The 4% Universe Quotes

“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,”
― Richard Panek, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

“astronomers had been saying for a generation that dark matter dominated baryonic matter in the universe. Now they were saying that dark matter dominated baryonic matter in the universe.”
― Richard Panek, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

“Those measurements of the Hubble constant on the “wrong” side of 60 that displeased Allan Sandage because they suggested a universe younger than its oldest stars? Problem solved. Those large-scale structures of supercluster filaments that seemed too mature for such a young universe? Problem solved. The universe was “too” young only if you assumed that the expansion rate had been decelerating throughout the history of the universe, or at least holding steady. A car that had been accelerating from 50 to 60 miles per hour and was only now reaching 65 would have needed more time to cover the same stretch of road than a car that had already been cruising at 65 miles per hour or slowing down from 70. If the expansion were decelerating, hitting the brakes, it would have been going faster in the “recent” past, and therefore taking less time to reach the present, than if it had just been constant. But an expansion that was accelerating today, hitting the gas, going faster and faster, would have been going less fast in the recent past, taking more time to reach the present. Thanks to acceleration, the age of the universe seemed to be, roughly, in the range of fifteen billion years, safely in the older-than-its-firstborn, old-enough-to-have-mature-filaments range. But”
― Richard Panek, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

“There are reasons, increasing in number and quality, to believe that the masses of ordinary galaxies may have been underestimated by a factor of 10 or more.”
― Richard Panek, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality