Richard Panek's "The 4% Universe"

This is a fun read of the 50 year history of discovering "missing mass" and uncovering a bit of understanding what it is. The current account:

72.8% dark energy, 22.7% dark matter, and 4.56% baryonic matter

The stuff we call "the universe" is that 4.56%. The rest of it is pretty mysterious with some experimental evidence pointing to it being "matter" and "energy" but no real theory that satisfactorily accounts for it. In short, we live in a world of mystery, but as the book points out: what we know is incredible compared to what was known a century ago...

A poor soldier who died in the trenches in 1914 knew as much about the universe as a caveman. That infantryman lived in a cosmos that was as vast as the stars, but no vaster, and stood still. In the past century, however, our knowledge had grown from one island universe to hundreds of billions of galaxies, from eternally repetitive motions in space to structural evolution over time. And now we even had one more more: darkness.

This book is a tour through three generations of astronomers, cosmologists, and physicists steadily broadening our understanding of the universe. It may not teach you any science, but it will help you appreciate how science is done, how the generations interact, the bickering feuds, the advances, the pitfalls, and the stories of glory. My only complaint is that with a cast of thousands, it is a bit hard to keep track of "who's who" and "what's what" through the course of the book. A cheat sheet like some old novels and plays had would help, i.e. a list of the cast of characters and their role in the story to help keep all the details under control.

I'll give you a taste of the book. Here's a bit about the sole Canadian, Jim Peebles, highlighted in the book and the level of "security" at Los Alamos in the late 1960s:

The computer he would be using at Los Alamos -- a CDC 3600 -- was many magnitudes more powerful than any he could have found on a university campus, and he wouldn't even have to tap the Princeton Physics Department's research funds. He could run the computer as long as he needed -- all night, even all weekend. And Peebles could do so even though Los Alamos was in high Cold War mode and he wasn't a U.S. citizen. Peebles had emigrated from Manitoba only eleven years earlier. He was a Canadian citizen -- officially an alien. Yet apparently the work he was doing seemed either so primitive or so esoteric -- or his demeanor so unthreatening; his reputation so established; his computational skills so (relatively) undeveloped -- that his entire security detail consisted of a secretary who sat at one side, knitting.

And here is Panek's view of the next step needed to understand the dark matter and dark energy:

Scientists liked to say that what physics needed was "the next Einstein." But if we took seriously the once-a-millennium quality of the dark-universe revolution -- and we had every reason to think we should -- then the analogy was inexact. Einstein was our Copernicus, finding the equations that might or might not represent the real -- or "real" -- universe. The discoverers of dark matter and dark energy were our Galileo, making the observations that validated this universe, though it turned out to be far more elaborately mysterious than we had ever imagined. What science needed now wasn't the next Einstein but the next Newton -- someone (or someones, or some collaboration, or some generations-long cathedral of a theory) to codify the math of this new universe. To unite the physics of the very big with the physics of the very small, just as Newton had united the physics of the celestial with the physics of the terrestrial. To take the ob servations and make sense of our universe all over again in ways that we couldn't begin to imagine, but that would define our physics and philosophy -- our civilization -- for centuries to come.

The book is an enjoyable read. It will let you understand the science of cosmology, the advances made, but the problems that remain. It will help you appreciate why science will never come up with a "final answer", a "theory of everything". The world is just too bizarre. Think about it. What we thought was "our universe" is only 4% of what is out there... and even less if you accept string theory with its invisible branes that collide with out brane to create new "big bang" universes. The stuff is mind boggling. But that's what makes it so exciting.