The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality by Richard Panek (PDF)

Description

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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐If you want to know why astrophysics is a sizzling science, read this book.I see that there are a number of reviews here on Amazon, which I think is great. It shows that people care about the big questions– what’s the Universe made of? How do we know?The review by Paul Preuss is particularly interesting. “Snarky” “virulent” “rancorous” Wow! Who knew science was so much fun?Preuss doesn’t reveal until the 27th paragraph that he is the Press Officer at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab whose job over the past decade has been to press the case for recognition of the work on dark energy done by scientists at his institution. There’s nothing dishonorable about putting the best face on the work done by people at the Lab, whether it involves super-heavy elements, the Cosmic Microwave Background, or cosmic acceleration. After all, somebody has to make the case for science in a media atmosphere of Lady Gaga and the cat in the dumpster. But it would be asking too much for a person in his position to give a completely balanced account of a scientific discovery, like the discovery of cosmic acceleration, that took place over time and at many places, as described in the spellbinding new book by Richard Panek, The 4% Universe .To avoid a similar gaffe, I should tell the reader right up front that I am the same Robert Kirshner referred to in Panek’s excellent book. Not always with admiration, but he’s not perfect and neither am I. The important thing is that all of the people in this book, and many left out, got to discover something big and wonderful about the universe in which we live. Panek is an excellent guide to that adventure.Panek is a talented writer, a diligent researcher, and his book The 4% Universe is an exciting account of one of the most revolutionary discoveries in physical science. Great science is bigger than any of us. If you want a complementary perspective on these events, I can’t recommend a better book than “The Extravagant Universe: exploding stars, dark energy, and the accelerating universe.” It’s by me, and I am a participant in the events, but I tried hard to stick to the facts. It’s from 2002, still in print, and available in Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and Czech.

⭐In his Amazon review of Panek’s book, Preuss offers his own version of the story starting (as if that were the start of the discovery of cosmic acceleration) with the establishment of the Center for Particle Astrophysics at Berkeley by the National Science Foundation. Preuss asserts without any evidence that I was opposed to the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP) “from the moment I heard about it.” I think I’m the only witness on this matter. It ain’t so. I thought this project could be a good thing, and gave a talk at the opening symposium for the Center describing how you could use supernovae to find out how much the universe is slowing down. Little did I know it was speeding up! The LBL team asked me more than once to join the project. The Center for Particle Astrophysics asked me to serve on their External Advisory Committee. I would not waste my time to fly across the country to sit in darkened windowless rooms to watch hours of powerpoint presentations if I thought the project was not worth doing. The Center for Particle Astrophysics, with its healthy engagement with astrophysics, may be the place where Preuss first encountered the idea that supernovae could be used to measure the universe, but this idea has deep roots in astronomy, as sketched by Panek in The 4% Universe .After Fritz Zwicky pioneered methods for finding supernovae through monthly searches in the dark of the moon, Walter Baade showed that the supernovae we now call Type Ia, the thermonuclear detonation of white dwarf stars, could be used to measure cosmic expansion. If supernovae all had the same intrinsic brightness, then you could judge their distances by their apparent brightness. If you also measured the redshift for the supernova, or its host galaxy, you could use the plot of distance against redshift to measure the history of cosmic expansion. This was clearly understood in the 1930s! In 1968, Charlie Kowal, who worked for Zwicky at Caltech, compiled the world’s data and published an article in The Astronomical Journal that showed thermonuclear supernovae were pretty good standard candles with a scatter of about 60% in brightness. Kowal speculated that distances to individual objects might eventually be known to 5-10%. What’s more, Kowal said, “It may even be possible to determine the second-order term in the redshift-magnitude relation when light curves become available for very distant supernovae.” In plain english, that means he was thinking about using supernovae to gather evidence for the cosmic deceleration that everyone expected to see due to the effects of gravity. This is the measurement that, to everyone’s surprise, showed evidence for cosmic acceleration when it was finally published in 1998.Along the way in 1979, Gustav Tammann, working with Allan Sandage, showed how you could use the Hubble Space Telescope to measure distant supernovae and establish whether or not the universe was decelerating. But first, some important astronomical aspects of the supernovae needed to be sorted out. It turns out that mixed in with the thermonuclear explosions were some imposters– supernovae that resembled SN Ia, but got their energy from the gravitational collapse of their cores. Astronomers, including me, began to get this straightened out in 1985.Another complication comes from the thermonuclear supernovae. Preuss says about the 1990 establishment of the SCP “the physicists believed, {thermonuclear supernovae were} very similar in their brightness. ” I don’t know if that is accurate about the beliefs of physicists, but it certainly is not true about supernovae. Mark Phillips (later a member of the High-Z Team) began to see in 1986 that there’s a factor of 3 in the range of intrinsic brightness of Type Ia supernovae. If you don’t develop a method to compensate for this, to sort out the 75 watt bulbs from the 25 watters, you will make a mess of estimating distances from brightness. Physicists did not have a monopoly on understanding supernovae as tools for measuring the history of cosmic expansion, and in the early 1990s it was clear we all needed to learn more about the variety of supernovae from astronomical observations of nearby objects. My own team at Harvard worked hard on this aspect of the problem.Methods for working out how to find supernovae with digital detectors were pioneered by a group of Danish astronomers in 1988. Their goal was to measure cosmic deceleration. There’s no question that the LBL team later worked out their own way to detect supernovae in digital images of the sky, and they profited from the rapid technical advances in detectors and computers after 1988, but this was not a problem for which astronomers were waiting for intervention from superior beings, having already done it. More important was making precise observations of the supernova brightness through more than one filter. If you do not do this, you cannot, even in principle, tell the difference between supernovae that are dimmed by cosmic acceleration and supernovae that are dimmed by obscuring dust. The SCP made their earliest observations through only one filter. As Panek describes, I counseled them to do this measurement correctly. Maybe that’s why Preuss thinks I was opposed to the project. But that’s not right. I was only opposed to them making bad inferences from inadequate data.In his review of The 4% Universe, Preuss says:”With an initial small sample the SCP did indeed make bad guesses about the universe’s weight and shape. But in 1994 they started collecting Type Ia supernovae by the fistful, having developed and applied methods that should have been obvious — particularly to doubting astronomers.”The way this is written, a reader might think that those early “bad guesses” were made before 1994. In fact, the SCP reported these results at conferences in 1996 and published them in 1997. As for the “doubting astronomers” who seem like such dolts– Danish astronomers were discovering supernovae in 1988 and by 1995 our High-Z supernova team, led by Brian Schmidt, was finding distant supernovae to go along with our nearby samples and making our own observations with carefully selected pairs of filters as imagined by Nick Suntzeff. This is the program that led to a good outcome in 1998.As Panek makes clear, the early work from the SCP, led by Saul Perlmutter, was not “bad guesses”, it was wrong. It claimed to rule out accelerating cosmologies. This was a small data set. Maybe the problem was bad luck. Maybe the problem was flaws in the way the observations were carried out and analyzed. Later observations by Saul’s team were technically much better, and gave a different result, which makes me think the latter is more likely. But in 1996 and 1997, the LBL team was saying that supernovae showed there was no cosmic acceleration, and no need for dark energy. Theorists were frustrated. To some of them, dark energy would help fit all the pieces of cosmology together. But the SCP resolutely said the opposite. Cosmologist Mike Turner is quoted by Panek (on p.148) as saying (in jest!) at a 1996 conference in Princeton, “I don’t think Saul is that stupid.”The competing High-Z team (the team I was on, just to be clear about loyalties) published a paper in The Astronomical Journal in September of 1998 called “”Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant” with Adam Riess as the first author. It was based on 50 supernova light curves and spectra, near and far. The SCP paper, published 9 months later, was based on 60, with all the nearby data obtained and previously published by astronomers in Chile, many of whom joined the High-Z team. Both groups found evidence for cosmic acceleration. In his review of The 4% Universe, Preuss characterizes the difference in the two results this way: “Large datasets are a physicist’s playground. Astronomers are content with fewer data but pride themselves on analyzing each with great discrimination.” I agree with the pride in craftsmanship part, but I don’t think that in this context 60 and 50 are the difference between “large” and “fewer”.Though press releases and self-published items have a place, and seem very important to press offices, scientists know that publication in refereed journals is the only thing that really counts. There is no question about the order of publications in cosmic acceleration. Our High-Z team published a correct result in September 1998 and, in the same year, published two further papers giving all the technical details and inferring the dark energy equation-of-state– a first step toward seeing whether the dark energy was or was not consistent with Einstein’s cosmological constant. It was — and much better measurements in the past decade are still consistent with this simplest form of dark energy. The SCP, having published a result claiming that dark energy was ruled out by their data in 1997, changed direction at the beginning of 1998, and in June of 1999 presented a strong case for cosmic acceleration. From 1998 through 2003, members of the High-Z Team published a series of papers with new results that enlarged the world’s sample at low redshift and high, introduced the “rolling search” that has become the new standard, tested for systematic effects using spectra and infrared observations, and extended the redshift range of supernova cosmology over half way back to the Big Bang. The last bit, led by Adam Riess, is described in Panek’s book in vivid detail. Preuss emphasizes the concordance of two different groups as sealing the deal with the astrophysical community. I think this stream of tests and improvements was also quite important, even though it all came from one team. The next paper with new results from the SCP appeared in 2003.Panek alternates points of view in his chapters of The 4% Universe, sometimes giving the High-Z view and sometimes channelling the thoughts of the LBL group. In his review, Preuss quotes selectively from the chapters where Panek is trying to express how things looked to the LBL group. But in other chapters, some of the same events are described from another perspective (which I usually liked better!) It’s very naughty to pretend one version of events is the whole truth while ignoring another view that is presented in the same book.Here’s what the LBL website says today:”Dark energy was discovered in 1998 by Department of Energy- and NASA-funded scientists working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and other institutions.”As you will learn from reading The 4% Universe, this is not the whole story. The discovery of the accelerating universe involved many people and many places, some of them funded by the National Science Foundation or other organizations and many at institutions that are not the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. For example, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, the European Southern Observatory, the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard University, the University of Hawaii, and the Australian National University.Preuss does do readers a service by reminding us that Panek had aspirations as an author of fiction. Fiction authors try to show events stem from the characters they create. Panek has created a fictional character who is something like me, but much more unpleasant. I call him “Cranky Kirshner.” When Paul Pruess writes a tiresome 3 part diatribe in the LBL house organ, Panek says (p. 228) “In Cambridge, in an office half a mile up Garden Street from Harvard Square, a quivering hand reached for a keyboard.” I may be assuming too much, but my office is described in an earlier chapter as a “duchy” half a mile from Harvard Square, and readers might reasonably conclude that I am the trembling typist. No! This is the fictional Duke, Cranky Kirshner. I guess Panek imagines an old guy with shaky hands. Panek’s fictional muse omits to say it was a dark and stormy night. The non-fiction version is much less interesting. My actual response was glazed eyeballs and inaction.Buy this book, read it with an open mind, note that it alternates points of view on contentious topics that you will have to balance out for yourself, and form your own opinion based on the whole. Cosmic acceleration has opened a great scientific adventure. And it is just beginning. Read this book and share in the fun!

⭐Richard Panek has given us a serious book about cutting-edge science that reads like a playful mystery. I couldn’t put his book down! Panek has the instincts and skills of a novelist. His characters – real people – are complex and engaging, and his comedic timing is perfect. Panek knows how to advance his story in ways that are compelling for readers who know little or nothing about science.When I wrote

⭐I used dark matter and dark energy as a throw-away line. Abundant afterlife evidence suggests that most of reality is not material, and here – sure enough – is scientific evidence that 94% of reality is invisible to us. Hmmm. Could it be…? I confess that my reason for picking up Panek’s book was my interest in learning more about this “dark” aspect of reality so I could rule it in or rule it out as possible additional afterlife evidence. What kept me reading was the fun of the book itself, full of amusing insider stories that show that even the most revered scientists are just people, after all. Scientific theorists and scientific observers are often in conflict? Who knew? And particle physicists are frequently at war with macro-scientists? And cosmology wasn’t considered a real science until the 1990s – indeed, cosmology and astronomy and astrophysics are three different sciences? Who among us civilians knew that?Watching scientists earnestly squabble like the brainy schoolchildren they once were is wonderful fun, as is seeing their process of working through deducing whatever it is they are deducing from blackboard walls full of calculations and endless gazing at miniscule dots of space on beautiful starry nights. This book offers such a wonderful window on the work habits of modern scientists that it should be read by everyone. I found myself rooting for my favorite characters, hoping they could figure it out, while knowing that wasn’t going to happen. Panek tells us that researchers are willing to test literally anything at this point as a possible explanation for dark matter and dark energy, and it begins to look as if figuring this out will require violating science’s ultimate taboo. Since dark matter and dark energy are apparently not material, the only way to learn what they are may be to look beyond this material universe.Cosmology was at once time consigned to the outer scientific darkness because its theories could not be used to make predictions. The study of the greater reality that we discover by surveying 200 years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence likewise is not considered to be a science, and it carries a burden that cosmology lacks. It is apparently not governed by mathematics, which means that it cannot be even on the scientific JV team. All that we have by which to study the part of reality that is not material is an enormous body of evidence delivered by people who once lived on earth and now are alive in a greater reality which they can describe to us in detail. The afterlife evidence is so consistent and so detailed that it is possible to construct a reasonable set of theories now about how the greater reality works, and also how it fits with material physics. It is obvious to those who study this evidence that the greater reality is every bit as real as the part of the universe that we can see, which makes the ongoing refusal of mainstream science to look at all this evidence flat-out bewildering to me. This is not about life after death any more, since we long ago were able to prove that as fact. But studying the afterlife evidence reveals so much about how reality works that until mainstream scientists take all this evidence seriously there will remain great gaps in their knowledge, from what the heck is going on with gravity to whatever might be hiding most of the universe. All the answers seem to be there. But they are being ignored. Having read Panek’s wonderful book, I now more firmly believe that the problem he addresses is indeed connected to the reality revealed by studying the afterlife evidence. The reality beyond what we can perceive is composed of and held in place by mind-energy, and it is so enormous that for the “material” parts of the greater reality to be six times the mass of the material universe may be about right. And the mind-energy that supports it is so beyond-amazingly powerful that it easily could be three or four times the volume of the universe and the greater reality put together. Hmmm. A non-material energy combined with a significant amount of non-material matter, all of which exists throughout the universe? That sure looks like dark energy and dark matter to me! This theory comes with a bonus, too. The dark matter of the afterlife levels is full of well-trained scientists who would have a lot of information to share… if only living scientists could expand their minds enough to consider the possibility that they might be there.Mainstream scientists are like the rest of us. We all buy into this material illusion. Most of us can be forgiven for doing so because it is a very good illusion, but the basics of quantum physics are by now so well established that there should be no scientist alive who is not troubled by – and made curious by – the fact that quantum physics intimates that matter, energy, time and space are governed by mind and may not be objectively real. This fact alone should awaken some physicist somewhere to the fact that we are missing something big. And when this insight is combined with the frustrating search for most of reality, perhaps at some point the study of the greater reality revealed by the afterlife evidence will make it to the scientific JV team, after all. Roberta Grimes – Cross-posted at afterlifeforums.com

⭐The ‘four percent’ in the title of this book refers to the apparently true but bizarre fact that only 4% of the universe seems to be ordinary stuff – from planets to stars – with twenty-odd percent of the remainder dark matter and the rest dark energy, the unknown phenomenon that is forcing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.Don’t come to this book hoping to find out what dark matter and dark energy are – because there’s a long way to go before those questions can be definitively answered – but instead you will find an in-depth history of the process by which the (probable) existence of dark matter and dark energy were discovered.Richard Panek is at his best when describing human beings in action, rather than covering the details of physics or cosmology. He really takes the reader in to experience the astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists (surprisingly different beasts) at work. We begin to understand how these people work, what drives them and what they really think. We also see that these really are human beings, particularly in the rivalry and at times downright antagonism between two teams, one primarily astronomers, the other primarily physicists, who were at the forefront of the discovery of dark energy in the late 1990s.There are two problems with this approach, though. One is that we are dealing with quite a large cast, few of whom are given big enough parts to really stand out – so often the reader, for example, can forget which of the two camps a particular scientist belongs to. Although we get a real feeling of knowing a couple of the names, it does get a bit overwhelming. What also gets overwhelming is the depth Panek goes into with the detail of discovery.There’s a parallel here with the book A Grand and Bold Thing, where Ann Finkbeiner goes into a lot of detail of what happened in the development of the Sloane Digital Sky Survey. Our reviewer loved it, but I have seen another review bemoaning the Finkbeiner’s approach of covering ever little step. Similarly, if I’m honest, I got a touch bored with some of the trivia of discovery that Panek explored. The suspicion has to be that, having got access to detailed information from those involved, he was reluctant not to mention everything he heard – but this could have done with tighter editing.The other problem with the focus on the people is that I’m not entirely sure that Panek always understands the science – there are one or two moments when he makes a statement that seems entirely wrong as far as the physics goes, but is swept away by the flow of the narrative so you don’t really notice it. For example he tells us that the anthropic principle is the term for the idea that inflation implies that there are 10500 inflationary bubbles, each its own universe. First of all, inflation doesn’t require this, it is just one possible implication, but secondly, the anthropic principle (which comes in two distinct forms) is not anything to do with inflation per se. It merely would explain why, if there were 10500 universes, we happened to live in this one.A final niggle – the writing can be a touch pretentious. This doesn’t come across when Panek is at his best, telling us the personal stories of scientists and their work. But when he tries to take the overview we get sentiments like ‘… the award ceremony at Cambridge wasn’t only about posterity. It was about history, and history was something else. History was posterity in motion.’ Groan.Don’t get me wrong. This is a great book for getting into the minds of those involved in these discoveries and for understanding more about how modern astronomy and cosmology works. I do recommend it. But the book’s limitations are strong enough that they can’t be entirely overlooked. It is also a little out of date now, though discoveries have tended to be ‘more of the same’ since.

⭐Cosmology is a complex subject to cover for non-specialists, because there’s always quite a long and necessary background story, reviewing the science that has led us to the start point of the book.But this book is written in the style of a fiction novel, with a scene being set and a drama enacted. I guess the very first paragraph of the book shows what I mean:”in the beginning – which is to say, 1965 – the universe was simple. It came into being one noontime early that year over the course of a telephone conversation. Jim Peebles was sitting in the office of his mentor and frequent collaborator, the Princeton physicist Robert Dicke, along with two other colleagues. The phone rang; Dicke took the call. Dicke helped run a research firm on the side, and he himself held dozens of patents. During these weekly lunches in his office, he sometime got phone calls that were full of esoteric and technical vocaulary that Peebles knew intimately – concepts the four physicists had been discussing that very afternoon. Cold load, for instance: a device that would help calibrate the horn antenna – another term Peebles overheard – that they would be using to try to detect a special signal from space. The three physicists grew quiet and looked at Dicke. Dicke thanked the caller and hung up, then turned to his colleages and said, “Well boys, we’ve been scooped.”Don’t expect the style to settle down – it doesn’t. It’s something like a radio panel show game, with contestants given a task “Explain a scientific story in the style of an Inspector Rebus novel”. It’s just inappropriate, frustrating; and very soon the recession velocity of useful information exceeds the cosmic attention span, and one just gives up.Not only that, but the book’s title doesn’t fit with the content: “The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality”. Unless I’ve missed something really important, although the indirect evidence for dark matter and energy of empty space is pretty much unimpeachable, dark matter particles themselves have yet to be detected. So I hoped to read a book about the subject described in the title, and the scientific race/quest to complete the picture.Nah, if you’re interested in the cosmology, don’t waste your time: this is a book about teams you’re not interested in, full of names you don’t care about, competing with each other to directly observe something which has yet to be observed. If this were an Inspector Rebus novel (or any other novel), we’d feel short-changed (to say the least) if the story had no conclusion. But if this is a race, it is a race that has not ended.If you, like me, are interested in reading about the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, what we know, what and why we conjecture, and how open questions are being addressed and proofs are being sought; I think you’re likely to be as disappointed as me by this book.If you’re one of the guys in the story (probably the USA side of the story) and you want to read about yourself in a narrative, maybe you’ll quite like it.Okay, lastly in this review, since it’s actually a book about a race between a few global teams to discover a dark matter particle, I’d like to wish good luck to Dr Sean Paling and his team at the Boulby Underground Science Facility, who are in the UK’s part of this race. I think it’s important to wish them well, since this book full of names doesn’t even mention their existence, neither reference any of their experiments.

⭐If you are expecting a hard nosed science book such as: ‘Why Does E= mc2?’ ‘A brief history of Time’ or ‘The Quantum Universe’ then you will be disappointed. What Panek has produced however is a thoroughly researched, semi biographical account of the lives and work of the key scientific protagonists in dark matter and dark energy investigation, that following the discovery of the Higgs boson, lies at the frontier of particle research.At times the pace of the science can be frustratingly slow and the biographical detail a little florid. Nevertheless, the author paints a compelling human picture of academic research: the rivalries and tensions, the personal sacrifices, the funding crises, the ground breaking insights, failures and even the tragedies.The human narrative is based around two rival teams of researchers vying to be the first to discover and publish their findings with respect to dark matter and energy and thus the future of the universe. What makes this story fascinating and the rivalry so intense is the fact that the teams come from the very different disciplines of astronomy and particle physics – with different academic modus operandi and cultures.Panek adroitly outlines the study of supernovae which led to the dramatic conclusion that the expansion of the universe is actually accelerating, rather than slowing as would be predicted by Newtonian theories of gravity. He describes how this in turn led to the revival of Einstein’s cosmological constant, initially seen by physicists as a fudge and later discarded with Hubble’s discovery of an expanding universe through inflation. Subsequent discussion leads inexorably into the hypothesis of dark matter – bizarre enough and then stranger still -dark energy as the catalyst of this acceleration.Less important than whether dark matter consists of axions or neutralinos is the paradigmal shift that dark matter and energy research caused in moving cosmology from the realm of meta physics to particle physics. Crucially such research has also shifted the emphasis of astronomy from the study of the visible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum to the study of the dark invisible longer wavelengths.The author ends by suggesting tantalizing quantum based multi universe explanations for dark energy effects and concludes that future developments in our understanding are dependent on the reconciliation of the physics of the very large with that of the very small i.e. the evolution of a quantum theory of gravity.

⭐This is what I would call a very ‘thorough’ book, and I think readers’ enjoyment (hence their * rating) will depend upon the balance of their interests between the science and the history. I have read a number of this type before and my inclination is towards the science but with an interest in the history as well.This book covers the science quite well, and in a fair bit of detail (though sometimes the descriptions seem a bit bland even if they are lengthy). But it is overwhelmingly about the history of the discoveries and the relationships between the different, sometimes competing, individual researchers, and teams. So the book could be said to be about 25-30% science, and the rest narrative. It is quite a long read too, so eventually I found myself sneaking a look at where the notes, references, index, etc started, to see how near the finishing line I was getting! That meant that my rating is down a bit, but I am sure others will enjoy it more, as it undoubtedly a good book.An example is the historic phone call between two sets of researchers who were investigating background radiation from the sky that came to be known as the Cosmic Microwave Backgound. Not only is there the obligatory mention of the content of the call itself, but in later threads there are further references to it such as ‘this was the same room that …’, and ‘this was the day that…’. All this perhaps is a reflection of the description of his work as “writing on science and culture” in various publications and books, trying to set the whole research programme in context.As with other books I have read, the narrative repeatedly reverts in time to trace through each thread of the investigations and discoveries from initial ideas to the latest situation. As a bit of an aside, I would be fascinated to see someone try and take a broader front through time, with the concurrent investigations described ‘together’ chapter by chapter, using a single pass from ‘then’ to ‘now’. Don’t know if it would work though!I would recommend this particularly to prospective readers that have perhaps a preference for the historical part of the story.

⭐Although the title refers to 4%, the book is actually about the 96%! It tells how the unseen universe of dark matter and dark energy was deduced.Here is a rather unusual approach for a science book. It is a story that Richard Panek tells through the aspirations, actions and achievements of a host of individuals. There is a cast list of hundreds and while key characters are a constant presence, many others – as in any drama – are bit players.Sometimes for one who wants to follow the scientific thread, it is disconcerting to have to remember who did which with whom to produce what. Nevertheless the book rattles along at brisk pace dwelling in some detail on one of the big set pieces: the rivalry between the High-z team at Berkeley and the SCP team at Harvard to determine whether the expansion of the universe was slowing or accelerating. So many names were mentioned that even on re-reading I am not entirely sure who headed these teams. The rivalry was about personal kudos but also concerned the practical matter of getting finance.If you want to understand the insights that yield theories and then the tedious business of observation to demonstrate the validity of the idea, this book gives a good idea of what goes on. Richard Panek interviewed over ninety scientists in researching the book as well as publications: the bibliography runs to a 150 references. I’m sure it is an entirely accurate picture but for the general reader the personal details intrude and make everything rather more complex than it need be.

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