Through a Universe Darkly: A Cosmic Tale of Ancient Ethers, Dark Matter, and the Fate of the Universe

In 1988 in a playful article in the journal Nature , astrophysicists Joseph Silk and James Peebles ``made book'' on the then-current theories that might explain the Big Bang's missing mass. Given the huge gaps in theoretical astronomy that remain, theirs was not an unreasonable approach . In her much longer exegesis, science writer Bartusiak ( Thursday's Universe ) finds no odds-on winner, either. She offers a lively review of astronomers' struggle to find the stuff of the universe since Hubble. Sidelights on the quirks in the personal lives of 19th-century astronomers (the author is more discreet in her profiles of the living) interrupt the time line of the science. With the number of portraits and interviews here, the book would have been as appropriately subtitled Lives of the Astronomers. Illustrated. (Aug.)