If you liked Robert Kirshner’s 2002 book, The Extravagant Universe, then I think you might like Richard Panek’s 2011 book even more. The subject is cosmology and the search for two key numbers describing the universe: how fast is the universe expanding, and how quickly is that expansion slowing down? Kirshner’s sub-title was “exploding stars, dark energy and the accelerating cosmos,” while Panek’s is “Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and The Race to Discover the Rest of Reality.” Both sum things up very well.
The surprise is that the rate of expansion is not slowing down, it is increasing, thus requiring mysterious Dark Energy to explain the acceleration. This, and the need for invisible mass to explain galactic rotation, represents a major change in our understanding of the cosmos.
Panek writes in a very accessible style, making the complex concepts of cosmology easy to understand. He provides a balanced, outsider’s perspective when describing the race to use supernovas to calculate the two key numbers, where Kirshner was associated with one of the teams and writes from that team’s perspective. Panek also provides an update on the efforts to understand dark matter and dark energy, and how strange it is that most of the universe – 72.8% dark energy, 22.7% dark matter – is unknown to us, leaving only 4.5% composed of familiar baryonic matter.
Books I've Read 