All Categories
    Filters
    Preferences
    Search

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

    £22.46
    £24.95
    Price-Match is available in-store for recommended titles in CCCU module handbooks
    ISBN: 9780674248991
    Products specifications
    Attribute nameAttribute value
    AuthorSchilling, Govert
    Pub Date27/05/2022
    BindingHardback
    Pages336
    Publisher: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
    Ship to
    *
    *
    Shipping Method
    Name
    Estimated Delivery
    Price
    No shipping options
    Availability: Available for despatch from the bookshop in 48 hours
    If existing models of the structure of the universe are correct, then 85 percent of the cosmos comprises a substance called dark matter. Yet no direct evidence of dark matter exists. Award-winning science journalist Govert Schilling details the quest to detect dark matter and how the search has helped us to understand the universe we inhabit.

    An award-winning science journalist details the quest to isolate and understand dark matter-and shows how that search has helped us to understand the universe we inhabit.

    When you train a telescope on outer space, you can see luminous galaxies, nebulae, stars, and planets. But if you add all that together, it comprises only 15 percent of the matter in the universe. Despite decades of research, the nature of the remaining 85 percent is unknown. We call it dark matter.

    In The Elephant in the Universe, Govert Schilling explores the fascinating history of the search for dark matter. Evidence for its existence comes from a wealth of astronomical observations. Theories and computer simulations of the evolution of the universe are also suggestive: they can be reconciled with astronomical measurements only if dark matter is a dominant component of nature. Physicists have devised huge, sensitive instruments to search for dark matter, which may be unlike anything else in the cosmos-some unknown elementary particle. Yet so far dark matter has escaped every experiment. Indeed, dark matter is so elusive that some scientists are beginning to suspect there might be something wrong with our theories about gravity or with the current paradigms of cosmology. Schilling interviews both believers and heretics and paints a colorful picture of the history and current status of dark matter research, with astronomers and physicists alike trying to make sense of theory and observation.

    Taking a holistic view of dark matter as a problem, an opportunity, and an example of science in action, The Elephant in the Universe is a vivid tale of scientists puzzling their way toward the true nature of the universe.