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

by Richard Panek

she tried to update the old clockwork view of the cosmos for the new expanding universe. She reasoned that since the Earth rotated on its axis, and the solar system rotated, and the galaxy rotated, then maybe the universe had an axis too. Maybe the whole universe rotated. The premise seemed reasonable. Her husband, Robert Rubin, a doctoral candidate in physics at Cornell, had shown her a brief, speculative article by George Gamow in the journal Nature, “Rotating Universe?” Then she heard that Kurt Gödel, at Princeton, was working on a theory of a rotating universe. Her approach also seemed reasonable. She gathered data on the 108 galaxies for which astronomers had managed to measure a redshift. Then she separated out the motions that were due to the expansion of the universe—what astronomers call recessional motions. Did the motions that remained—the peculiar motions—exhibit a pattern? She plotted them on a sphere and thought they did. In December 1950, at the age of twenty-two, still half a year shy of getting her master’s degree, Vera Cooper Rubin presented her thesis at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Haverford, Pennsylvania.