Summary

Spanning disciplines from biology to cosmology, chemistry to psychology to physics, Michael Brooks thrillingly captures the excitement of scientific discovery. Science's best-kept secret is this: even today, thereare experimental results that the most brilliant scientists cannot explain. In the past, similar "anomalies" have revolutionized our world. If history is any precedent, we should look to today's inexplicable results to forecast the future of science. Michael Brooks heads to the scientific frontier to confront thirteen modern-day anomalies and what they might reveal about tomorrow's breakthroughs.

Author Biography

Michael Brooks, who holds a PhD in quantum physics, is an editor at New Scientist. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Independent, Observer, Times Higher Educational Supplement, and even Playboy. He is a regular speaker and debate chair at the Science Festival in Brighton, UK.

Prologue

1 THE MISSING UNIVERSE
We can only account for 4 percent of the cosmos

2 THE PIONEER ANOMALY
Two spacecraft are flouting the laws of physics

3 VARYING CONSTANTS
Destabilizing our view of the universe

4 COLD FUSION
Nuclear energy without the drama

5 LIFE
Are you more than just a bag of chemicals?

6 VIKING
NASA scientists found evidence for life on Mars. Then they changed their minds.

7 THE WOW! SIGNAL
Has ET already been in touch?

8 A GIANT VIRUS
It’s a freak that could rewrite the story of life

9 DEATH
Evolution’s problem with self-destruction

10 SEX
There are better ways to reproduce

11 FREE WILL
Your decisions are not your own

12 THE PLACEBO EFFECT
Who’s being deceived?

13 HOMEOPATHY
It’s patently absurd, so why won’t it go away?

Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes And Sources
Index

Supplemental Materials

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Excerpts

1
THE MISSING UNIVERSE
We can only account for 4 percent of the cosmos

The Indian tribes around the sleepy Arizona city of Flagstaff have an interesting take on the human struggle for peace and harmony. According to their traditions, the difficulties and confusions of life have their roots in the arrangement of the stars in the heavens--or rather the lack of it. Those jewels in the sky were meant to help us find a tranquil, contented existence, but when First Woman was using the stars to write the moral laws into the blackness, Coyote ran out of patience and flung them out of her bowl, spattering them across the skies. From Coyote's primal impatience came the mess of constellations in the heavens and the chaos of human existence.

The astronomers who spend their nights gazing at the skies over Flagstaff may find some comfort in this tale. On top of the hill above the city sits a telescope whose observations of the heavens, of the mess of stars and the way they move, have led us into a deep confusion. At the beginning of the twentieth century, starlight passing through the Clark telescope at Flagstaff's Lowell Observatory began a chain of observations that led us to one of the strangest discoveries in science: that most of the universe is missing.

If the future of science depends on identifying the things that don't make sense, the cosmos has a lot to offer. We long to know what the universe is made of, how it really works: in other words, its constituent particles and the forces that guide their interactions. This is the essence of the "final theory" that physicists dream of: a pithy summation of the cosmos and its rules of engagement. Sometimes newspaper, magazine, and TV reports give the impression that we're almost there. But we're not. It is going to be hard to find that final theory until we have dealt with the fact that the majority of the particles and forces it is supposed to describe are entirely unknown to science. We are privileged enough to be living in the golden age of cosmology; we know an enormous amount about how the cosmos came to be, how it evolved into its current state, and yet we don't actually know what most of it is. Almost all of the universe is missing: 96 percent, to put a number on it.

The stars we see at the edges of distant galaxies seem to be moving under the guidance of invisible hands that hold the stars in place and stop them from flying off into empty space. According to our best calculations, the substance of those invisible guiding hands--known to scientists as dark matter--is nearly a quarter of the total amount of mass in the cosmos. Dark matter is just a name, though. We don't have a clue what it is.

And then there is the dark energy. When Albert Einstein showed that mass and energy were like two sides of the same coin, that one could be converted into the other using the recipe E = mc2, he unwittingly laid the foundations for what is now widely regarded as the most embarrassing problem in physics. Dark energy is scientists' name for the ghostly essence that is making the fabric of the universe expand ever faster, creating ever more empty space between galaxies. Use Einstein's equation for converting energy to mass, and you'll discover that dark energy is actually 70 percent of the mass (after Einstein, we should really call it mass-energy) in the cosmos. No one knows where this energy comes from, what it is, whether it will keep on accelerating the universe's expansion forever, or whether it will run out of steam eventually. When it comes to the major constituents of the universe, it seems no one knows anything much. The familiar world of atoms--the stuff that makes us up--accounts for only a tiny fraction of the mass and energy in the universe. The rest is a puzzle that has yet to be solved.

How did we get here? Via one man's obsession with life on Mars. In 1894 Percival Lowell, a wealthy Massachusetts industrialist, had become f

Excerpted from 13 Things that Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time by Michael Brooks
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