The Story of Dark Matter

So is it true? Did Fritz have a very difficult personality which inhibited the spread of his discoveries.

One of the best Dark Matter novels is:

The Missing Matter (Isaac Asimov's The Next Wave #3) by Thomas R. McDonough. Bantam Spectra (1992) ISBN: 0553293648. You can get this POD via Thomas R. McDonough's home page. Thomas R. McDonough was a protege of Carl Sagan's, has two SF novels published, was SETI Advisor to the Planetart Society, and a nonfiction book on the history of the Space Program.

Fritz Zwicky was an amazing man who did not suffer fools gladly. I did meet him once at Caltech, were he immediately barked "Who the hell are you?" with which many in the blogosophere can empathize. Fritz Zwicky's "Ideocosm" (the space of all possible ideas) was a methodology that he developed and wrote a book about.

The mapping of all possible ideas was proposed and begun decades ago by famous astronomer Fritz Zwicky.

He called the space of all possible ideas the "ideocosm." He worked out systematic methodologies to fill in missing parts of that space.

He was eccentric, undervalued, but a genius who'd fought his way up from self-taught technician to Professor at prestigious Caltech.

He influenced, among others, the late Herman Kahn, the #1 civian advisor to US defense policy in the cold war.

Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy says, among other things:

"Eccentric Swiss-American astronomer who was professor of astronomy at Caltech. He studied extragalactic supernovae and the distribution of galaxies in Coma Berenices (Preston 1987, p. 113). He was the first to consider gravitational lensing by extragalactic objects (Zwicky 1937; Perlick 2000, p. 201)."

"Zwicky had a difficult personality, and intentionally intimidated his quiet colleague Baade (Preston 1987). Zwicky was also fond of calling people 'spherical bastards,' because they were bastards every way he looked at them. According to Preston (1987), Zwicky was known to accost unfamiliar students in the astronomy building at Caltech (Robinson Hall) with the interrogation 'Who the hell are you!?'"

Jonathan,

Thanks for the flattering mention and the very interesting blog about Zwicky. I didn't know him personally when I was at Caltech, but was fascinated by some of his writings on his big-picture ideas about understanding the universe. [Another big-picture look at the universe that I recommend is Cosmic Discovery by astronomer Martin D. Harwit. It even estimates that at least sixty major new phenomena await discovery.]

My novel, The Missing Matter, is not available via print-on-demand right now due to legal complications connected with the death of book packager Byron Preiss. [It's my novel, The Architects of Hyperspace, that I reprinted via POD after it went out of print at Avon.]

The Missing Matter came about because Isaac Asimov and Byron Preiss wanted to create a new series of novels called The Next Wave. Each book would be written about a scientific theme, and would have an opening essay by Asimov, a novel about that theme, and a closing essay by a scientist. They invited me to write a novel and gave me several topics to choose from. Most of them were standard, but one of them was dark matter. I said that nobody, to the best of my knowledge, had written a novel about dark matter, so I chose that one.

I created a story in which I envisioned the possibility that matter in parallel universes might influence ours. I had not heard of any theory proposing this, though after I wrote the novel, I learned that other scientists had proposed this idea independently.

In the novel, a spaceship travels through a number of parallel universes, in each of which the constants of physics are slightly different.

Dark matter was also known as missing matter. I chose the latter as the title because it sounded more mysterious.

Sadly, shortly after the book came out, Asimov died, and so did the series.

Thomas R. McDonough

Dark-matter SF? Well, Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence is set around a war against dark matter "photino birds".

Well, there's the painfully obvious "His Dark Materials" series ...

Thank you for the correction and clarification, Tom.

See the below for another Dark Matter concern, plus diagram.

'Missing Dwarf Galaxy' Problem May Be Solved

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070914173533.htm

Source: W. M. Keck Observatory
Date: September 17, 2007

Science Daily -- Scientists may have solved a discrepancy between the number of extremely small, faint galaxies predicted to exist near the Milky Way and the number actually observed.

Distribution of newly discovered dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. (Credit: M. Geha)

In an attempt to resolve the "Missing Dwarf Galaxy" problem, two astronomers used the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to study a population of the darkest, most lightweight galaxies known, each containing 99% dark matter. The findings suggest the "Missing Dwarf Galaxy" problem is not as severe as previously thought, and may have been solved completely.

"It seems that very small, ultra-faint galaxies are far more plentiful than we thought," said Dr. Marla Geha, co-author of the study and a Plaskett Research Fellow at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Canada. "If you asked me last year whether galaxies this small and this dark existed, I would have said no. I'm astonished that so many tiny, dark matter-dominated galaxies have now been discovered."

The Missing Dwarf Galaxy puzzle comes from a prediction of the "Cold Dark Matter" model, which explains the growth and evolution of the universe. It predicts large galaxies like the Milky Way should be surrounded by a swarm of up to several hundred smaller galaxies known as "dwarf galaxies." However, until recently, only 11 such companions were known to be orbiting the Milky Way. [truncated]

This is exactly my field of interest! One of my hobbies is to track down all stories that contain dark matter and read them.

I recently finished two novels with the title Dark Matter. One was good, written by Rodman Philbrick. This is a story about an astronomer who discovers that people he has been working with are murdered, maybe because of some potential discovery that the murderer wants for himself to secure the Nobel Prize. The ending is not what you would expect, and the portrait of science in progress is fairly accurate (except for the occasions when bright theorists meet at an observatory to find out about something important).

The other one was not as good, but nevertheless a fun read. It's written by Garfield Reeves-Stevens and features at least one mad genius. A really mad genius: a murderer who teaches cosmology to his victims before killing them.

Both of these lean towards alternative formulations for gravity instead of really discovering dark matter.

There is also a short story at spacewesterns.com about herding artificial "cows" to get energy from dark matter.

Dark matter is mentioned in the last (latest) Ringworld book by Larry Niven, but I can't say that he makes anything interesting with it. (And the distribution is not realistic.)

Then I prefer the fantasy angle, like in His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, or in the latest Young Wizards book by Diane Duane. It's fun to see what authors are inspired to by the concept of dark matter.