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

by Richard Panek

Hamuy examined it and told Riess he thought it was, as scientists say by way of praise, “robust.” Riess, however, said he had a problem. So far he hadn’t been able to test the LCS method on real data. Could he see Hamuy’s? Hamuy hesitated. Your data was your data. Until you published it, it was yours and yours alone. But Riess was persistent, and Hamuy was a guest (at Harvard, of Bob Kirshner), and he relented. Hamuy agreed to show Riess his first thirteen light curves, though not before exacting a promise: Riess could use them only to test his technique, not as part of a paper about the technique. A few weeks later, Hamuy got an e-mail from Riess. The technique was working. Riess was excited. Could he publish the results after all? That, Hamuy reminded Riess, wasn’t part of the deal. But again he relented, though not before exacting another promise: that Riess wouldn’t publish his paper using Hamuy’s data before Hamuy published his own paper on the thirteen supernovae. Riess would have to wait until Hamuy’s paper had cleared the referee stage at the Astronomical Journal. When it did, in early September 1994, Hamuy let Harvard—meaning Riess and Kirshner, as well as William Press, who provided mathematical guidance—know that they were free to submit their own paper. They did. But they submitted it to Astrophysical Journal Letters, a publication that, as its name suggests, traffics in shorter papers—and, therefore, briefer lead times. Hamuy had to work hard to convince the A...