The Universe for Dummies

FOR those who want to read the article in full try this link

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/magazine/11dark.t.html?pagewanted=all

Out There

By Richard Panek

Only 4 percent of the universe is made of the kind of matter that makes up you and me and all the planets and stars and galaxies. The rest — 96 percent — is ... who knows?

Three days after learning that he won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, George Smoot was talking about the universe. Sitting across from him in his office at the University of California, Berkeley, was Saul Perlmutter, a fellow cosmologist and a probable future Nobelist in Physics himself. Bearded, booming, eyes pinwheeling from adrenaline and lack of sleep, Smoot leaned back in his chair. Perlmutter, onetime acolyte, longtime colleague, now heir apparent, leaned forward in his.

"Time and time again," Smoot shouted, "the universe has turned out to be really simple."
Perlmutter nodded eagerly. "It’s like, why are we able to understand the universe at our level?"
"Right. Exactly. It’s a universe for beginners! 'The Universe for Dummies'!"

But as Smoot and Perlmutter know, it is also inarguably a universe for Nobelists, and one that in the past decade has become exponentially more complicated. Since the invention of the telescope four centuries ago, astronomers have been able to figure out the workings of the universe simply by observing the heavens and applying some math, and vice versa. Take the discovery of moons, planets, stars and galaxies, apply Newton’s laws and you have a universe that runs like clockwork. Take Einstein’s modifications of Newton, apply the discovery of an expanding universe and you get the big bang. "It’s a ridiculously simple, intentionally cartoonish picture," Perlmutter said. "We’re just incredibly lucky that that first try has matched so well."
But is our luck about to run out? Smoot’s and Perlmutter’s work is part of a revolution that has forced their colleagues to confront a universe wholly unlike any they have ever known, one that is made of only 4 percent of the kind of matter we have always assumed it to be — the material that makes up you and me and this magazine and all the planets and stars in our galaxy and in all 125 billion galaxies beyond. The rest — 96 percent of the universe — is ... who knows?
"Dark," cosmologists call it, in what could go down in history as the ultimate semantic surrender.

This is not "dark" as in distant or invisible. This is "dark" as in unknown for now, and possibly forever.