In the Dark

Years ago, when people were being urged to drink a lot of milk, it became clear that some were lactose intolerant. As scientists did further research they found more and more adults unable to digest dairy products. The scientists wondered why so many people seemed to have this defect until it was realized in fact that they looking at it all wrong. These scientists were mostly Caucasian and had assumed they were the norm when if fact the majority of adults in the world cannot digest lactose easily. It turns out that only people of European descent, those descended from a few African tribes and a few other groups may be able to digest dairy as adults. What was assumed to be normal was in fact an anomaly.


We may be making the same error when we are looking at the universe...we are assuming we are the norm when in fact the matter and energy we are made of and are familiar with may make up a very small part of the universe! It turns out that roughly 70% of the Universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 25%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the Universe. Come to think of it, maybe it shouldn't be called "normal" matter at all, since it is such a small fraction of the Universe.


This is turning our view of the universe upside down, that we are in the minority and something that we know so little about, and possibly can know so little about, comprises most of this universe. It's a scary thought...if true.


For decades physicists have been trying to tie everything up into a Grand Unified Theory. The current great best hope has to do with string theory or should I say theories as there is not one but dozens. Unfortunately I don't believe the physicists working with string theory have taken into account the new discoveries of dark matter and energy...heck even the Big Bang and the professed 13.7 billion years of age of our universe may be overturned as astronomers believe they have discovered stars older than that, mature galaxies when the universe was supposedly young and the giant walls of superclusters of galaxies that are believed to have taken more time than that to have developed.


OTOH dark matter and energy may not exist at all. It could be that we are running out of time. Or our theories of gravity are all wrong especially on the large scale.  Or that even the speed of light has changed over the eons. I find it amusing when pundits claim the end of science is near as everything has been learned and it's just a matter of fine-tuning the details. It seems to me our knowledge of the universe is like an onion or a matryoshka doll where we see/know one layer only to find another beneath, having been there all the time, only hidden from us by ignorance. The science established by the Greeks and Romans suited our needs for centuries; then came Sir Isaac Newton who revealed further workings of reality. We found his laws useful for centuries until along came Albert Einstein followed shortly by Werner Heisenberg and others who showed the effects of quantum mechanics underlying the Newtonian world view. Now we are coming to realize that there may be still more to the universe then we have thought. It turns out we may indeed still be in the dark as we take out first steps out of our cradle into the dark.