It was almost impossible to keep track of all the people and politics in this book, and the author went back in forth in time so often it was hard to tell what was going on at times. Add to that the author not explaining acronyms for various projects and telescopes. Otherwise the science was interesting. ( )

The problem with a book on dark matter and dark energy is that there really isn't enough known about them to fill a book that would be of interest to an average reader. So, most of the book is filled with biographies of the researchers who helped collect the data the points toward the existence of dark matter and dark energy. There's a lot of clashing personalities and politics, with debates about who is claiming too much credit and who isn't getting the credit they deserve. Some of the biggest questions I had about dark matter are never addressed in the book. (For instance, if dark matter is the predominant form of mass in the universe, why does it seem that our solar system is so unaffected by it on a local scale? We can land probes on Titan without having to adjust for dark matter's influence.) Not a bad book, just not the book I thought I was buying. ( )

Informative but a little on the confusing side. The definition of an acronym or term is given once and then you are expected to know it forever. I spent half of the book wondering what red shift was. Many incidents like this abound. I guess I shouldn't have tried to listen to this while driving....

Still, I know a lot now that I didn't before and have a greater appreciation for the hardships astronomers and other scientists have to endure. ( )

It was interesting. It sort of combines science and psychology to show the team of people that found this phenomenon rather than focusing on the phenomenon itself. ( )

This a highly readable history of the transformation of cosmology from metaphysics to physics, from philosophy and speculation to hard science, and in the process, the discovery of most of the universe.

Historically, astronomy and physics didn't have a great deal to do with each other. Astronomers studied the stars by observation, very patient and detailed observation and record-keeping. Theoretical physicists theorized and calculated, and experimental physicists experimented, and they fed each other's work, very occasionally coming up with something, most notably gravity, that made a real difference to astronomy. Then Einstein gave us general relativity, and began a century of ever-deeper entanglement of physics and astronomy, and the transformation of cosmology--the study of the nature and origins of the entire universe--from something utterly beyond the scope of physics into its core. The questions of how big the universe is, whether it is eternal in space and time or had a beginning and might have an end, became real questions.

Edwin Hubble, early in the century, discovered that the universe is expanding, but also that there are other galaxies beyond our own, and that they're all moving away from us. This was a major, exciting, and initially controversial change in our conception of the universe. In the 1960s, Vera Rubin, looking for a research project she could do within the constraints of raising two young children, studied other astronomers' observations and discovered that the galaxies were rotating as well as moving away from us. Also in the mid-1960s, Robert Dicke, Jim Peebles, and a small group of theoretical physicists had a prediction for which they had no supporting data: If the Big Bang theory of the history of the universe were correct, there should be low-level cosmic microwave radiation, at a temperature of about 3 degrees Kelvin. Then two astronomers at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, had data for which they had no explanation: While trying to calibrate the Bell Labs' Crawford Hill antenna to study radio waves from the fringes of the Milky Way, they found they had a tiny background hiss which no amount of calibration would eliminate. They'd found the background cosmic radiation, echo of the Big Bang.

That's one small step along the way, from Einstein to the discovery that most of our universe is invisible. As the back and forth played out between the theoretical physicists and the experimental and observational scientists, increasingly astronomers, each theoretical question drew forth an observation, a find, a discovery that answered that question, and raised another. The most startling of these was the discovery that visible, directly detectable matter is just over 4% of the total make-up of a universe far larger and more complex than ever suspected at the start of the 20th century. If what we see were all there were, the galaxies would not be, could not be, relatively compact, stable spirals (or their other shapes), but should be torn apart by the speed of their rotation. Outside, among, around, the visible matter of the galaxies was dark matter.

Dark matter was soon joined by the even more mysterious dark energy.

The largest part of Panek's book is devoted to the research to detect and identify dark matter and dark energy, He takes us through not only the science, fascinating enough in itself, but also the human drama as two teams, one primarily physicists and the other primarily astronomers, raced against each other to gather enough observations of sufficiently distant (and therefore ancient) supernovae to answer essential questions about the conditions of the early universe. In the answers to those questions, and questions about changes since that early time, would lie the answers to the reality of dark energy, dark matter, and maybe the ultimate fate of the universe.

Highly recommended.

This book is not yet published but can be pre-ordered from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

I received a free electronic galley of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. ( )