Science / Medicine : ‘Dark Matter Is Last Affront to Our Worth’

“It’s the ultimate insult,” said Thomas Weiler, visiting professor at the University of Hawaii, as he considered evidence that almost all of the universe is made of exotic matter different from that making up stars, the Earth and people.

Mounting evidence suggests that as much as 99% of the universe’s matter may be exotic, infinitesimal particles that pervade space, undetected except for their gravitational effect on stars.

But in the history of astronomy and physics, a universe made of exotic matter is only the latest in a series of assaults on intuitive notions that humans hold a special place at the center of things in the cosmos. In fact, scientific progress has included a steady march of the human species to the “periphery” of cosmic phenomena, notes Claude Canizares, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the 16th Century, Nicholas Copernicus toppled the firmly accepted belief, offered centuries earlier by the ancient Greek astronomer Ptolemy, that the Earth was the center of the universe. Copernicus argued instead that the Earth orbited the sun.

Early in this century, astronomers established that the sun was only one among billions of stars in the Milky Way. Furthermore, it occupied an apparently undistinguished place on the outskirts of the galaxy.

Even humanity’s home galaxy turned out to be just one among billions of galaxies strewn throughout space.

“Dark matter is the last affront to our worth,” Weiler said. “We’re not even made of the majority stuff. Most of the universe is made of matter we’re not made of.”

But discovering what the universe actually is made of should restore the species’ dignity in another way, notes Canizares: “As we are more and more demoted in our physical position, we’re more and more exalted in our ability to comprehend our actual position in the universe.”