Just to remind ourselves of the state of human knowledge:

Dark energy changed everything we thought we knew about the composition (and ultimate fate) of our universe. Scientists currently estimate it accounts for a whopping 72% of everything the universe is made of, followed by 24% dark matter, and 4% "normal" matter — the latter being every star, galaxy, planet, and so forth contained in the cosmos. (My spousal unit, Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll, is fond of telling how folks are always giving him grief that we only know about 4% of all the matter in the universe. "The miracle is that we understand 4%!" he exclaims.)
To make matters worse, the universe we see with our eyes is less than 1% of what we know. I also read recently that some consider dark matter to be the normal stuff, and what we call normal stuff to be the actual anomaly—the extra, accidental, disturbing stuff of the universe. The freak show of the universe is what we are and what we can see and understand.
Picture_6.png
  • Ivan T
Also, this summer I read with pleasure and some difficulty Sean Carroll's book From Eternity to Here. And, around that time, I read with even more pleasure and less difficulty a book by the other Sean Carroll, Forms Most Beautiful. The reason for the extra pleasure had to do with the fact that I'm more interested in the mechanism of life than the mechanics of time.