Experimental Blog # 235

Comments about the book "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs", the Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe by Lisa Randall

    In the author's own words, "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs explains our current knowledge about the Universe, the Milky Way, the Solar System, as well as what makes for a habitable zone and life on Earth."
    And, "Dark matter constitutes 85 percent of the matter in the Universe while ordinary matter - such as that contained in the stars, gas, and people - constitutes only 15 percent."
    The astrophysicist Lisa Randall theorizes that as the Solar System journeys around the Milky Way galaxy, and as it oscillates up and down, it periodically passes "through a disk of dark matter that is embedded in the plane of the Milky Way." This "periodicity" occurs roughly every 35 million years. The gravity of the dark matter disk can dislodge comets from the "Oort Cloud" that surrounds the Solar System and send them crashing towards the Sun and into the Earth.
    Beginning around 300 years ago people thought that Isaac Newton had "figured out the Universe", and some people even put his name on the "Newtonian Universe". Then, around the middle of the nineteenth century, along came James Clerk Maxwell; and he created, with some help from others, a different physics and universe for electromagnetic waves. Then just about 100 years ago came Albert Einstein. And he, too, with some help from others, put the two universes together. For many years, since then, people often talked about the "Einsteinian Universe".
    Lisa Randall writes about the dozens of people in the last century, or so, but especially in the last 30 to 50 years, who have contributed to the science of astrophysics, and many other sciences, too. There are so many contributors and there is so much "astounding" research that it seems quite incorrect to put anybody's name on the Universe today.