The Last Word On Nothing

Did you know there’s a tenth planet—well, ninth, if you don’t count Pluto—that’s on a collision course with Earth, and the government has built a telescope in Antarctica to monitor its movements, only they don’t want the public to know about this impending doomsday because they don’t want to cause a worldwide panic? It’s true! But you don’t have to take my word for it. Just Google “South Pole Telescope collision planet Earth” and you’ll find all the evidence you need.

Okay, maybe not you, since you’ve presumably come to this site with a greater fondness for physics theories than for conspiracy theories. But a lot of people. And they’re not afraid to make their opinions known to the people they will most need to convince, if the truth is ever to see the light of day: scientists.

Scientists who deal with the most far-out mysteries of the universe routinely receive advice from skeptics, inventors, and armchair physicists. The Princeton theorist P. James E. Peebles, one of the discoverers of the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation of the Big Bang, often hears from nonscientists eager to enlighten him as to how the universe really works. Over the decades he has developed a filing system for these letters: a cardboard box in a corner of his office. Brian Schmidt, one of the astronomers who in 1998 discovered evidence that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, once told me that he gets e-mails and phone calls every day from people who claim to know what dark energy, the driving force behind the acceleration, is. Usually he ignores them, but once in a while he just can’t resist. “Oh,” he’ll say, “have you done the tensor fluctuations?”

And it’s not just scientists who get to hear how wrong, misguided, or gullible they are. Writers do, too—or at least I do, just about every time I write about dark matter and dark energy. Soon after an article of mine on dark energy appeared in Smithsonian magazine this year, I received a rather fat envelope from the editorial office, full of letters and e-mails either explaining the primacy of Scripture or questioning the intelligence of the scientists. Did any of these scientists, one correspondent asked me, ever take into account that if distant galaxies are moving outward from us, then we are also moving outward from them?

Um…yes.  All of them.

Already I’m getting this sort of feedback on my book on dark matter and dark energy, The 4% Universe, and it won’t even be out until January. Says one “Comment,” responding to an early review on Amazon: “The ridiculous concepts of Dark Matter and Dark Energy are a total crock of crap.” Well, you can’t argue with that. Really. You can’t.

But if you could, here’s what that argument would be—and it has nothing to do with empirical evidence or appeals to reason or who’s right and who’s wrong. I learned it during my research for the book when I visited a University of California, Berkeley, astrophysicist working on the South Pole Telescope. He asked me if I knew about Nibiru. I didn’t. Nibiru, he explained, was a menacing tenth planet (also known as Planet X), and the South Pole Telescope was the locus of the government cover-up—at least according to a conspiracy theory that originated in the 1990s with a woman who claimed she had learned the truth from aliens she met in the forest as a young girl. This astronomer said he heard from Nibiru theorists all the time.

I asked how he responds. And like most scientists (and science writers), he doesn’t.

Until, he added, just the other day.

“You have to be careful what you ask for,” he wrote back to a Nibiru enthusiast. “I could tell you the truth, but are you sure you’re ready for it?”

Yes, the Nibiruist answered.

“Because you have to have a very open mind if you’re going to be ready to accept the truth.”

Yes, yes, came the answer. I’m ready. Tell me the truth.

So the astronomer did. He wrote: that the cosmic microwave background is the remnant imprint on the heavens from the moment, when the universe was 379,000 years old, that the temperature of the expanding and cooling universe fell below 4000 K, and matter and energy went their separate ways; that the South Pole Telescope is using minute fluctuations in that signal to measure the changes in the distribution of galaxy clusters from one era in the universe’s history to the next; and that this information will help determine whether dark energy, whatever it is, is constant over time and space, or varies.

That argument, of course, went nowhere. Even as this astrophysicist was making it, he knew that it would be interpreted as evidence that he was a “tool” of the government. But then he tried one more appeal, the one that has stayed with me.

“Here’s the deal,” he went on. “What we’re doing is weirder and more interesting than anything you’re already imagining.”

That argument, too, went nowhere. But it was worth a try, I think, because it’s the truth.