The 4% Universe Author:Richard Panek Publisher: Oneworld ISBN: 978-1-85168-821-0 Price: £ 10.99 (Pb), 297pp
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If anything, Richard Panek’s new book shows that the story of how discoveries are made is just as exciting as the discoveries themselves. At its heart it’s the story of scientists who made unexpected discoveries that challenged what we know about the Universe. From Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias’ accidental discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, to Vera Rubin’s unintentional discovery of dark matter, to the astounding finding by two teams of scientists locked in furious competition that our Universe will expand forever, none of it was expected. And yet dark matter and dark energy together make up about 96 percent of the Universe (the remaining four percent, referring to the title of the book, being stars, planets, gas and all the atoms that make up us).

To understand dark matter and, in particular, dark energy involves a struggle to make astronomy compatible with physics, and it is this that drives much of the drama. It is in the chapters describing the discovery of dark energy, where Panek chronicles the competitive edge between the Supernova Cosmology Patrol – made of physicists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory led by Saul Perlmutter – and the High-Z team made from astronomers at various institutions led by Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, that the book excels. The two teams fought tooth and nail to beat the other to the results, and in the end they independently made the discovery that turned cosmology on its head.

The scientists’ personal tales of discovery are almost romantic in a sense, and Panek’s book inspires and awes in equal measure. Surely anyone who has doubts about dark matter and dark energy would reconsider after reading The 4% Universe. If it has a real fault, it’s that the story of the ‘dark universe’ doesn’t have an end yet, which Panek acknowledges with a ‘to be continued’, and hence we’re left with an anticlimax, although that can hardly be helped. Perhaps, one day though, there will be a sequel. Until then we can only anticipate the discoveries ahead of us.

Keith Cooper