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In dark silence, deep underground, experiments
are now under way that may resolve the age-old question
of what makes up the universe. More than two thousand years
ago, Aristotle proposed adding a new substance, the qunitessence,
to the four elements -- earth, air, fire, and water -- of
which everything was then believed to be made. Aristotle's
fifth essence could be neither seen nor felt, but it permeated
all of creation. Today, astronomers have established that
the visible galaxies are surrounded by a vast cosmic sea
of mysterious material that is invisible to our telescopes
and at least ten times as abundant as all the matter we
can see. And elementary particle physicists are exploring
the possibility that such matter exists not only "out
there" but "in here" as well, continuously
traversing the earth and ourselves.
The scientific search for this elusive dark
matter is now challenging our keenest minds and most sensitive
instruments. In The Fifth Essence, a leading thinker
in that quest offers an engaging insider's tour of a startling
universe in which everything that we are made of and all
that we can see may be only an insignificant bit of "noise,"
a cosmic afterthought. At hand are new solutions to such
ultimate puzzles as the fundamental structure of matter,
the formation of galaxies, and whether the universe will
continue to expand forever or halt and reverse, ending in
a fiery "Big Crunch."
Lawrence M. Krauss is Associate Professor
of Physics and Astronomy at Yale University and Visiting
Scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
He is the author of more than sixty scientific papers and
numerous popular articles on physics and astronomy.
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