cover image The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter

The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter

Katherine Freese. Princeton Univ, $29.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-691-15335-3

Freese, a professor of physics at the University of Michigan, begins this exploration into the mystery of dark matter by relating her journey to become one of the field’s early researchers. Years of collecting data and positing unknown cosmic entities led to the probable existence of this substance, and evidence slowly began to appear despite scientists’ inability to quantify the “collisionless dark matter.” As background, Freese describes general relativity, Hubble expansion, quarks, and antimatter, doing her best to present abstruse concepts clearly, and sprinkling the text with personal anecdotes. However, her explanations too often presuppose a better grasp of university-level physics than most laypeople will possess, and the alphabet soup of acronyms only adds to potential confusion (a reference glossary would help the reader keep these straight). Although Freese does her best to elucidate extremely difficult material, she compares studying physics without math to listening to poetry in a language one doesn’t know: “Without having learned the language of mathematics.+.. its beauty is hard to access.” Sadly, it’s an apt analogy and the mystery of dark matter remains lost in the translation. (July)