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Heart of Darkness: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Invisible Universe
Heart of Darkness describes the incredible saga of humankind's quest to unravel the deepest secrets of the universe. Over the past thirty years, scientists have learned that two little-understood components--dark matter and dark energy--comprise most of the known cosmos, explain the growth of all cosmic structure, and hold the key to the universe's fate. The story of how evidence for the so-called "Lambda-Cold Dark Matter" model of cosmology has been gathered by generations of scientists throughout the world is told here by one of the pioneers of the field, Jeremiah Ostriker, and his coauthor Simon Mitton.
From humankind's early attempts to comprehend Earth's place in the solar system, to astronomers' exploration of the Milky Way galaxy and the realm of the nebulae beyond, to the detection of the primordial fluctuations of energy from which all subsequent structure developed, this book explains the physics and the history of how the current model of our universe arose and has passed every test hurled at it by the skeptics. Throughout this rich story, an essential theme is emphasized: how three aspects of rational inquiry--the application of direct measurement and observation, the introduction of mathematical modeling, and the requirement that hypotheses should be testable and verifiable--guide scientific progress and underpin our modern cosmological paradigm.
This monumental puzzle is far from complete, however, as scientists confront the mysteries of the ultimate causes of cosmic structure formation and the real nature and origin of dark matter and dark energy.
From humankind's early attempts to comprehend Earth's place in the solar system, to astronomers' exploration of the Milky Way galaxy and the realm of the nebulae beyond, to the detection of the primordial fluctuations of energy from which all subsequent structure developed, this book explains the physics and the history of how the current model of our universe arose and has passed every test hurled at it by the skeptics. Throughout this rich story, an essential theme is emphasized: how three aspects of rational inquiry--the application of direct measurement and observation, the introduction of mathematical modeling, and the requirement that hypotheses should be testable and verifiable--guide scientific progress and underpin our modern cosmological paradigm.
This monumental puzzle is far from complete, however, as scientists confront the mysteries of the ultimate causes of cosmic structure formation and the real nature and origin of dark matter and dark energy.
328 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2013
48 people are currently reading
189 people want to read
About the author
Jeremiah P. Ostriker
9 books2 followersJeremiah Paul Ostriker was an American astrophysicist and a professor of astronomy at Columbia University and a Charles A. Young Professor Emeritus at Princeton, where he also served as a senior research scholar. Ostriker also served as a university administrator as Provost of Princeton University.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
March 10, 2013
I won't pretend that I understood all of this book, but for someone who never took high school physics, this is as lucid an academic treatment of cosmology I've come across. Some of the matter in the earlier chapters seems like it isn't really necessary (Newton's laws and the Hubble constant), but these come nicely into play when Ostriker and Mitton draw on these to further illustrate more complex matters in the universe (dark matter being the biggest hurdle for most people). Ostriker participated in some of the earliest research on dark matter and energy and takes the narrative right up to the latest discoveries and research. There's quite a bit of math which is a little daunting, but for the high school grad who took physics should be able to get a grip on it. An appendix takes the math further for those who can handle it. Well illustrated, and although it sometimes strays into textbook-like narrative, strangely compelling. Makes me curious for further reads on the subject.
September 17, 2013
Well written. An excellent paper quality. Has an interesting appendices to calculate the mass of the Earth, The Sun or even our galaxy. Good explanation of Hubble's law, dark matter and dark energy. It explains why dark meter exists in the first place.
Our galaxy and others like that, which seem to consist mainly of a flat disk of stars, are actually embedded in a more or less spherical component of similar or greater mass. If this were not the case, the galaxy would have become wildly unstable, ultimately forming into the shape of a giant bar.
Our galaxy and others like that, which seem to consist mainly of a flat disk of stars, are actually embedded in a more or less spherical component of similar or greater mass. If this were not the case, the galaxy would have become wildly unstable, ultimately forming into the shape of a giant bar.
March 25, 2025
Cosmology as a scientific discipline is relatively young because of the problems in gathering the (literally cosmic level) data to choose between competing hypotheses. It is a singularly peculiar enterprise too, since the Universe as an object of study is sui generis - unlike the peas of Mendel that establish the nature of genes by abstracting from patterns discerned across a multitude of experiments, there is but one instance of its history and future and its sheer scale places it outside the realm of usual controlled laboratory interventions that are the beating heart of the scientific method. The idea of an intelligence someday morphing its ontological substrate, of a transhuman consciousness directing the evolution of the Whole, is vertiginous, though also a tribute to the grandiosity of a Universe that allows such self-transformative ambitions to emerge.
How can we construct a falsifiable theory that doesn’t trivially adapt to retrofit every observation but makes novel predictions from a coherent framework that is consistent with the terrestrial laws of physics? How can we avoid making the map as large as the territory?
How do we trust our model when we run into fundamental limits of direct evidence - for example, the fact that electromagnetic radiation emitted at the moment of creation and during subsequent developments was only free to travel towards us once matter density had dropped below a threshold that prevented scattering, and hence we cannot access any information before that epoch, even in principle? But then again, the development of twenty first century gravitational wave astronomy might open up novel avenues - all certitudes are destined to be contingent in retrospect.
Or the head spiraling realization that a finite bound on the speed of light combined with the accelerating expansion of space implies there are events whose knowledge is yet on its way to us (thus the more we wait - the more of its possibilities, that are a precondition for our "laws of nature", are revealed), and some are so far away that we'll never know anything about them, since they are moving away from us faster than the speed of light.
Of what one cannot speak one must be silent. Is the Universe there when nobody looks, where nobody cannot look even if they wished to?
How can we keep the ensnarement of theology - that is only natural when the matter of concern is existence itself - at bay, or at most use it as a guide for meditation rather than adjudication?
But before prejudiced haste turns us away from normative metaphysics as a source of inspiration, remember Georges Henri Joseph Edouard Lemaître, a Belgian priest who was the first one to argue - Against Einstein and Before Hubble - for the Big Bang and the expanding Universe - Because of his religious motives.
A crude analogy for the structural dynamics would be a grid of rods that extends endlessly in all directions. Call the intersection points as nodes - then no matter which node one is at (homogeneity), the grid looks the same wherever one looks (isotropy) and the neighboring nodes are moving away in proportion to their distance from oneself (Hubble's law).
Why is anywhere an equally legitimate perspective on the totality? Why isn't there a privileged center or a set of eminent viewpoints? The arc of the moral Universe does seem to bend towards justice, far beyond merely hopeful metaphor.
Why is the Universe so uniform on the largest scales and lacks, for example, endless hierarchies? Conversely, why isn’t it totally featureless either, but exhibits locally low entropy aggregations such as stars, galaxies and clusters?
The critical density of the mass-energy distribution decides its fate. If it's below unity - expansion eventually reverses direction to collapse back onto itself, at unity - expands at an ever decreasing rate to become static “at infinity”, above unity - expands at a non-decreasing rate until endless voids separate every unit of Being and Nothingness reigns supreme. Why does it appear to be, in fact, "flat" i.e. miraculously close to unity?
Why are the values of some physical constants remarkably fine tuned to enable its current form and hence observers who puzzle over it? Can we avoid the pernicious, hopeless capitulation of using our own self-evident actuality as a razor to shave off the haunting absence of all other possibilities?
What is the “dark matter” that is necessary to explain several independent phenomena (e.g. the stability of galaxies, their rate of rotation and initial perturbations in matter-energy distribution leading to galaxy formation), but leaves no traces behind apart from its gravitational interaction?
What is the nature of the “dark energy” that pulls the fabric of spacetime apart? How come the final state - if there is such a thing as a beginning and a finality - of the Universe (to implode or to explode forever) seems to desperately hang onto the value of a mysterious force that counter-intuitively increases with distance, like no other?
It is bizarre that we have made any progress at all on dilemmas so immense such as these. That a wet blob of organic matter running on thirty watts dares to pursue the alpha and omega of reality itself - and succeeds.
How can we construct a falsifiable theory that doesn’t trivially adapt to retrofit every observation but makes novel predictions from a coherent framework that is consistent with the terrestrial laws of physics? How can we avoid making the map as large as the territory?
How do we trust our model when we run into fundamental limits of direct evidence - for example, the fact that electromagnetic radiation emitted at the moment of creation and during subsequent developments was only free to travel towards us once matter density had dropped below a threshold that prevented scattering, and hence we cannot access any information before that epoch, even in principle? But then again, the development of twenty first century gravitational wave astronomy might open up novel avenues - all certitudes are destined to be contingent in retrospect.
Or the head spiraling realization that a finite bound on the speed of light combined with the accelerating expansion of space implies there are events whose knowledge is yet on its way to us (thus the more we wait - the more of its possibilities, that are a precondition for our "laws of nature", are revealed), and some are so far away that we'll never know anything about them, since they are moving away from us faster than the speed of light.
Of what one cannot speak one must be silent. Is the Universe there when nobody looks, where nobody cannot look even if they wished to?
How can we keep the ensnarement of theology - that is only natural when the matter of concern is existence itself - at bay, or at most use it as a guide for meditation rather than adjudication?
But before prejudiced haste turns us away from normative metaphysics as a source of inspiration, remember Georges Henri Joseph Edouard Lemaître, a Belgian priest who was the first one to argue - Against Einstein and Before Hubble - for the Big Bang and the expanding Universe - Because of his religious motives.
A crude analogy for the structural dynamics would be a grid of rods that extends endlessly in all directions. Call the intersection points as nodes - then no matter which node one is at (homogeneity), the grid looks the same wherever one looks (isotropy) and the neighboring nodes are moving away in proportion to their distance from oneself (Hubble's law).
Why is anywhere an equally legitimate perspective on the totality? Why isn't there a privileged center or a set of eminent viewpoints? The arc of the moral Universe does seem to bend towards justice, far beyond merely hopeful metaphor.
Why is the Universe so uniform on the largest scales and lacks, for example, endless hierarchies? Conversely, why isn’t it totally featureless either, but exhibits locally low entropy aggregations such as stars, galaxies and clusters?
The critical density of the mass-energy distribution decides its fate. If it's below unity - expansion eventually reverses direction to collapse back onto itself, at unity - expands at an ever decreasing rate to become static “at infinity”, above unity - expands at a non-decreasing rate until endless voids separate every unit of Being and Nothingness reigns supreme. Why does it appear to be, in fact, "flat" i.e. miraculously close to unity?
Why are the values of some physical constants remarkably fine tuned to enable its current form and hence observers who puzzle over it? Can we avoid the pernicious, hopeless capitulation of using our own self-evident actuality as a razor to shave off the haunting absence of all other possibilities?
What is the “dark matter” that is necessary to explain several independent phenomena (e.g. the stability of galaxies, their rate of rotation and initial perturbations in matter-energy distribution leading to galaxy formation), but leaves no traces behind apart from its gravitational interaction?
What is the nature of the “dark energy” that pulls the fabric of spacetime apart? How come the final state - if there is such a thing as a beginning and a finality - of the Universe (to implode or to explode forever) seems to desperately hang onto the value of a mysterious force that counter-intuitively increases with distance, like no other?
It is bizarre that we have made any progress at all on dilemmas so immense such as these. That a wet blob of organic matter running on thirty watts dares to pursue the alpha and omega of reality itself - and succeeds.
October 3, 2023
5/5
The more we know, the more we know we don't know.
This book is one of the most interesting piece of science literature I've come across. This takes us from the time of the Greek to the present day understanding of the universe that we live.
As the authors put it, the discoveries of the modern science has not always been linear, it has a lots of going back and forth.
There's an apt quote referenced by the author which in turn from a scientific paper, which goes as,
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
The more we know, the more we know we don't know.
This book is one of the most interesting piece of science literature I've come across. This takes us from the time of the Greek to the present day understanding of the universe that we live.
As the authors put it, the discoveries of the modern science has not always been linear, it has a lots of going back and forth.
There's an apt quote referenced by the author which in turn from a scientific paper, which goes as,
Desist from thrusting out reasoning from your. mind because of its disconcerting novelty. Weigh it, rather, with a discerning judgement. Then, if it seems to you true, give in. If it is false, gird yourself to oppose it. For the mind wants do discover by reasoning what exists in the infinity of space that lies out there, beyond the ramparts of this world ... Here, then, is my first point. In all dimensions alike, on this side or that upward or downward through the universe, there is no end.
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
April 1, 2018
The book comes with excellent author credentials. They have done a good job in explaining highly complex and cutting edge topic in a lucid manner. However, the book lacks coherence. Goes back and forth too many times with a lot of repetitions. Also, somewhat sloppy editing. Do not be surprised to find hanging quotation marks and acronyms that are explained a couple of pages after their first appearances or "z" the symbol for redshift appearing from nowhere or confusion between "centripetal" and "centrifugal" forces!
Overall, a let down
Overall, a let down
July 10, 2018
This survey of the modern cosmology does exactly what it sets out to do. It provides a comprehensible and authoritative explanation of a complex and seemingly baffling subject. It's readable and interesting if oddly unexciting. The short biographical sketches included are a strong point, while the frequent references to other chapters are more distracting than helpful. Putting the supporting math in two appendices was a very wise move, and there is a very useful glossary. If you're interested in this subject, this is a must read.
April 25, 2025
An invigorating treatise on the history and development of modern cosmological physics. As a layman only just beginning to explore the field, I found it approachable, informative, and remarkably beautiful. The authors treat their subject with all the reverence and wonder of a theologian, and yet, with all the precision I would expect of their chosen field of study. The text challenged previous misconceptions I did not even realize I held and opened my eyes to a new understanding and renewed love of the cosmos. I cannot wait to read more on the subject!
September 19, 2022
He didn't dumb it down enough for a general audience.
July 17, 2020
The Universe Brilliantly Revealed
Ostriker and Mitton’s HEART OF DARKNESS: UNRAVELING THE MYSTERIES OF THE INVISIBLE UNIVERSE does exactly as advertized: By exposing the reader chronologically to humanity’s growing knowledge of the cosmos—from the ancient Greeks’ remarkable speculations through Copernicus’s revolutionary discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun through the advances in knowledge contributed by other scientists up to the present-day’s awareness of dark matter and dark energy—lay persons are able to grow their own understanding in a logical way.
The authors, who are important contributors to that knowledge, filled in many, often huge, gaps in this math-challenged reader’s view of what has happened and is happening in our mysterious universe (an appendix goes through the math for those willing to address it).
Joseph Amiel
Author most recently of the YA novel Fearsome Destiny: Sisters and Brothers and the short-story collection Death Can Delight: A Trio of Mysteries
Ostriker and Mitton’s HEART OF DARKNESS: UNRAVELING THE MYSTERIES OF THE INVISIBLE UNIVERSE does exactly as advertized: By exposing the reader chronologically to humanity’s growing knowledge of the cosmos—from the ancient Greeks’ remarkable speculations through Copernicus’s revolutionary discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun through the advances in knowledge contributed by other scientists up to the present-day’s awareness of dark matter and dark energy—lay persons are able to grow their own understanding in a logical way.
The authors, who are important contributors to that knowledge, filled in many, often huge, gaps in this math-challenged reader’s view of what has happened and is happening in our mysterious universe (an appendix goes through the math for those willing to address it).
Joseph Amiel
Author most recently of the YA novel Fearsome Destiny: Sisters and Brothers and the short-story collection Death Can Delight: A Trio of Mysteries
January 30, 2014
Yes, it is excellent. It stretches the mind to envision the vastness of cosmos. Gravity is intriguing, we don't know what it is! Is there such a thing as anti-gravity? We don't know. And what is dark matter? Is it a dense collection held by gravity? as a dark hole? Or is it a collection of dark energy? And what is dark energy? Is it a sort of gravity? Are they all the same thing, like energy is mass x speed?
What is the connection between time and gravity?
If I were in elementary school, I would shoot for a career in physics. There are so many discoveries to be made. About 50 years after we flew the first airplane, we went to the moon and walked on it and came back. So I believe we will see some exciting discoveries about time, gravity, energy, matter and more soon. Maybe even time travel? I loved this book.
What is the connection between time and gravity?
If I were in elementary school, I would shoot for a career in physics. There are so many discoveries to be made. About 50 years after we flew the first airplane, we went to the moon and walked on it and came back. So I believe we will see some exciting discoveries about time, gravity, energy, matter and more soon. Maybe even time travel? I loved this book.
January 8, 2017
Ostriker is one of the world's leading astrophysicists. With his coauthor he presents the historical development of the Big Bang theory, with inflation, dark matter and dark energy - what is today known as the canonical Lambda - Cold Dark Matter cosmology. He lived through, and contributed to, many of the important developments, so one gets a good feel for how astrophysicists were slow to accept certain important concepts, such as dark energy. His enthusiasm for the canonical model may be a bit too strong, especially with recent developments such as the theory of emergent gravity and the lack of direct dark matter detection, that question the existence of dark matter as an exotic new particle. Rather a page turner for those who know something about the Big Bang, and his derivation of the standard cosmology from Newton's laws in an appendix is a nice touch.
November 18, 2016
Publikacja autorstwa Jeremiaha P. Ostrikera i Simona Mittona została docelowo poświęcona dwóm zagadnieniom, które obecnie spędzają sen z oczu fizykom: ciemnej materii i ciemnej energii. Czym one są i jakie mają znaczenie dla współczesnej nauki oraz w jaki sposób wpływają na naszą wiedzę o Wszechświecie. Nim jednak wspomniani wyżej naukowcy przechodzą do tego problemu przedstawiają czytelnikom w jaki sposób rozwijała się fizyka od czasów najdawniejszych po dzień dzisiejszy.
Więcej na: http://wiedzma-czyta.blogspot.com/201...
Więcej na: http://wiedzma-czyta.blogspot.com/201...
August 27, 2018
En su momento, mi libro favorito de divulgación. Una de las razones por las que acabé estudiando Física en la universidad.
April 6, 2017
Ocenię nie starając się nie być subiektywnym. Książka już trochę nie dla mnie. Połowa to historia kosmologii, bardzo późno dochodzi do jakichkolwiek konkretów. Może dla laika, który wcześniej nie czytał niczego związanego z tematem, książka będzie bardzo dobra, lecz dla laika, któremu zdarzyło się już coś czytać, będzie to problem. Faktyczny temat rozwija się dopiero pod koniec i fajne jest to, że autorzy wplatają choć trochę faktycznej fizyki w opowiadanie.
Nadal mam niesmak względem teorii ciemnych składników wszechświata. Książka ładnie podsumowuje dowody na to co i dlaczego się postuluje, ale ciągle mam niedosyt i wrażenie, że czegoś nie wiemy i po prostu dodajemy kolejne epicykle/eter do układu.
Finalnie...ok.
Nadal mam niesmak względem teorii ciemnych składników wszechświata. Książka ładnie podsumowuje dowody na to co i dlaczego się postuluje, ale ciągle mam niedosyt i wrażenie, że czegoś nie wiemy i po prostu dodajemy kolejne epicykle/eter do układu.
Finalnie...ok.
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