The Elephant in the Universe: Our Hundred-Year Search for Dark Matter

Journalist Schilling (Ripples in Spacetime) chronicles the decades-long search for dark matter in this fascinating history. Sophisticated experiments are being conducted to document the existence of dark matter, which Schilling describes as “one of the biggest enigmas of modern science”: though it is believed to hold “the universe together,” he writes, its “true nature” remains a mystery. The author outlines the work of key players in the field: there’s Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn, who “was the first to come up with a description of the shape and size of the Milky Way, a description that included a role for dark matter” in the 1920s; Phillip James Edwin Peebles, “godfather of the theory of cold dark matter,” who was prominent in the 1970s and ’80s when “dark matter burst onto the scene”; and Vera Rubin, whose 1980 paper on “missing mass” revolutionized the field. Along the way, Schilling convincingly argues that even without proof of its existence, dark matter has increased people’s understanding of the world—the search for it has led to greater knowledge of galaxies, gravity, and the big bang, among other phenomena. It makes for a solid introduction to an elusive topic. (May)