The Last Word On Nothing

One of our favorite science writers has just published a terrific new book, The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality. So I nabbed author Richard Panek, who just happens to be an LWON blogger, for a Q and A session.

Q:  Your book’s really provocative. What first drew you to the subject?

A:   The central idea—that what we’ve always thought was the universe in its entirety, for thousands of years, is only 4% of what’s actually out there—is absolutely wild. When I first heard about this idea at astronomy conferences about ten years ago, I thought it was too wild to be true.

I figured there must be a catch. But there isn’t! The more I investigated, the more I realized that scientists are actually reaching a consensus, despite their best efforts to convince themselves otherwise. We know that 23% of the universe is in the form of something mysterious called dark matter, and that 73% is in the form of dark energy, which leaves 4% the stuff of us—”normal” matter like protons and neutrons.

The idea is so startling that I suspect most people would have an initial response similar to my own. Certainly that was the reaction of even the scientists who made the key discoveries. But over the past decade the evidence has become overwhelming, and the “dark universe” is now scientific orthodoxy. The impulse to write this book grew out of my desire to spread the news: “You’re not going to believe this—but it’s true!” I wanted to tell the story of the scientists who have brought us to the cusp of a truly revolutionary new way of thinking about the universe.

Q:   I was stunned to learn how little we know about the universe and what’s in it.

A.  Well, there you go, Heather. You’re a scientifically very knowledgable person, and even to you this news is stunning.

Q. Should we be worried about our ignorance?

A:  Worried? No. Humbled? Sure. Not humbled in the sense of how insignificant we are in the scheme of things. Of course we’re insignificant! Get over it! Instead, I mean humbled in the sense of having to confront the fact that we know far less than we thought. Again and again science has had to learn this lesson. Hey, wait—I think I feel a Last Word on Nothing post coming on.

Until I write that post, though, I’ll just say that I think if you had asked most astronomers fifteen years ago whether they wanted the universe to be 96% unknown and possibly unknowable, they would have said, Um, no thanks. But they’ve had to accept the universe on its terms, not theirs, and as a result they have come to see this seeming human limitation as a source of intellectual liberation. They have embraced the need for a radically new understanding of what the universe is and how it works. I often think of something I once heard a theorist say at a conference. I quote it in the book: “If you could put the timeline of the history of science before me and I could choose any time and field, this is where I’d want to be.”

Q:   It’s a serious subject, yet I could see that you were having a lot of fun at times writing this book.  What was the most fun part in the research or the writing for you?

A:  I’m glad to hear that the fun comes across. I don’t know if you know this about me, Heather, but I have no background in science. In fact, I never liked the subject in school. Instead, my background is in journalism and fiction. So I tried to combine the just-the-facts methods of journalism with the what-comes-next? momentum of fiction, and the result is a narrative full of real-life characters and dialogue and scenes and conflicts (and more conflicts). The 4% Universe is a story of scientists racing one another to solve one of the biggest mysteries in the universe: its fate. And they do! But along the way they also discover that the vast majority of the universe, the very subject of their study, is missing.

Q:  What fascinates you most about scientists like Jim Peebles, who struggle against enormous odds to understand the universe?

A:  One aspect is what you just said so well yourself: their willingness to struggle against enormous odds to understand the universe. The other aspect that fascinates me is that often they succeed. It fascinates them, too. They can’t figure out why they can figure out the universe—even when what they figure out is that now they have a new, even bigger puzzle to solve, like dark matter and dark energy.

But Jim Peebles is a particularly fascinating case. He’s a theorist at Princeton, and he’s probably best known as part of the group that back in the 1960s identified the cosmic microwave background, which is sort of the echo of the Big Bang. But if you look at the history of cosmology over the past half a century, Peebles has been part of the latest, most important, and most surprising developments again and again. That he appears to be a nice, self-effacing guy, at least in my experience, only helps.

Q:  Will you continue to write about this subject?  Or are you contemplating something completely different for your next book?

A:  Certainly my immediate next project is different from anything I’ve done—a collaboration with Temple Grandin on a book to be called The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum. Regarding my own work, though, my last three books, including The 4% Universe, have addressed topics in astronomy and cosmology that allowed me to explore the history and philosophy of science. I have a subject in mind for the next book, and it would fit into that category, but for now I think I’ll keep readers right where we all are anyway: in the dark.

Image: Figure of the heavenly bodies. Illuminated illustration of the Ptolemaic geocentric conception of the Universe by Portuguese cosmographer and cartographer Bartolomeu Velho (?-1568).