Book Review: The Invisible Universe, Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe

Abstract

THE INVISIBLE UNIVERSE Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe. Jeremiah P. Ostriker and Simon Mitton (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2013). Pp. xxii + 299. $27.95. ISBN 978-0-691-13430-7.As witnessed by classics such as James Jeans's The mysterious universe, Willem de Sitter's Kosmos and Arthur Eddington's The expanding universe, cosmology has for nearly a century been a favourite subject for science books aimed at a general readership. The book under review is one of numerous books of its kind and it follows a pattern that was familiar to Jeans and his generation: to tell about the most recent developments by presenting them as the culmination of a long historical tradition. The two authors have written an engaging and fairly detailed narrative that focuses on developments in the twentieth century, from Einstein's cosmological model of 1917 to the sensational 'discovery' of dark energy about eighty years later. Aware of the continuities as well as discontinuities in history, they begin their cosmic journey with a brief prologue on the development from Aristarchus to Einstein. This part is fragmentary and meant only as an introduction. Yet it is disturbing to read that Ptolemy's Almagest was a standard astronomical work in Europe for about 1,400 years, and it is no less disturbing - or revealing? - to read concerning Galileo's discoveries of Jupiter's satellites and the phases of Venus: At a stroke, these observations decisively demolished the Aristotelian cosmos (p. 11).As indicated by the title, a substantial part of the book deals with the problems of dark matter and structure formation in the universe. These are the areas in which one of the authors, the distinguished astrophysicist Jeremiah Ostriker, did pioneering work in the 1970s, and they are explained very well. (The other author, Simon Mitton, will be known to historians of astronomy for his biography of Fred Hoyle.) Heart of darkness also covers even more recent developments such as dark energy, inflation theory and - briefly - multiverse speculations. These parts are written clearly and authoritatively, although they are somewhat disappointing from a historical point of view. For example, they ignore developments before the 1970s such as the fascinating history of how the cosmological constant eventually became identified with the vacuum energy predicted by quantum mechanics. Incidentally, the two authors express some dislike of the standard interpretation of dark energy as a manifestation of the cosmological constant, a quantity they hope will be replaced by something more plausible in the future (p. …