Overview

""Fascinating . . . One of the most important stories in the history of science.""-- Washington Post In recent years, a handful of scientists has been racing to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only 4 percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, and every star and planet. The rest is completely unknown. Richard Panek tells the dramatic story of how scientists reached this cosmos-shattering conclusion. In vivid detail, he narrates the quest to find the ""dark"" matter and an even more bizarre substance called dark energy that make up 96 percent of the universe. This is perhaps the greatest mystery in all of science, and solving it will bring fame, funding, and certainly a Nobel Prize. Based on hundreds of interviews and in-depth, on-site reporting, the book offers an intimate portrait of the bitter rivalries and fruitful collaborations, the eureka moments and blind alleys, that have redefined science and reinvented the universe. ""A lively new account of twentieth-century (plus a little twenty-first-century) cosmology . . . The book is as much about how the science got done as about the science itself.""--Salon

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Reviews

The centerpiece of The 4% Universe is a compelling narrative of science at its best... serve[s] handsomely as an illuminating guide to the dark mysteries lying at the heart of the intersection of astronomy and fundamental physics. <br>-- The Wall Street Journal Impeccably researched and highly readable. <br>-- New Scientist <p> A remarkable book and a model for all would-be popular-science writers. <br>-- Physics World Panek's passion for the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy wins the day. He succeeds because he recognizes that he's writing not just about red shifts and supernovae, but about people...the success of The 4 Percent Universe also stems from Panek's wisdom about how science works. <br>-- The Washington Post The balance between lively characters and provocative ideas keeps the book moving as quickly as any high stakes thriller, but the pay-off here is an answer of truly cosmic significance...the universe is keeping secrets from us--big secrets. Dark secrets. Panek's joyful journey through the wilds of modern cosmology gives us good reason to care about those secrets, and their sure-to-be surprising answers. <br>-- Ad Astra, Magazine of National Space Society <br> A superior account of how astronomers discovered that they knew almost nothing about 96 percent of the universe. Science writer Panek ( The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud, and the Search for Hidden Universes, 2005, etc.) points out that 50 years ago astronomers assumed they understood the cosmos and its history from the big bang to galaxy formation to its ultimate fate as expansion continued. One detail remained disturbing: Galaxies were moving too fast. Since gravity controls movements, they had to be heavier than predicted. By the 1980s, this missing mass problem became critical as it became clear that galaxies, including ours, were rotating so fast that missing mass far outweighs visible objects such as stars. Even after eliminating gas and dust, dark matter repr

The centerpiece of The 4% Universe is a compelling narrative of science at its best... serve[s] handsomely as an illuminating guide to the dark mysteries lying at the heart of the intersection of astronomy and fundamental physics. <br>-- The Wall Street Journal Impeccably researched and highly readable. <br>-- New Scientist Panek's passion for the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy wins the day. He succeeds because he recognizes that he's writing not just about red shifts and supernovae, but about people...the success of The 4 Percent Universe also stems from Panek's wisdom about how science works. <br>-- The Washington Post The balance between lively characters and provocative ideas keeps the book moving as quickly as any high stakes thriller, but the pay-off here is an answer of truly cosmic significance...the universe is keeping secrets from us--big secrets. Dark secrets. Panek's joyful journey through the wilds of modern cosmology gives us good reason to care about

The centerpiece of The 4% Universe is a compelling narrative of science at its best... serve[s] handsomely as an illuminating guide to the dark mysteries lying at the heart of the intersection of astronomy and fundamental physics. <br>-- The Wall Street Journal Impeccably researched and highly readable. <br>-- New Scientist <p> A remarkable book and a model for all would-be popular-science writers. <br>-- Physics World Panek's passion for the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy wins the day. He succeeds because he recognizes that he's writing not just about red shifts and supernovae, but about people...the success of The 4 Percent Universe also stems from Panek's wisdom about how science works. <br>-- The Washington Post The balance between lively characters and provocative ideas keeps the book moving as quickly as any high stakes thriller, but the pay-off here is an answer of truly cosmic significance...the universe is keeping secrets from us--big secrets. Dark secrets

Author Information

RICHARD PANEK is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and the author of The Invisible Century and Seeing and Believing. He has frequently written for the New York Times--where The 4-Percent Universe began as an article--as well as Discover, Smithsonian, Esquire, and Outside, among other publications.

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