13 things that don't make sense The most baffling scientific mysteries of our time

Verdict: Some of the topics are more accessible than others, and a background in physics will help in reading certain chapters. However, even when dealing with some of the more difficult topics, the text is liberally sprinkled with biographical and historical context to keep the reader engaged and concrete examples to aid understanding. Recommended for general science collections in public and academic libraries. Background: Expanding the author's 2005 article of the same title published in New Scientist (and one of the most forwarded articles in the magazine's online history), where he was senior features editor, this volume addresses 13 crucial scientific questions involving physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology, and medicine in which there is a minority viewpoint (sometimes only one person) whose current findings challenge the established models. These examples of the hard work of paradigm shift are truly fascinating. Brooks examines the uncomfortable phase that comes before a radical change in scientific thought--or the failure of a proposed model.--Carla H. Lee, Univ. of Virginia Lib., Charlottesville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Brooks expands a New Scientist article on phenomena that challenge accepted theory. He starts with one of the biggest: that 96 percent of the universe that can't be detected. Dark matter and dark energy are attempts to explain why galaxies don't disintegrate under their momentum, and why distant galaxies are moving away from each other faster than expected. As mathematical models, the two posited phenomena work fine. What nobody has yet explained is what sort of physical reality they represent. Are they just fudge factors? Or could the observations be wrong? Two space probes launched in the 1970s seem to defy Newton's laws of gravity. Are the measurements inaccurate, or is some unseen force affecting them? Cold fusion set off a scientific furor when it was first announced in 1989, but was branded as pseudoscience when nobody could duplicate the experiments. Now a few people appear to have done so. Which is flawed: the experiments or the notion that cold fusion is bogus? Brooks provides cogent character sketches as he introduces the scientists involved in these investigations. He also effectively plays the gadfly, taking potshots at the scientific orthodoxy these phenomena call into question. Sometimes this seems overdone. Failure to account for the origins of life or death hardly seems a reason to question the validity of the scientific enterprise. On the other hand, there is considerable reason to question Viking's failure in 1976 to detect signs of life on Mars. In fact, a Viking experiment that gave fairly clear signs of organic activity was written off as a "false positive," apparently because it didn't fit scientific preconceptions. There is also legitimate controversy about the two medical topics included: the placebo effect and homeopathy. While Brooks carefully avoids labeling anyone a crackpot or charlatan, it's hard to escape the suspicion that some of his subjects are exactly that. Which ones? Well, every reader is likely to have a different idea. Great fodder for arguments, written in a lively style. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

1 THE MISSING UNIVERSE We can only account for 4 percent of the cosmos The Indian tribes around the sleepy Arizona city of Flagstaff have an interesting take on the human struggle for peace and harmony. According to their traditions, the difficulties and confusions of life have their roots in the arrangement of the stars in the heavens--or rather the lack of it. Those jewels in the sky were meant to help us find a tranquil, contented existence, but when First Woman was using the stars to write the moral laws into the blackness, Coyote ran out of patience and flung them out of her bowl, spattering them across the skies. From Coyote's primal impatience came the mess of constellations in the heavens and the chaos of human existence. The astronomers who spend their nights gazing at the skies over Flagstaff may find some comfort in this tale. On top of the hill above the city sits a telescope whose observations of the heavens, of the mess of stars and the way they move, have led us into a deep confusion. At the beginning of the twentieth century, starlight passing through the Clark telescope at Flagstaff's Lowell Observatory began a chain of observations that led us to one of the strangest discoveries in science: that most of the universe is missing. If the future of science depends on identifying the things that don't make sense, the cosmos has a lot to offer. We long to know what the universe is made of, how it really works: in other words, its constituent particles and the forces that guide their interactions. This is the essence of the "final theory" that physicists dream of: a pithy summation of the cosmos and its rules of engagement. Sometimes newspaper, magazine, and TV reports give the impression that we're almost there. But we're not. It is going to be hard to find that final theory until we have dealt with the fact that the majority of the particles and forces it is supposed to describe are entirely unknown to science. We are privileged enough to be living in the golden age of cosmology; we know an enormous amount about how the cosmos came to be, how it evolved into its current state, and yet we don't actually know what most of it is. Almost all of the universe is missing: 96 percent, to put a number on it. The stars we see at the edges of distant galaxies seem to be moving under the guidance of invisible hands that hold the stars in place and stop them from flying off into empty space. According to our best calculations, the substance of those invisible guiding hands--known to scientists as dark matter--is nearly a quarter of the total amount of mass in the cosmos. Dark matter is just a name, though. We don't have a clue what it is. And then there is the dark energy. When Albert Einstein showed that mass and energy were like two sides of the same coin, that one could be converted into the other using the recipe E = mc2, he unwittingly laid the foundations for what is now widely regarded as the most embarrassing problem in physics. Dark energy is scientists' name for the ghostly essence that is making the fabric of the universe expand ever faster, creating ever more empty space between galaxies. Use Einstein's equation for converting energy to mass, and you'll discover that dark energy is actually 70 percent of the mass (after Einstein, we should really call it mass-energy) in the cosmos. No one knows where this energy comes from, what it is, whether it will keep on accelerating the universe's expansion forever, or whether it will run out of steam eventually. When it comes to the major constituents of the universe, it seems no one knows anything much. The familiar world of atoms--the stuff that makes us up--accounts for only a tiny fraction of the mass and energy in the universe. The rest is a puzzle that has yet to be solved. How did we get here? Via one man's obsession with life on Mars. In 1894 Percival Lowell, a wealthy Massachusetts industrialist, had become f Excerpted from 13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time by Michael Brooks All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.