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Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: March 18th, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/magazine/11dark.t.html?ex=...
Three days after learning that he won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, George Smoot was talking about the universe. Sitting across from him ... was Saul Perlmutter, a fellow cosmologist. Smoots and Perlmutters work is part of a revolution that has forced their colleagues to confront a universe wholly unlike any they have ever known, one that is made of only 4 percent of the kind of matter we have always assumed it to be. The rest 96 percent of the universe is ... Dark. This is not dark as in distant or invisible. This is dark as in unknown. It lies ... beyond the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The motions of galaxies dont make sense unless we infer the existence of dark matter. Understanding dark energy ... seems to really require understanding and using both [general relativity and quantum mechanics] theories at the same time. Its been so hard that were even willing to consider listening to string theorists, Perlmutter says, referring to work that posits numerous dimensions beyond the traditional (one of time and three of space). According to quantum theory, particles can pop into and out of existence. In that case, maybe the universe itself was born in one such quantum pop. And ... why not many universes? This is just one of a number of theories that have been popping into existence ... in the past few years: parallel universes, intersecting universes or, in the case of Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog just last summer, a superposition of universes.
Note: Many scientists today claim that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old with an uncertainty of 200 million years. Yet in the late 1800's, scientists were convinced that the age of the Earth was less than 100 million years old. In the early 1700's, Isaac Newton and his contemporaries believed the universe to be about 6,000 years old plus or minus a few hundred years. So in the last 300 years, the "scientific" age of our universe has increased by billions of years! What will it be in another 100 or 200 years?
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