb 08, 2011 Bookmarks Magazine rated it liked it

Shelves: mar-apr-2011

Exploring "one of the most important stories in the history of science" (Washington Post), Panek nimbly outlines recent findings in physics, astronomy, and cosmology and evaluates rival theories in clear, comprehensible language. He also dives into the bureaucratic morass and professional enmities of contemporary research, examining how these discoveries were made as well as who made them. While some critics appreciated this behind-the-scenes human drama as a tool for understanding the full ...more

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Jan 15, 2012 David rated it really liked it

This is an interesting look at modern cosmology, and the perplexing fact that scientists can only account for about 4% of the universe's matter. Another 21% or so is "dark matter", so far rather poorly understood, and fully 75% is "dark energy", that strange characteristic of the universe that is causing it to expand at an accelerating rate. Panek also describes the "cosmological constant" paradox, namely the fact that the energy density of the universe is 120 orders of magnitude lower than the ...more

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Jun 15, 2011 Dan rated it did not like it

Hard to know who the audience for this book is supposed to be. Insufficient explanation of the science means most non-specialists will only be able to follow the history of cosmology as it is developed in the book in the most trivial way. While at the same time the thumbnail character sketches of the working scientists are too short and too bland to provide much of additional interest. Panek is also a surprisingly boring stylist.

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Sep 29, 2011 Julie James rated it liked it

I just finished this, and I realize now that he wrote this to describe (as the title clearly indicates) the "race" more than to describe the science. I read the whole book without realizing this and feeling disappointed the whole time that he didn't get more deeply into the science! (Duh.) Now, I realize that he accomplished exactly what the title suggests... and I'll go looking for another new book on particle physics or dark energy or...

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Jun 13, 2019 Ashlee Bree rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, science

This read more like a biography of the scientists behind cosmological discovery than it did about dark matter and dark energy as universal concepts/theories in general, but I think what I found to be most interesting is how so-called 'simple answers' about the universe have proven themselves to be winding, circuitous, and at times, downright contradictory. Where lambda was concerned, for instance, also known as the cosmological constant, there was so much uncertainty about whether it should hold ...more

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Oct 09, 2018 Richard Thompson rated it it was ok

Shelves: physics

I think that I am going to have to stop reading popular science books by journalists. I like to read science books to learn about science, but I didn't get that here. Most of the science was a rehash of what I already knew, and I don't know much about dark matter and dark energy. The lives of the scientists can be interesting, and some scientists are fascinating characters. Certainly Einstein and Feynman were unique people, and I have been interested in the lives of Hawking, Heisenberg, Dirac, ...more

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Feb 04, 2012 Chris rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction-science

"The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move."

(Tips hat to Douglas Adams.) Ok, not quite. But the universe has made a lot of people very puzzled and been widely regarding is a mind-boggling mystery. The scientific hunt to find the solution to this mystery is the focus of Richard Panek's book.

In the mid-20th century, humanity (not for the first time) thought it understood the universe. Though there ...more

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About Richard Panek

Richard Panek

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Richard Panek, a Guggenheim Fellow in science writing, is the author of The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which won the American Institute of Physics communication award in 2012, and the co-author with Temple Grandin of The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, a New York Times bestseller. He lives in New York City.

Books by Richard Panek

The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes

The Trouble with Gravity: Solving the Mystery Beneath Our Feet

Seeing and Believing: How the Telescope Opened Our Eyes and Minds to the Heavens

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum

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“forever: 23 percent something mysterious that they call dark matter, 73 percent something even more mysterious that they call dark energy. Which leaves only 4 percent the stuff of us. As one theorist likes to say at public lectures, “We’re just a bit of pollution.” Get rid of us and of everything else we’ve ever thought of as the universe, and very little would change. “We’re completely irrelevant,” — 3 likes

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