The 4 Percent Universe, Richard Panek
The 4 Percent Universe, Richard Panek
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The 4 Percent Universe
Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

Author: Richard Panek

Narrator: Ray Porter

Unabridged: 10 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/10/2011

Categories: Nonfiction, Science

Synopsis

Over the past few decades, a handful of scientists have been racing to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only four percent of it consists of the matter that makes up you, me, our books, and every star and planet. The rest is completely unknown. Richard Panek tells the dramatic story of the quest to find this dark matter and an even more bizarre substance called dark energy. This is perhaps the greatest mystery in all of science, and solving it will bring fame, funding, and certainly a Nobel Prize. Based on indepth reporting and interviews with the major playersfrom Berkeleys feisty, excitable Saul Perlmutter and Harvards witty but exacting Robert Kirshner to the doyenne of astronomy, Vera Rubinthe book offers an intimate portrait of the bitter rivalries and fruitful collaborations, the eureka moments and blind alleys, that have fueled their search, redefined science, and reinvented the universe. The stakes couldnt be higher. Our view of the cosmos is profoundly wrong, and Copernicus was only the beginning: not just Earth, but all common matter is a marginal part of existence. Paneks fastpaced narrative, filled with original reporting and behindthescenes details, brings this epic story to life for the very first time.

About Richard Panek

RICHARD PANEK, a Guggenheim Fellow in science writing, is the author of The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality, which won the American Institute of Physics communication award in 2012, and the co-author with Temple Grandin of The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum, a New York Times bestseller. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Riku on August 14, 2014

Now thisis how an honest-to-goodness popular science book ought to be like. The book basically tracks the same story as A Universe from Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss and even has Lawrence as a character every now and then. Because I was familiar with the story and its ending, this time around I cou......more

Goodreads review by Manny on September 23, 2013

What a very strange book this is, and what a very strange guy Richard Panek seems to be. I know many autistic-spectrum people, and I wonder if he isn't a little autistic. One of the most characteristic things about autistic people is the unevenness in their range of abilities. They are usually extre......more

Goodreads review by aPriL does feral sometimes on February 09, 2021

The '4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality' by Richard Panek is a very readable history of the discovery of dark matter and dark energy, including brief biographies of the scientists involved. Particularly, it illuminates how the pressures of being a hum......more

Goodreads review by Atila on September 01, 2017

Que livro gostoso de ler. Panek explica da concepção da ideia de Big Bang à descoberta recente de matéria escura e energia escura. O livro é bem compreensivo e bem explicado, daqueles que expõe as perguntas e ideias que levam à formulação de uma nova teoria, além dos testes feitos depois que corrobo......more

Goodreads review by Kevin on August 30, 2022

No study of Dark Matter is legitimate without frequent references to Vera Rubin (Vera Florence Cooper Rubin, 1928 - 2016). She is the astronomer who’s observations and calculations provided the first evidence of Dark Matter. Rubin’s rock-solid mathematics exposed a discrepancy between what conventio......more

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