Washington Post Book Reviews
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Tuesday February 8, 2011
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THE 4% UNIVERSE: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality 
Richard Panek
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 978-1851688210
297 pages
$26
Reviewed by Carl Zimmer
In 1969, an astronomer named Jeremiah Ostriker realized that the Milky Way was spinning too fast. That may sound odd, given that it takes the sun 230 million years to make a full orbit. But when Ostriker tried to simulate the Milky Way on a computer, he found that it was spinning so quickly that it should have ripped itself apart long ago. There weren't enough stars to hold it together.
Ostriker went to his fellow Princeton scientist James Peebles to share his puzzle. "There's something wrong here," Ostriker said to Peebles. The two scientists decided there could only be one solution: The stars we can see in the Milky Way are just a small fraction of the actual galaxy. They are embedded in a vast, unseen halo, made of an unknown stuff that has come to be known as dark matter. When Ostriker and Peebles looked to other galaxies, they found hints of dark matter there as well.
Other astronomers didn't want to believe it. After all, they had spent the past four centuries learning about the universe by collecting the light of the universe in their telescopes. Now it seemed they were missing most of the cosmic show. But as Richard Panek chronicles in his fascinating new book, "The 4 (percent symbol) Universe," it turned out that there was a lot more wrong with the universe than even Ostriker had realized and that his and Peebles' work was only the beginning of an enormous undertaking by many scientists.
The latest surveys of the universe indicate that only 4 percent of it is made of ordinary matter. Nearly 23 percent is made up of dark matter, which some physicists suspect consists of wispy subatomic particles that may someday be caught in a detector. And the remaining 73 percent is made up of something far more baffling: an energy that is causing the universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate. Scientists call it "dark energy," and they have no idea what it is. "Get rid of us and of everything else we've ever thought of as the universe," writes Panek, "and very little would change."
In "The 4 (percent symbol) Universe," Panek reconstructs the five decades of research that led to this humbling realization. It is one of the most important stories in the history of science, but also one of the hardest to tell. The science is fiendishly tricky, and the human history is also arcane. The discoveries of dark matter and dark energy were not the work of some lone genius. It took a huge network of scientists. In 2007, Cambridge University awarded the Gruber Prize in Cosmology, the highest honor a cosmologist can win, to the discoverers of dark energy. Fifty-two prize-winners showed up.
Inevitably, Panek has to plunge into the bureaucratic depths of modern science. His pages are splattered with acronyms -- NSF, CARA, COBE, DASI -- standing for funding agencies and assorted astronomy projects. From time to time, I had the same trouble keeping track of the scientists that I have with the characters in big Russian novels. Some chapters have only tenuous links to the rest of the book, reading more like magazine articles than vital episodes in a greater story.
But Panek's passion for the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy wins the day. He succeeds because he recognizes that he's writing not just about red shifts and supernovae, but about people. They're unusual people to say the least, happy to stay up all night to take pictures of stars or write software that compares those pictures to find the pop of supernovae exploding in distant galaxies. And they're far from perfect. The astronomer Vera Rubin gets to pay a visit to the legendary physicist George Gamow to talk about the nature of the universe, only to discover he's an oaf who yells at his wife. "Where were his papers? What had she done with his papers? Why was she always going through his papers?" Panek writes. "Whether Gamow's wife was ever actually there, Rubin couldn't be sure."
The success of "The 4 (percent symbol) Universe" also stems from Panek's wisdom about how science works. It's easy to think that the discovery of dark matter and dark energy -- the realization that we have no idea what most of the universe is made of -- is a story of failure. Actually, scientists are delighted to have learned that they have blasted beyond any ready explanation that physics can offer for how the universe works. Now they have the opportunity to build a new physics that can make sense of how the universe, both light and dark, really works. "What greater legacy could a scientist leave a universe?" Panek asks.
Carl Zimmer is the author of "The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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AMERICAN UPRISING: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt
Daniel Rasmussen
Harper
ISBN 978-0061995217
276 pages
$26.99
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
Reading Daniel Rasmussen's interesting if flawed account of a violent slave uprising in Louisiana in 1811, I found myself repeatedly recalling Samuel Johnson's dictum on women in the pulpit. The good doctor's words are totally incorrect, of course, but when one considers that the author of this book is all of 23 years old, they do seem to apply: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
As it happens, Rasmussen has done more things well than poorly, but the phenomenon of a person of his tender years writing and having published a serious work of history cannot go unnoticed. Perhaps it is unfair to Rasmussen to raise the matter, but his publisher's publicists have done so, as will, no doubt, others who review "American Uprising." The historians' guild is not an easy one to crack; that Rasmussen has done so only two years after reaching the age allowing him to raise a glass in his own honor is, in and of itself, rather remarkable.
The book itself is somewhat less so. Presumably researched and written during Rasmussen's undergraduate years at Harvard, from which he graduated festooned with honors in 2009, it is carefully researched, especially with regard to daily life on the early 19th-century sugar plantations of Louisiana, and its account of the slave rebellion is vivid and, considering the dearth of hard evidence, convincing. On the other hand, although he clearly is a gifted prose stylist, he has a taste for overwrought dramatization and foreshadowing, both of which could and should have been discouraged by his editors and academic mentors. He also dwells gratuitously and excessively on "how (America's) ideals have at times been twisted and cast aside for the sake of greed and power," on what he calls this country's "hypocrisies, evils, and injustices," lending a shrill political cast to a narrative that should be able to stand on its own.
"With little attention from scholars," Rasmussen writes, "North America's largest antebellum slave revolt has languished in the footnotes of history for two hundred years. While historians jostled to write about Nat Turner, who had mobilized fewer than 100 slaves, this diverse band of Louisiana slaves has been remembered by only a few." Well, the dark recesses of history are crammed with untold stories that deserve serious scrutiny, but Rasmussen is right to regard it as strange that this particular story has gone virtually unnoticed. He believes that the blame lies with William C.C. Claiborne, appointed governor of the huge Louisiana Territory after its purchase from Napoleon in 1803. On the evidence presented by Rasmussen, Claiborne really does not seem to have been "distinctly lacking in qualifications," but he was an ardent advocate of the western expansion of the United States who "wrote the slave-rebels out of history, believing that all that was important was the rise of American power."
Whether this interpretation is based in historical fact or is merely a figment of Rasmussen's somewhat overheated imagination is unclear, but with rare exceptions historians have overlooked the events of January 1811 in the Louisiana sugar country.
Though the slave army's ultimate goal was New Orleans, its uprising began in "one of the wealthiest and most fertile stretches of agricultural land in North America: Louisiana's famed German Coast." Originally settled by Germans but largely French by the early 19th century, the area was dominated by a small number of large plantations, all of them dependent on slave labor.
Great rewards were gained by the plantation owners, but "at immense human cost." Rasmussen writes:
"Force, or the threat of force, was as necessary an investment as land in making a successful sugar plantation. For slaves would not work without coercion. The planters seemed to focus their attention less on the methods and tremendous injustices of their chosen lifestyle and more on the results; perhaps this was the only way to rationalize the tremendous risks. Yet this heavy investment in violence created a fundamental risk: that the violence would backfire, wreaking uncontrollable havoc on the architects of this brutal system."
The planters saw themselves, and were widely seen, as "manly independent patriarchs, as gentlemen farmers, and as powerful aristocrats," and to them "slavery signaled status and wealth, not immorality or danger." Though they were well aware of slave rebellions elsewhere, particularly the fierce one earlier in the century that ousted the French from Haiti, these French settlers were more concerned about the new American governor's efforts "to introduce the principles of liberty and republican self-governance" than about "the tremendous danger posed by the rapidly growing slave population," nor did they "notice the increasingly radical tenor of the political discussions in the slave quarters."
Three men were the principal leaders of the slave revolt. Two, Kook and Quamana, "brought with them from Africa the memories and stories of the powerful and warlike empire in which they most likely grew up." The third, Charles Deslondes, "served as a slave driver, a member of the slave elite ... a notoriously conservative group with a bad reputation as traitors to the slave cause." Deslondes, however, "was not the contented slave he appeared" but "one of the key architects of an elaborate scheme to kill off the white planters, seize power for the black slaves, and win his own freedom and that of all those laboring in chains on the German Coast."
Deslondes and his followers had a dream: "Inspired by the stories of the Haitian revolution and flush with the philosophies of the French Revolution, the diverse band of slaves that joined insurrectionary cells believed they could secure freedom, equality, and independence through violent rebellion. As the heads of the whites rolled through the streets, they could form a new republic -- a black outpost on the Mississippi, guaranteed by force." They might well have succeeded, or at least made white Louisiana pay heavily for the slave society on which it depended, had one planter not managed to escape during an attack on his house, severely wounded but able to row across the river for help. A number of planters organized a militia, took the rebels by surprise, and began the appallingly bloody process of exterminating them, chopping off the heads of captured slaves and putting them on poles as gruesome reminders of "where power resided."
With that, Rasmussen is off and running. Claiborne "stripped the rebellion of revolutionary or geopolitical meaning by dismissing it as an act of base criminality," using it "to dramatize American civil and institutional power, portraying himself as an effective governor and representative of federal authority." He persuaded the formerly skeptical but now fearful French planters of "the value of a strong American presence in the region," one that upheld and protected the slave society. The achievement of statehood for Louisiana in 1812 "was the key to a new and stronger American nation that would spread its imperial tendrils across the continent."
Excise "its imperial tendrils" from that passage and you have a reasonably accurate portrayal of what the absorption of the Louisiana Territory meant to the inexorable move westward, but "imperial tendrils" injects a note of the political and/or ideological special pleading that has been too common in the history departments since the 1970s. It seems to be a lesson Rasmussen learned at Harvard, but it's one best unlearned.
Jonathan Yardley can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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