The 4% Universe. Richard Panek

(Audiolibro). I was expecting this to be a book describing dark matter/energy, and I got two surprises: The main one is tat this book is mostly about HOW and BY WHOM the most recent theories in Cosmology have been developed, a really candid, insider's look into competing teams of scientist and academics, with all the personality traits and politics that influence the scientific practice. The other one, is how surprisingly up to date the book is, it was published just last year. On the good side, I kind of recognized all of the topics, funny enough there was a reference to events in the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo that happened at the time I was working next door on the other institution founded by MikeL, RIM. On the bad side, I realized how much I don't understand of cosmology. I wish I had been reading it on paper, because as I was driving I sometimes tuned out of the plot about the different teams and their conflicts, and then he would describe a crucial aspect of the theory, which I couldn't quite catch...

Some ideas that caught my attention:
- In 50,000 years of civilization, our generation is the first to be able to answer some of the most fundamental questions about life, the universe and reality. Those formerly known as philosophical questions, now known simply as areas of scientific research.

- This knowledge is produced by a very, very small subset of our fellow citizens. All we know about the expansion of the universe, the nature of matter and energy, the age and size of the universe, was discovered by a group of people barely larger than the population of my high school. The most significant knowledge, created by so few.

- Some of the most amazing facts about the universe, can be described with extremely precise measurements, based just on creative experiment design, careful data collection and hard work at the lab.

- Why the sky is dark, since in every direction of the sky there is light coming to us form one of the billion starts of the billions of galaxies? Because the rate of expansion of the universe is such that the light from those stars will never reach us. we have only know this a few years.

- ...and of course, everything that we can detect, all we can see and measure, everything we used to call reality, is only the 4% of it. the other 94%, the part we can only infer, is the other 96%!