A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [84]
The difficulty in making final determinations is that there are often acres of room for interpretation. Imagine standing in a field at night and trying to decide how far away two distant electric lights are. Using fairly straightforward tools of astronomy you can easily enough determine that the bulbs are of equal brightness and that one is, say, 50 percent more distant than the other. But what you can't be certain of is whether the nearer light is, let us say, a 58-watt bulb that is 122 feet away or a 61-watt light that is 119 feet, 8 inches away. On top of that you must make allowances for distortions caused by variations in the Earth's atmosphere, by intergalactic dust, contaminating light from foreground stars, and many other factors. The upshot is that your computations are necessarily based on a series of nested assumptions, any of which could be a source of contention. There is also the problem that access to telescopes is always at a premium and historically measuring red shifts has been notably costly in telescope time. It could take all night to get a single exposure. In consequence, astronomers have sometimes been compelled (or willing) to base conclusions on notably scanty evidence. In cosmology, as the journalist Geoffrey Carr has suggested, we have “a mountain of theory built on a molehill of evidence.” Or as Martin Rees has put it: “Our present satisfaction [with our state of understanding] may reflect the paucity of the data rather than the excellence of the theory.”
This uncertainty applies, incidentally, to relatively nearby things as much as to the distant edges of the universe. As Donald Goldsmith notes, when astronomers say that the galaxy M87 is 60 million light-years away, what they really mean (“but do not often stress to the general public”) is that it is somewhere between 40 million and 90 million light-years away—not quite the same thing. For the universe at large, matters are naturally magnified. Bearing all that in mind, the best bets these days for the age of the universe seem to be fixed on a range of about 12 billion to 13.5 billion years, but we remain a long way from unanimity.
One interesting recently suggested theory is that the universe is not nearly as big as we thought, that when we peer into the distance some of the galaxies we see may simply be reflections, ghost images created by rebounded light.
The fact is, there is a great deal, even at quite a fundamental level, that we don't know—not least what the universe is made of. When scientists calculate the amount of matter needed to hold things together, they always come up desperately short. It appears that at least 90 percent of the universe, and perhaps as much as 99 percent, is composed of Fritz Zwicky's “dark matter”—stuff that is by its nature invisible to us. It is slightly galling to think that we live in a universe that, for the most part, we can't even see, but there you are. At least the names for the two main possible culprits are entertaining: they are said to be either WIMPs (for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which is to say specks of invisible matter left over from the Big Bang) or MACHOs (for MAssive Compact Halo Objects—really just another name for black holes, brown dwarfs, and other very dim stars).
Particle physicists have tended to favor the particle explanation