The Four Percent Universe by Richard Panek

From The Week of June 19, 2011

We live in a world of objects: cars and buildings, lakes and mountains, stars and planets. This is our universe, a tangible reality that can be seen, touched, experienced, and even understood. But as Mr. Panek explains in The Four Percent Universe, all of what we are, all of what we can observe, is but one-25th of the stuff that makes up the universe.

We are the four percent. Mr. Panek, an author of popular science, illuminates this startling revelation in this, his history of the search for the composition of the universe. Drawing in many of the 20th century's greatest minds in astronomy and physics, he describes the evolution of human understanding of the world beyond our world. After quickly touching on the various astronomical revolutions which informed our understanding, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Hubble, the author focuses on the two teams of scientists which, in the late 1990s, independently uncovered the astonishing truth that everything we are is but a fraction of the whole. But if this is true, then what is the rest?

According to results garnered by the High-z and SCP teams so thoroughly chronicled here, the remainder of the universe is made up of a combination of Dark Matter (23 percent) and Dark Energy, 73 percent), forces inimical to light. How can something be measured when it cannot be seen? Indirectly. Dark Matter reveals itself in the structure of galaxies which should be disc-shaped. But given that spirals, bars and clusters abound, there must be missing mass. Dark Energy is made manifest in the rate at which the universe is expanding. Some unknown force must be counteracting gravity, forcing every cubic foot of universe to expand away from its fellows at an ever increasing rate. Invisible truths, uncovered as a result of realizing that something is missing.

Mr. Panek sets himself a difficult task with this history of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. He has plenty of fascinating and engaging scientists to fill out his tale, characters who culminate in the warring teams which continually one-upped each other in the late 1990s to find answers to the big questions in astronomy. What he lacks, however, are conclusions. Dark Matter and Dark Energy have only been discovered, not understood. And so, while Mr. Panek has done a wonderful job explaining how we have arrived at our current understanding of the universe, The Four Percent Universe is necessarily incomplete. It is more a chronicle of the competing teams of scientists than it is of Dark Matter and Dark Energy which are, as ever, omnipresent and utterly elusive.

What science there is here is gripping, but Mr. Panek has to rely too much on the self-indulgent, human narrative to compensate for our lack of understanding of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. But while this handicaps his tale, it does not cripple it. Engaging work. (3/5 Stars)