The Canon by Natalie Angier Read Free Book Online

youthful burst of levity, and then the years start tugging on the back of your shorts. So, too, it was believed, for the universe: the gravitational pull of all its mass was supposed to be slowing down its rate of expansion. Instead, researchers have seen the opposite. The expansion is speeding up. Galaxies are flying away from one another at an ever increasing pace. Our universe has found a second wind. What is the meaning of this shadowy force, this type A provocateur, this energy so studiously seditious it hides behind dark glasses? Does its existence call into question the entire edifice of astrophysics, of what we've learned about the universe to date? To quote that most cerebral of comics, Steve Martin: "Nah!" Scientists are dazzled by dark energy. They are
impressed by its size and strength. They want very, very much to understand it. Nobody I spoke with, however, felt threatened by it. They have some ideas about what dark energy may be. They're open to other, better suggestions. They're just not about to consult a psychic for help in finding the body.
    After all, history is replete with "unfathomable" mysteries that have been fathomed into the archives. The physicist Robert Jaffe of MIT cited the case of what might be called spire and brimstone. The cathedrals and churches of Christendom traditionally were built on the highest promontory in town and outfitted with the loftiest steeples parishioners could afford, the better to reach toward heaven and vamp for the neighbors. Unfortunately, those tall, wooden towers attracted more than envy: churches were regularly struck by lightning and burned to varying degrees of a crisp. "Every time this happened, there would be a wrenching dialogue about sin and the vengeance of God," said Jaffe, "and what the parish had done to bring the wrath of the Lord upon them." Then, in the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin determined that lightning was an electric rather than an ecclesiastic phenomenon. He recommended that conducting rods be installed on all spires and rooftops, and the debates over the semiotics of lightning bolts vanished. Nowadays, a fire in a church is less likely to be considered an act of God than of a tippling priest who neglected to blow out the candles.
    Scientists may believe that much, if not all, of the universe will prove comprehensible, yet interestingly, this comprehensibility continues to astound them. Immanuel Kant observed that "the most astonishing thing about the universe is that it can be understood." This was hardly a clause in a prenuptial agreement. As the Princeton astrophysicist John Bahcall put it in an interview shortly before he died, we crawled out of the ocean, we are confined to a tiny landmass circling a midsize, middle-aged, pale-faced sun located in one arm of just another pinwheel galaxy among millions of star-spangled galaxies; yet we have come to comprehend the universe on the largest scales and longest time frames, from the subatomic out to the edge of the cosmos. "It's remarkable, it's extraordinary, and it didn't have to be that way," Bahcall said.
    In other words, we can count our lucky stars that the stars can be counted. "You can imagine a universe that's complicated no matter how you look at it or try to break it down," said Brian Greene. "But we don't live in that kind of universe, and I for one am grateful." The world may seem confusing, chaotic, unspeakably rude, yet underlying it all is a certain amount of order. "The wonder of science is that a few very simple ideas can yield incredibly rich phenomena," said Greene. "It's astounding that a few symbols on a blackboard underlie so much of what we experience." Ah, yes, "a few symbols on a blackboard," the smudged garden of glyphs that covered Greene's blackboard, and the green boards and the black-markered white boards of every physicist I visited. Physicists don't just scribble equations when they're posing for cartoonists. They scribble to one another, too. They talk the