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

By Govert Schilling

‘From a revered science writer, a clear, wide-ranging account of one of the deepest and most fascinating mysteries in astronomy’

– Martin Rees

Scientists are faced with a crisis that encompasses particle physics, astronomy and cosmology, and, as yet, there’s no solution  –  though hints may be in plain sight

Some 80 per cent of all matter in the Universe consists of unknown particles, but despite decades of research by the most brilliant minds on Earth, no one knows what the stuff really is. It’s a thought-provoking and humbling conclusion: even the matter we are composed of is little more than the visible tip of a weird, non-luminous iceberg.

Current wisdom has it that dark matter consists of a so far undiscovered type of elementary particle that hardly interacts with normal matter, making it almost impossible to detect. A whole industry of detectors is looking for the enigmatic particle – usually installed in deep underground laboratories to shield the sensitive equipment from spurious cosmic rays. Meanwhile, other physicists are searching for evidence of decaying dark matter in the wider Universe, or trying to create dark-matter particles in collider experiments. But so far none of these approaches has yielded any results.

Little surprise, then, that some scientists have started to doubt that dark-matter particles really exist. Who knows, the mysterious stuff may be a new state of matter, more akin to an all-pervasive field. Dark matter’s properties may be somehow connected to the equally puzzling discovery that empty space must also contain loads of mysterious ‘dark energy’ to account for the accelerating expansion of the Universe. Or our current understanding of gravity may be all wrong, leading us to believe in the existence of huge amounts of dark matter while there may be none at all. 

In The Elephant in the Universe, Govert Schilling take readers on a comprehensive tour through space and time and across the globe to explore the story of the dark-matter mystery and the researchers working to crack it. The book takes the form of 33 brief chapters, each giving a separate insight into just what this strange missing stuff might be. Taken together they provide a unique, state-of-the-art overview of the latest ideas and findings. With so many new particle experiments coming online, telescopes dedicated to finding a solution and bright researchers exploring the limits of theoretical physics, there is real hope, he says, that this combined effort will soon shed light on dark matter and open up a deeper understanding of the nature of reality itself.