Warning: Geeky Science Content

Yet another post full of geeky content. My friend Nate and I were talking about "dark matter" on our drive down to Connecticut the other day. I couldn't remember what the evidence was that suggested there must be a lot more mass in the universe so I looked it up today. The strongest evidence comes from measuring the speed at which rotating galaxies are spinning. Since rotating galaxies should follow Kepler's laws, you can calculate how much mass they should contain by measuring how fast they are spinning. There are tons of spinning galaxies to measure and it turns out they are all spinning faster than their expected mass would suggest. This leads scientists to believe there must be some other mass in those galaxies that we are not detecting. This "dark" mass would account for 80-95% of all the mass in the universe!

I was pretty much right about our"dark energy" discussion. Fairly recent studies suggest that the universe is not only expanding, but expanding at an accelrating pace. Dark energy simply accounts for whatever energy we are currently unaware of that would provide the force necessary to accelerate our universe as it expands.

Finally, my geeky reading brought me to The Particle Adventure. This is a great tutorial that I have only just begun to read, but am hooked on. So far I've gotten a very understandable and readable explanation of fundamental partilces and forces. If you want to learn about quarks, hadrons, baryons or the strong force, this is the place to go.