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

Richard Panek

Hardcover | Pages: 297 pages

Rating: 3.88 | 6251 Users | 390 Reviews

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

Original Title:	The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality
ISBN:	0618982442 (ISBN13: 9780618982448)
Edition Language:	English

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

The epic, behind-the-scenes story of an astounding gap in our scientific knowledge of the cosmos.  

In the past few years, a handful of scientists have been in a race to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only 4 percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, our books, and every planet, star, and galaxy. The rest—96 percent of the universe—is completely unknown.  

Richard Panek tells the dramatic story of how scientists reached this conclusion, and what they’re doing to find this "dark" matter and an even more bizarre substance called dark energy. Based on in-depth, on-site reporting and hundreds of interviews—with everyone from Berkeley’s feisty Saul Perlmutter and Johns Hopkins’s meticulous Adam Riess to the quietly revolutionary Vera Rubin—the book offers an intimate portrait of the bitter rivalries and fruitful collaborations, the eureka moments and blind alleys, that have fueled their search, redefined science, and reinvented the universe.

Be Specific About Containing Books The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

Title	:	The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality
Author	:	Richard Panek
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	Special Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 297 pages
Published	:	January 10th 2011 by Houghton Mifflin (first published December 11th 2010)
Categories	:	Nonfiction. Science. Astronomy. Physics. History. Audiobook. Space

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

Ratings: 3.88 From 6251 Users | 390 Reviews

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

This is really an enjoyable, easy-to-read book on the recent history of cosmology. Read this book and you will understand the big questions in cosmology--there are no answers yet. I especially appreciate the descriptions of recent advances in astronomical observation techniques, and the telescopes (optical and radio) that are used. I thought that a bit too much of the book is devoted to the competition to find and measure supernovae, and the squabbles that ensued.

This book was a disappointment. While it begins with a flourish, and introduces the reader to the notion of dark matter and energy, it quickly digresses into a manual of academic politics between rival labs. It would have been better to stay with the development of the so-called "missing" mass in the universe, or inferences from redshift/blueshift observations of the dynamic universe. The key word in the title of this volume is "the race to discover" rather than the discovery itself. This book

This read more like a biography of the scientists behind cosmological discovery than it did about dark matter and dark energy as universal concepts/theories in general, but I think what I found to be most interesting is how so-called 'simple answers' about the universe have proven themselves to be winding, circuitous, and at times, downright contradictory. Where lambda was concerned, for instance, also known as the cosmological constant, there was so much uncertainty about whether it should hold

This spring I read the non-fiction book by Rickard Panek with the alternative title, Dark matter, dark energy and the race to discover the rest of reality. Pretty big title and the mystery still is what the rest of reality is. But he did cover the race to discover it between a group of physicists and astronomers which in the process birthed the science of cosmology. Read the epilogue first. In there on page 242 Panek says, In early 2010 . . . the results arrived bearing the latest refinements of

For 20 years or so after the first Star Wars movie came out, most people who mentioned "dark" and "universe" in the same breath were talking about Darth Vader and the Dark Side. Doubtless some of the movie's fans were also astronomy fans who'd heard about the evidence for real dark matter -- not what it is (nobody yet knows what it is) but what it does, flattening galaxies, speeding up their rotation, and invisibly sculpting the structure of the visible night sky. Yet the import of that

A funny thing happened to me on the way to.... seriously, this book was given high marks by two friends. I tried listening to it, and abandoned the effort after 3 (out of 9) discs. A lot of the time, I could follow but then had no idea what it was that I had just heard. And sometimes I couldn't follow at all. And occaisionally (but not frequently enough), I understood it perfectly. So not a great experience. However, (back to the "a funny thing....") over the next couple of weeks I kept hearing

I don't consider the two star review a qualitative measure of "4 Percent Universe", so much as an indication that it failed to deliver what I expected. It is exceptional as a series of biographies of the scientists involved in the search for dark matter, dark energy, and supernovae; it is passable as a layman's course on modern cosmology and the techniques that are being employed; but it falls far short of being a useful study on dark matter and dark energy themselves. These concepts don't even