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

by Richard Panek

In the summer of 1981, during a hike in the Dolomites, Schramm and Leon Lederman, the director of Fermilab, discussed the idea of founding an institute devoted to the scientific intersection that Schramm had been championing for the previous decade: particle physics and cosmology. The idea was somewhat radical; as Turner said, “The two disciplines had little in common, other than indifference for one another.” But NASA (perhaps as a consolation prize for awarding the Space Telescope Science Institute to Johns Hopkins rather than Fermilab) agreed to fund it, and Lederman and Schramm hired Turner and Kolb to run the NASA/Fermilab Astrophysics Center. “The Big Bang,” Schramm often said, quoting Yakov Zel’dovich, a Russian theorist, “is the poor man’s particle accelerator.” Accelerators on Earth could approach the energies of the earliest moments in the universe—the earlier the moment, the higher the energy—but they couldn’t match the earliest, most energetic moments.