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

by Richard Panek

On monday evenings throughout the mid-1980s, the DuPage County Center for Scientific Culture held what would have been the only course in its catalogue, if it had had a catalogue. The classroom was the basement of a split-level suburban home. The student body was sparse: a handful of researchers, postdocs, and graduate students from the University of Chicago or the nearby Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, as well as, often, a distinguished visitor. The students served as the instructors, too. Tuition was five bucks a week, which bought you pizza (or sometimes barbecued “backup” hamburgers, resurrected from the bowels of the freezer), beer, and a turn at the blackboard. The topics varied from week to week, and from moment to moment. The first topic of the evening might be a recently published paper that had gotten it all wrong, whatever “it” was, or a wildly speculative hypothesis that someone wanted to test. From there the evening would follow its own path. The chalk would pass from hand to hand, feverishly, amid shouts of criticism or approval and screams of sudden insight or instant regret, and by the end of the class the participants were vowing to write a response eviscerating the recent paper that had gotten it all wrong, whatever “it” was, or a new paper championing an original theory that, whether one of the participants had arrived at the meeting espousing it or it had arisen over the course of the evening, had already gone through its own peer evisceration. (...