The Elephant in the Universe
Our Hundred-Year Search for Dark Matter
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4.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $39.99
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- $39.99
Publisher Description
A Seminary Co-op Notable Book
A BBC Sky at Night Best Book
“An impressively comprehensive bird’s-eye view of a research topic that is both many decades established and yet still at the very cutting edge of astronomy and physics.”
—Katie Mack, Wall Street Journal
“Schilling has craftily combined his lucid and accessible descriptions of science with the personal story of those unlocking the finer details of the missing mass mystery. The result is enthralling…A captivating scientific thriller.”
—BBC Sky at Night
“Fascinating…A thorough and sometimes troubling account of the hunt for dark matter…You will come away with a very good understanding of how the universe works. Well, our universe, anyway.”
—Michael Brooks, New Scientist
When you train a telescope on outer space, you can see luminous galaxies, nebulae, stars, and planets. But if you add all that together, it constitutes only 15 percent of the matter in the universe. Despite decades of research, the nature of the remaining 85 percent is unknown. We call it dark matter.
Physicists have devised huge, sensitive instruments to search for dark matter, which may be unlike anything else in the cosmos—some unknown elementary particle. Yet so far dark matter has escaped every experiment. It is so elusive that some scientists are beginning to suspect there might be something wrong with our theories about gravity or with the current paradigms of cosmology. Govert Schilling interviews believers and heretics and paints a colorful picture of the history and current status of dark matter research. The Elephant in the Universe is a vivid tale of scientists puzzling their way toward the true nature of the universe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Schilling (Ripples in Spacetime) chronicles the decades-long search for dark matter in this fascinating history. Sophisticated experiments are being conducted to document the existence of dark matter, which Schilling describes as "one of the biggest enigmas of modern science": though it is believed to hold "the universe together," he writes, its "true nature" remains a mystery. The author outlines the work of key players in the field: there's Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn, who "was the first to come up with a description of the shape and size of the Milky Way, a description that included a role for dark matter" in the 1920s; Phillip James Edwin Peebles, "godfather of the theory of cold dark matter," who was prominent in the 1970s and '80s when "dark matter burst onto the scene"; and Vera Rubin, whose 1980 paper on "missing mass" revolutionized the field. Along the way, Schilling convincingly argues that even without proof of its existence, dark matter has increased people's understanding of the world—the search for it has led to greater knowledge of galaxies, gravity, and the big bang, among other phenomena. It makes for a solid introduction to an elusive topic.
