dark matter

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First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time by Emma Chapman

Albert Einstein, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, endowment effect, Ernest Rutherford, friendly fire, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, Neil Armstrong, Olbers’ paradox, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the long tail, uranium enrichment, Wilhelm Olbers

‘Normal’ matter is made of baryons, which interact with light so that we can see their presence, using some part of the electromagnetic spectrum at least. Dark matter doesn’t interact with light, so escapes all of our traditional telescopes and even our most modern ones. We have never directly detected dark matter and this is no insignificant thing as we think dark matter makes up 85 per cent of the total mass within the Universe. It’s not that first stars scientists disregarded dark matter entirely – more that we thought that dark matter could only noticeably interact through gravity. Dark matter creates a factory floor on which to construct the first stars. In the early Universe, after recombination 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the gas was hot, too hot to collapse into anything approaching a star: there were no lucky clouds of gas at all.

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Once the gas has coalesced into a star within the web of dark matter, however, we have little need to consider dark matter. It’s on the wrong scale to matter, just as dark matter has little effect within the scale of our Solar System. Or so we thought. What the EDGES result implies is that something is interacting with the gas to make it colder, and the only thing hanging around in the Universe colder than the gas is dark matter. Given a hot cloud of gas and a cold cloud of dark matter, energy is passed from the former to the latter until the two are in thermal equilibrium: the gas cools and the dark matter warms up a bit. But hang on – dark matter is famous for not interacting with stuff; it’s even in the name WIMP.

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However, to the best of our knowledge, and there is some argument about this, dark matter was cold. Cold stuff can collapse, so collapse it did. Our models show that the dark matter condensed into dense filaments, a cosmic web covering the entire Universe. It didn’t collapse further, say into stars or galaxies made of dark matter because, while it was cold enough to condense a bit, it cannot interact electromagnetically (that is, with photons) to lose heat like baryons can. Because dark matter couldn’t lose this heat, the internal pressure was much higher. This kept the dark matter from condensing into anything much smaller than regions of gravitationally bound dark matter, called halos, of about 1 million solar masses, at the junctions of the filaments.

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder

Adam Curtis, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cognitive bias, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, double helix, game design, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Skype, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method

They’ve been seeing this signal for more than a decade. Such an annual modulation is what we would expect from dark matter because the probability that a dark matter signal is detected depends on the direction from which dark matter particles fall in. Since Earth moves through the presumably existing dark matter cloud on its way around the Sun, the direction of the incoming dark matter flux changes over the course of the year. Unfortunately, other experiments have excluded that the DAMA signal can be caused by dark matter because if that were so, it should have shown up also in other detectors, which hasn’t happened.

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At 1017 Kelvin, therefore, we start with a soup composed almost entirely of matter and dark matter. Space-time reacts to this matter by beginning to expand. This cools the soup and enables the formation first of atomic nuclei and then of light atoms. Initially, the particle soup is so dense that light gets stuck in it. But once atoms form, light can travel almost undisturbed. Dark matter, since it doesn’t interact with light, cools faster than normal matter. In the early universe, therefore, dark matter is the first to start clumping under its own gravitational pull. Indeed, without the dark matter’s early clumping, galaxies wouldn’t form in the way that we observe, for the gravitational pull of the already clumpy dark matter is needed to speed up the clumping of normal matter.

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The first attempt at modified gravity, known as modified Newtonian dynamics, did not respect the symmetries of general relativity, and this very much spoke against it.15 Newer versions of modified gravity respect the symmetries of general relativity and still explain the observed galactic regularities better than particle dark matter.16 But they don’t do well on distances far below or far above galactic size. The solution might be somewhere in between. Recently a group of researchers has proposed that dark matter is a superfluid, which at short scales resembles modified gravity but at long scales allows the flexibility of particle dark matter.17 This idea combines the benefits of both without the disadvantages of either. And despite the different terminology, the mathematics of modified gravity and the mathematics of particle dark matter are almost the same. As Katie says, for modified gravity one adds new—so far unobserved—fields.

The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy by Moiya McTier

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Burning Man, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, James Webb Space Telescope, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, overview effect, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

But that simple relation only works if most of the mass is concentrated in the middle. Since my dark matter halo is so huge and holds most of my mass, it affects the speeds of my outer stars. They move faster than they would if they were just reacting to the mass of the luminous material…the shiny stuff. They move so fast that some of them could even have escaped if I didn’t have as much dark matter as I do, holding them in place. The slope of that radius-speed relation, aka the rotation curve, depends on the amount of dark matter the galaxy has, and it’s how your astronomers learned about dark matter in the first place. Your physicists first hypothesized dark matter in 1933, but you didn’t find evidence until 1968, when Vera Rubin realized stars were moving faster than she expected.

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The biggest but dimmest part of my majestic body is my halo, which has three overlapping parts: stellar, circumgalactic, and dark matter. The stellar component is a messy spherical field of stars and globular clusters3 left over from previous interactions with other galaxies, and it extends out to about 100 kpc. The circumgalactic halo is a cloud of warm gas that I can use to fuel my star making. The dark matter halo is my most extensive and massive “organ,” you could say. It’s not called “dark” because it’s inherently wicked or threatening. In fact, dark matter was instrumental for all of us in the beginning. Without dark matter’s cold clumpiness, galaxies like me wouldn’t have been able to hold on to mass and form stars in the early, hot universe.

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Back in the beginning, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, when the first protogalaxies were being born, the universe was too hot for all that non-dark matter, or the baryonic matter as your scientists call it, to bind together gravitationally. Gas particles were moving around so fast they would have overcome the gravitational attraction of the other baryons. But what if there was already some cooler material that clumped more easily and could still attract the warmer particles? Dark matter is like a scaffold you might build to help your plants grow. So we all owe our existence to that dark matter. But dark matter doesn’t come without downsides. As we know because of the conservation of angular momentum, the stars farther out in a galaxy’s disk should move more slowly than close-in stars.

The World According to Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, germ theory of disease, gravity well, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, information security, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, post-truth, power law, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, supercomputer in your pocket, the scientific method, time dilation

You would need a light-year’s thickness of lead shielding to have even a fifty-fifty chance of blocking them. You could say that they are, to all intents and purposes, ‘dark matter’. However, they cannot be the dark matter that we are searching for because, being so light, they travel at near light speed—too fast to remain bound within galaxies and thus to explain galaxies’ anomalous properties. We refer to neutrinos as hot dark matter, because they move so fast. And as if the unresolved problem of dark matter weren’t big enough for physicists, we now know of another mysterious substance filling the universe, which plays a vital role in shaping it.

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The observed higher-than-expected orbital speeds of these outer stars suggest that there must be some additional invisible stuff present, extending out beyond the visible matter we can see and providing the extra gravitational glue to stop the outer stars from flying off. Dark matter can also be seen from the way it curves space around it. This phenomenon manifests itself in the way light bends while on its path from very distant objects to our telescopes. The amount of bending can only be explained by the extra gravitational curvature of space provided by the dark matter of galaxies that the light passes on its way to us. So, what do we know about dark matter other than that it provides this necessary extra gravitational attraction? Might this not be accounted for by something less exotic than a new form of matter?

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The existence of dark matter also seems necessary to explain the structure of the early universe. In contrast with normal matter, which through its interaction with the electromagnetic field kept its energy high, dark matter cooled down more quickly as the universe expanded and therefore started to clump together gravitationally earlier. One of the most important results in astrophysics in recent years has been the confirmation from sophisticated computer simulations of galaxy formation that we can only explain the real universe if it does indeed contain large quantities of dark matter. Without it, we would not get the rich cosmic structures we see today.

Sunfall by Jim Al-Khalili

airport security, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Bletchley Park, Carrington event, cosmological constant, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Attenborough, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, imposter syndrome, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, pattern recognition, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, Silicon Valley, smart cities, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Turing test

Technical Note on Dark Matter The central premise of the odin project rests on the behaviour of dark matter. But how accurate is this scientifically? Well, let me make a couple of things clear. Firstly, dark matter is real. It is what holds galaxies together. In fact, there is five times more dark matter in the universe than normal matter. The problem is that, as of the time of writing in December 2018, we still don’t know what dark matter is made of. Whatever its constituent particles are, they are nothing we currently know of. Physicists refer to it as ‘non-baryonic matter’. We know dark matter feels the force of gravity but not the electromagnetic force (which is what allows it to pass through normal matter as though it weren’t there).

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But, as I hope you all know by now, dark matter doesn’t feel the presence of normal matter, by which I mean it’s not affected by the electromagnetic force. So, just as dark matter passes through normal matter as if it weren’t there, it will also be oblivious to the presence of the magnets, regardless of how powerful those magnets are.’ The background murmuring began afresh as many in the audience suddenly understood what seemed to be a fundamental flaw in the scheme. Marc took a couple of steps closer to the front of the stage. ‘So, here’s the plan. We don’t make beams of neutralinos, the usual dark-matter particles, to begin with, but heavier versions of them.

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His institute in China had been developing a mini dark-matter accelerator for the past five years and he’d been heavily involved in getting it funded. Now it seemed that it would play its part in the latest test of the Odin Project. It was to be placed on-board a ship that would float above the point where this beam would emerge on the other side of the planet. Darklab would itself produce a small amount of dark matter and fire it down into the sea to meet the Mag-4 pulse head-on. The tiny energy created would then be picked up by the vessel’s detectors. She turned to Qiang. ‘But if it’s just to see if two colliding dark-matter beams can create energy inside the Earth, wasn’t that what the Antarctic tests confirmed last month?’

Space at the Speed of Light: The History of 14 Billion Years for People Short on Time by Becky Smethurst

Apollo 13, Cepheid variable, dark matter, Galaxy Zoo, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Kickstarter, Stephen Hawking

We call the rest of the matter that doesn’t interact with light “dark matter.” It doesn’t give out light, or reflect or absorb it, so we have no way of “seeing” it. Unlike an isolated black hole, which traps light beyond its event horizon (we could, perhaps, class that as “absorbing” light), dark matter pervades the whole universe. Even in the solar system, we think there’s about two protons’ worth of dark matter in every teaspoon of space, and yet we’ve no way of interacting with it. So, how do we even know dark matter exists? Well, just like black holes, although light is not an option, dark matter does interact with gravity and so bends space in exactly the same way as normal matter.

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But it does have some problems—the biggest being the fact that it doesn’t incorporate dark matter at all. So, there are now some particle physicists trying to extend their beautiful theory into something a bit clunkier to shoehorn dark matter in there. To do that, they need to find what dark matter is made of—by detecting some of it. How to search for something that tiny, something incapable of interacting with light or even other matter, for that matter, is a big problem. One method is to attempt to detect when a particle of dark matter collides with a normal particle of matter that we can detect. We should then be able to identify the change in momentum, or energy, of the other particle, like a cue ball hitting a colored ball in a game of pool.

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What this finding suggested was that most of the mass in galaxies isn’t found in the center—it’s found on the outskirts. Yet when we look at a galaxy, we don’t see more stars on the outskirts; the greatest concentration of stars occurs in the center. So, that means there must be a huge amount of matter that we can’t see surrounding a galaxy, in something we’ve come to call a dark matter halo. The second piece of evidence for dark matter came from comparing how much mass gravity suggested was in galaxies to how much we could detect in starlight. As Einstein said, massive objects curve the spacetime that light travels along. This might sound like an odd concept, but lenses also change the path of light.

Collider by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dr. Strangelove, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, gravity well, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, horn antenna, index card, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, time dilation

Another field eagerly awaiting the LHC findings is astronomy. Astronomers hope that new results in particle physics will help them unravel the field’s greatest mystery: the composition of dark matter and dark energy, two types of substances that affect luminous material but display no hint of their origin and nature. 9 Denizens of the Dark Resolving the Mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy I know I speak for a generation of people who have been looking for dark-matter particles since they were grad students. I doubt . . . many of us will remain in the field if the L.H.C. brings home bad news. —JUAN COLLAR, KAVLI INSTITUTE FOR COSMOLOGICAL PHYSICS (NEW YORK TIMES, MARCH 11, 2007) There’s an urgency for LHC results that transcends the ruminations of theorists.

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Apart from neutrinos, MACHOs, and WIMPs, another option, a hypothetical massive particle called the axion, postulated to play a role in quantum chromodynamics (the theory of the strong force) and tagged by some theorists as a leading dark-matter contender, has yet to be found. The search for the universe’s missing mass has been at an impasse. Enter the LHC to the rescue. Perhaps somewhere in its collision debris the secret key ingredients of cold dark matter will be revealed. Prime contenders would be the lightest supersymmetric companion particles, such as neutralinos, charginos, gluinos, photinos, squarks, and sleptons. Presuming they have energies on the TeV scale, each would present itself through characteristic decay profiles that would show up in tracking and calorimetry. If dark matter were the main cosmic mystery, physicists would simply be clenching their teeth, crossing their fingers, and waiting expectantly for results at the LHC or elsewhere to turn up a suitable prospect.

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Something was pressing the gas pedal instead of the brakes—and it couldn’t be any of the known forces. University of Chicago theorist Michael Turner dubbed this unknown agent “dark energy.” While both have mysterious identities, dark energy could not be the same as dark matter. In contrast to dark matter, which would gravitate in the same way as ordinary matter, dark energy would serve as a kind of “antigravity,” causing outward acceleration. If dark matter walked into a party, it would serve as a graceful host introducing people and bringing them together, but if dark energy intruded, it would act like the riot police dispersing the crowd. Indeed, too much dark energy in the cosmos would be no fun at all—the universe would eventually tear itself apart in a catastrophic scenario called the Big Rip.

Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, British Empire, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, disinformation, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, ghettoisation, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, lifelogging, machine readable, mass incarceration, obamacare, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, r/findbostonbombers, Scientific racism, security theater, sexual politics, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, US Airways Flight 1549, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Works Progress Administration

DARK MATTERS DARK MATTERS ON THE SURVEILLANCE OF BLACKNESS SIMONE BROWNE Duke University PressDurham and London2015 © 2015 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by Natalie F. Smith Typeset in Arno Pro by Graphic Composition, Inc., Athens, GA Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Browne, Simone, [date] author. Dark matters : on the surveillance of blackness / Simone Browne. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-5919-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-2-8223-5938-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-7530-2 (e-book) 1.

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Its distribution cannot be measured; its properties cannot be determined; and so it remains undetectable. The gravitational pull of this unseen matter is said to move galaxies. Invisible and unknowable, yet somehow still there, dark matter, in this planetary sense, is theoretical. If the term “dark matter” is a way to think about race, where race, as Howard Winant puts it, “remains the dark matter, the often invisible substance that in many ways structures the universe of modernity,” then one must ask here, invisible to whom?18 If it is often invisible, then how is it sensed, experienced, and lived? Is it really invisible, or is it rather unseen and unperceived by many?

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If one were to read these lectures “optimistically,” as Nicholas Mirzoeff has suggested, “had he lived longer, Fanon might have moved away from his emphasis on masculinity to imagine new modes of postrevolutionary gender identity, as part of this analysis of the racialized disciplinary society, a connection made by many radical black feminists in the United States from Angela Davis to Toni Cade Bambara and bell hooks.”9 I enter Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness with this sense of optimism in mind: that in Fanon’s works and in the writings of black feminist scholars, another mode of reading surveillance can be had. Dark Matters begins with a discussion of my failed attempt to get my hands on any information from the CIA pertaining to Fanon, his FBI FOIA file, the short notes that remain from his lectures on surveillance, and an excerpt from his letter to a friend recounting the “night and day surveillance” that he experienced as he was on the brink of death as a way to cue surveillance in and of black life as a fact of blackness.

The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything by Michio Kaku

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Olbers’ paradox, place-making, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, uranium enrichment

In fact, even today there are huge swimming pool–sized detectors (with vast amounts of fluids containing xenon and argon) that may one day capture the spark created by a photino collision. There are about twenty active groups searching for dark matter, often deep inside mine shafts below the Earth’s surface, away from interfering cosmic ray interactions. So it is conceivable that the collision of dark matter may be captured by our instruments. Once dark matter collisions have been detected, then physicists will study the properties of dark matter particles and then compare them to the predicted properties of photinos. If the predictions of string theory match the experimental results on dark matter, this would go a long way toward convincing physicists that this is the correct path.

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Perhaps evidence for string theory is hidden all around us, but we have to listen for its echoes, rather than try to observe it directly. For example, one possible signal from hyperspace is the existence of dark matter. Until recently, it was widely believed that the universe is mainly made of atoms. Astronomers have been shocked to find that only 4.9 percent of the universe is made of atoms like hydrogen and helium. Actually, most of the universe is hidden from us, in the form of dark matter and dark energy. (We recall that dark matter and dark energy are two distinct things. Twenty-six point eight percent of the universe is made of dark matter, which is invisible matter that surrounds the galaxies and keep them from flying apart.

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Search for Dark Matter Dark matter is strange, it is invisible, yet it holds the Milky Way galaxy together. But since it has weight and no charge, if you tried to hold dark matter in your hand it would sift through your fingers as if they weren’t there. It would fall right through the floor, through the core of the Earth, and then to the other side of the Earth, where gravity would eventually cause it to reverse course and fall back to your location. It would then oscillate between you and the other side of the planet, as if the Earth weren’t there. As strange as dark matter is, we know it must exist.

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demand response, Google Earth, Lewis Mumford, megacity, Minecraft, oil rush, out of africa, planetary scale, precariat, sovereign wealth fund, supervolcano, the built environment, The Spirit Level, uranium enrichment

And the remaining missing 27 per cent of the universe’s mass is thought to be made up of dark matter – the particles of which almost wholly refuse to interact with baryonic matter. Dark matter is fundamental to everything in the universe; it anchors all structures together. Without dark matter, super-clusters, galaxies, planets, humans, fleas and bacilli would not exist. To prove and decipher the existence of dark matter, writes Kent Meyers, would be to approach ‘the revelation of a new order, a new universe, in which even light will be known differently, and darkness as well’. Dark-matter physicists work at the boundary of the measurable and the imaginable.

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Dark-matter physicists work at the boundary of the measurable and the imaginable. They seek the traces that dark matter leaves in the perceptible world. Theirs is hard, philosophical work, requiring patience and something like faith: ‘As if’ – in the analogy of the poet and dark-matter physicist Rebecca Elson – ‘all there were, were fireflies / And from them you could infer the meadow’. Presently, the particle thought most likely to be the constituent of dark matter is known wryly as a WIMP – a weakly interacting massive particle. What we know of WIMPs suggests that they are heavy (up to more than a thousand times the weight of a proton), and that they were created in sufficiently vast quantities in the seconds after the birth of the universe to account for the missing mass.

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Dave Webb (2006). 44 ‘For the first time in millennia . . . the vast majority of people a few generations ago ‘: Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead, p. 31. Chapter 3: Dark Matter Pages 55 shielded from the surface by 3,000 feet of halite, gypsum . . . clay and topsoil: on the strata sequence at Boulby, see ‘Lithological Log of Cleveland Potash Ltd’, Borehole Staithes No. 20, drilled September–December 1968 to a depth of c.3500 feet (BGS ID borehole 620319, BGS Reference NZ71NE14). 58 ‘the revelation of a new order . . . and darkness as well’: Kent Meyers, ‘Chasing Dark Matter in America’s Deepest Gold Mine’, Harper’s Magazine (May 2015), 27–37: 28. 58 ‘As if. . .you could infer the meadow ‘: Rebecca Elson, ‘Explaining Dark Matter’, in A Responsibility to Awe (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), p. 71. 75 ‘I suddenly thought. . . it seems to have stuck’: Paul Crutzen, quoted in Howard Falcon-Lang, ‘Anthropocene: Have Humans Created a New Geological Age?’

The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish

Albert Einstein, anti-fragile, Atul Gawande, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bitcoin, Black Swan, colonial rule, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, feminist movement, Garrett Hardin, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, John Bogle, Linda problem, mandelbrot fractal, Pepsi Challenge, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, Richard Feynman, statistical model, stem cell, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem

_ It was Rubin’s observations of the Andromeda galaxy that led to her to collect the first evidence in support of the theory of dark matter—a substance that does not emit energy or light. Dark matter is an excellent theory with a lot of explanatory power. As Lisa Randall explains in Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, measurements of dark matter so far fit in exactly with what we understand about the Universe. Although we can’t see it, we can make predictions based on our understanding of it, and test those predictions. She writes, “It would be even more mysterious to me if the matter we can see with our eyes is all the matter that exists.”9 Dark matter is currently the simplest explanation for certain phenomena we observe in the Universe.

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“How Vera Rubin confirmed dark matter.” Astronomy.com, October 4, 2016. Retrieved from: http://www.astronomy.com/news/2016/10/vera-rubin 7 Larsen, Kristine. “Vera Cooper Rubin.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women’s Archive. Retrieved from: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rubin-vera-cooper 8 Panek, Richard. “Vera Rubin Didn’t Discover Dark Matter.” Scientific American, December 29, 2016. Retrieved from: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/vera-rubin-didnt-discover-dark-matter/ 9 Randall, Lisa. Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs. New York: HarperCollins, 2015. 10 Sagan, Carl.

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One possible explanation was something that had been theorized as far back as 1933, by Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky, who coined the phrase “dark matter” to describe a mass we couldn’t see, but which was influencing the behavior of the orbits in the galaxies. Dark matter became the simplest explanation for the observed phenomenon, and Vera Rubin has been credited with providing the first evidence of its existence. What is particularly interesting is that to this day no one has ever actually discovered dark matter. Why are more complicated explanations less likely to be true? Let’s work it out mathematically. Take two competing explanations, each of which seem to equally explain a given phenomenon.

The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless by John D. Barrow

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Charles Babbage, cosmological principle, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Fellow of the Royal Society, Georg Cantor, Isaac Newton, mutually assured destruction, Olbers’ paradox, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, scientific worldview, short selling, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

Their heaviness means they move more slowly and they can condense into regions small enough to explain the existence of cold dark matter in galaxies. This is an exciting frontier of modern cosmological research that brings together particle physicists with their candidates for the cold dark matter particles, astronomers with their observations of how much dark matter there seems to be, computational astrophysicists running huge computer codes to simulate the formation of galaxies dominated by slow-moving dark matter, and experimental physicists searching for the tell-tale signatures of the dark matter particles flying through their detectors deep underground. Until just a few years ago the observations pointed stubbornly to a Universe that did not contain the critical density of material needed to halt its expansion in the future.

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Remarkably, wherever we do this we discover that things are moving as if they are under the influence of the gravity of about ten times more matter than we see shining in the dark. We call this other unseen material 'cold dark matter'. A small fraction of this dark matter is composed of ordinary atoms and molecules, but the identity of the rest is a mystery. (see Figure 7.5). Two of the great quests of modern cosmology are to pin down the quantity and the quality of the cold dark matter. Fig 7.4 A composite satellite photograph of the Earth at night.11 Notice that the most brightly illuminated areas are big Western cities. The regions of greatest population in Asia and Africa are almost completely dark.

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There was growing evidence that they possessed a tiny mass, about ten billionths of the mass of a hydrogen atom, and that seemed to give just the right density of neutrinos to account for the mysterious abundance of cold dark matter today. Unfortunately, over the last twenty years it has become clear that the known types of neutrino, of which there are three, cannot be the cosmic dark matter. A combination of laboratory experiments and observations of stars where neutrinos are produced has constrained their masses to be so low that they are almost certainly not the cosmic dark matter. Equally problematic have been the studies, using some of the most powerful computers in the world, of what would happen to the luminous matter if it felt the gravitational pull of a universe of lightweight neutrinos.

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, dematerialisation, Eddington experiment, Hans Lippershey, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, power law, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, urban renewal

And so, like an audience that infers the presence of a dark-robed mime even though it sees only his white-gloved hands flitting to and fro on the unlit stage, astronomers concluded that the universe must be suffused with dark matter—matter that does not clump together in stars and hence does not give off light, and that thus exerts a gravitational pull without revealing itself visibly. The universe’s luminous constituents—stars— were revealed as but floating beacons in a giant ocean of dark matter. But if dark matter must exist in order to produce the observed motions of stars and galaxies, what’s it made of? So far, no one knows. The identity of the dark matter remains a major, looming mystery, although astronomers and physicists have suggested numerous possible constituents ranging from various kinds of exotic particles to a cosmic bath of miniature black holes.

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But even without determining its composition, by closely analyzing its gravitational effects astronomers have been able to determine with significant precision how much dark matter is spread throughout the universe. And the answer they’ve found amounts to about 25 percent of the critical density.21 Thus, together with the 5 percent found in visible matter, the dark matter brings our tally up to 30 percent of the amount predicted by inflationary cosmology. Figure 10.5 A galaxy immersed in a ball of dark matter (with the dark matter artificially highlighted to make it visible in the figure). Well, this is certainly progress, but for a long time scientists scratched their heads, wondering how to account for the remaining 70 percent of the universe, which, if inflationary cosmology was correct, had apparently gone AWOL.

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These are the most standoffish of the supersymmetric particles—they could nonchalantly pass through the entire earth without the slightest effect on their motion—and hence could easily have escaped detection.9 From calculations of how many of these particles would have been produced in the big bang and survived until today, physicists estimate that they would need to have mass on the order of 100 to 1,000 times that of the proton to supply the dark matter. This is an intriguing number, because various studies of supersymmetric-particle models as well as of superstring theory have arrived at the same mass range for these particles, without any concern for dark matter or cosmology. This would be a puzzling and completely unexplained confluence, unless, of course, the dark matter is indeed composed of supersymmetric particles. Thus, the search for supersymmetric particles at the world’s current and pending accelerators may also be viewed as searches for the heavily favored dark matter candidates. More direct searches for the dark matter particles streaming through the earth have also been under way for some time, although these are extremely challenging experiments.

A Grand and Bold Thing: An Extraordinary New Map of the Universe Ushering by Ann K. Finkbeiner

Albert Einstein, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, digital map, Galaxy Zoo, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Magellanic Cloud, Skype, slashdot

And now, after recombination, the universe was a gas of hydrogen atoms. The mountains of dark matter were still growing, connecting up into chains. All around the dark matter mountains, the ripples of ordinary hydrogen are still spreading, overlapping with other ripples. All together the ordinary and dark matter have laid down a shadowy pattern of lower and higher densities. Along this pattern, gravity begins to win, acting on dark matter and ordinary hydrogen alike. Gravity pulls the hydrogen into the mountains of dark matter, pulls the dark matter into the rings of hydrogen, mixes the dark and ordinary matter together.

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Matter is of two kinds: the protons and electrons that make up ordinary atoms and the extraordinary particles—no one knows what they are—that outweigh the ordinary ones by six to one and that are called dark matter. And gravity is gravity: it pulls on everything, dark and ordinary matter alike, and the bigger something is and the closer you are to it, the more strongly you’re pulled. At a redshift of 3,000, matter and light were in a kind of uproarious equilibrium. The universe was expanding 120,000 times faster than it is now, and was 8,000 K; it was a plasma so furiously hot that the matter, the protons and electrons and dark matter, all raced around freely. The photons of light traveled with them; they couldn’t travel alone or very far in this dense universe before electrons would scatter them off in other directions, and scattered photons meant the universe was opaque.

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Gravity would have liked to make the cooler, denser hills bigger, but with ordinary matter, it couldn’t: at these temperatures, the photons in the hills carried enormously more energy than the protons and blew the protons out of the hills into rings, shells around the hills, little ripples that spread out farther and farther, so small—only one part in 100,000—that they hardly disturbed the universal equilibrium. Those energetic photons, however, couldn’t touch dark matter, so gravity was free to pile the hills of dark matter higher, then higher yet, up into mountains. And the universe kept expanding and cooling, dark and chaotic. When the universe was around 400,000 years old, at redshift 1,000, it dramatically shifted state. The temperature had fallen to 3,000K, and photons had now lost enough energy that they could no longer interfere with protons.

Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo by Sean B. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Brownian motion, classic study, dark matter, Drosophila, Gregor Mendel, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method

This is the “dark matter” of the genome. Just as dark matter in the universe governs the behavior of visible bodies, the dark matter in our DNA controls where and when genes are used in development. This chapter is all about the dark matter in DNA and how, by virtue of controlling how tool kit genes are used, it contains the instructions for making and patterning body parts. These instructions are embedded in the dark DNA as genetic switches (my second analogy). You may not have heard about switches before this book. They have not received nearly as much attention, either in the lab or in the press, as they deserve.

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Seeing in the Dark In cosmology, biology, as well as other sciences, the existence of particular entities is detected either directly, by observation, or indirectly, by observing the effects on other entities that are more easily visualized or measured. The evidence for dark matter in the universe is all indirect, based upon observation of the velocities and rotation of galaxies and the deduction that there must be a great deal of mass inside galaxies that cannot be seen. Cosmologists and physicists are not yet sure what dark matter is made of. Our understanding of dark matter in the genome is much better because we know what it is made of (DNA) and we can isolate it and study its properties both directly and indirectly.

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One of the most powerful ways to study noncoding “dark” DNA is to hook a piece of it up to a gene that encodes a protein that is easily visualized, such as an enzyme that will make a colored reaction product, or a protein that will fluoresce in a beam of light. By inserting these engineered pieces of DNA back into a genome and then visualizing color patterns in a microscope, we can see what instructions, if any, are contained in a given piece of dark matter (a stripe here, a spot there, etc.). Most dark matter contains no instructions and is just space-filling “junk” accumulated over the course of evolution. In humans, only about 2 to 3 percent of our dark matter contains genetic switches that control how genes are used. I will focus all of this chapter on how genetic switches work to control animal development, and much of the rest of the book on how changes in these switches shape evolution.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

But we give it all back by just investing in your T-bills. You Americans earn more by investing in businesses overseas.” That is another way of putting the “dark matter” point, and again it reflects the American willingness, and indeed eagerness, to seek out higher-yielding (and riskier) equity-based investments. There is no general agreement on how large this “dark matter” phenomenon might be. Hausmann and Sturzenegger in their original work suggested a figure as high as 5.6 percent of GDP per year, with an accumulated stock of dark matter as high as 40 percent of GDP (a 2006 estimate). If that is true, rather than foreigners having a net claim of $2.5 trillion on the United States in the form of capital assets (a 2005 estimate), the United States has a net claim of $724 billion on foreigners—a big difference in value.16 A lot of subsequent writers have expressed skepticism that dark matter gains could be so high, and the dark matter hypothesis fell out of favor during the financial crisis, when American investments overseas lost a lot of their value and the chaos made a lot of these values yet harder to measure.

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This American overseas investment probably represents a significant net gain to the citizens of the United States.15 One way of thinking about this net gain is to consider that domestic U.S. firms invest a good deal overseas, and at fairly high rates of return. The gains from these investments are sometimes called “dark matter,” because the gains cannot be observed easily and thus their size is the subject of debate. In economics, the “dark matter hypothesis” first became popular in 2005–2006, when the U.S. trade deficit was unusually large but, contrary to many predictions, the dollar showed no signs of collapsing and most of the time was not even falling. How could this be? Some economists, most notably Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, suggested a new hypothesis: that America’s actual trade deficit might be much lower than measured if we took into account intangible American exports overseas, typically bundled with American investment abroad.

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To make that more concrete, if there is a McDonald’s franchise in Europe, America is also exporting some brand-name capital, some organizational know-how, and some managerial expertise, but these will bring future rather than current returns, unlike exports narrowly measured. The upshot is that America’s net foreign position is much better than it looks on paper. And that is why the phrase “dark matter” is used, as a hat tip to a hypothesis in physics that says most of the matter in the universe is essentially invisible to our measuring instruments. Of course, this point about economic dark matter is a restatement of the earlier observation that American capital markets help bring higher rates of return to this country. I once had a chat with a leading Korean economist, who lamented to me: “We work so much harder than you do to export!

The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far by Lawrence M. Krauss

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Plato's cave, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, the scientific method, time dilation

Moreover, calculations that I and others performed more than thirty years ago showed that the remnant abundance today of the lightest supersymmetric particle left over after the Big Bang would naturally be in the range so that it could be the dark matter dominating the mass of galaxies. In that case our galaxy would have a halo of dark matter particles whizzing throughout it, including through the room in which you are reading this. As a number of us also realized some time ago, this means that if one designs sensitive detectors and puts them underground, not unlike, at least in spirit, the neutrino detectors that already exist underground, one might directly detect these dark matter particles. Around the world a half dozen beautiful experiments are now going on to do just that.

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So, we are in potentially the best of times or the worst of times. A race is going on between the detectors at the LHC and the underground direct dark matter detectors to see who might discover the nature of dark matter first. If either group reports a detection, it will herald the opening up of a whole new world of discovery, leading potentially to an understanding of Grand Unification itself. And if no discovery is made in the coming years, we might rule out the notion of a simple supersymmetric origin of dark matter—and in turn rule out the whole notion of supersymmetry as a solution of the hierarchy problem. In that case we would have to go back to the drawing board, except if we don’t see any new signals at the LHC, we will have little guidance about which direction to head in order to derive a model of nature that might actually be correct.

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Beyond these particles, as I shall soon describe, we have every reason to expect that other elementary particles exist that have never been observed. While these particles, which we think make up the mysterious dark matter that dominates the mass of our galaxy and all observed galaxies, may be invisible to our telescopes, our observations and theories nevertheless suggest that galaxies and stars could never have formed without the existence of dark matter. And at the heart of all of the forces governing the dynamical behavior of everything we can observe is a beautiful mathematical framework called gauge symmetry. All of the known forces, strong, weak, electromagnetic, and even gravity, possess this mathematical property, and for the three former examples, it is precisely this property that ensures that the theories make mathematical sense and that nasty quantum infinities disappear from all calculations of quantities that can be compared to experiment.

One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B. J. Novak

Bernie Madoff, carbon-based life, citation needed, dark matter, do what you love, F. W. de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, Saturday Night Live

But those who were there for both contests knew what was so special about what they had witnessed: slow and steady wins the race, till truth and talent claim their place. Dark Matter “And that’s the puzzling thing about dark matter,” said the scientist at the end of our planetarium tour. “It makes up over ninety percent of the universe, and yet nobody knows what it is!” People on the tour chuckled politely, like Wow, isn’t that a fun fact? But I looked closer at the scientist, and I could tell something from the smirky little smile on his fat smug face: This motherfucker knew exactly what dark matter was. “So as you look up at the skies tonight, I hope you have a little more perspective, knowing more about what we know—and don’t know—about our vast and magical …” etcetera etcetera.

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Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Jacket design by Hum Creative v3.1 To the Reader CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication The Rematch Dark Matter No One Goes to Heaven to See Dan Fogelberg Romance, Chapter One Julie and the Warlord The Something by John Grisham The Girl Who Gave Great Advice All You Have to Do ’Rithmetic The Ambulance Driver Walking on Eggshells (or: When I Loved Tony Robbins) The Impatient Billionaire and the Mirror for Earth Missed Connection: Grocery spill at 21st and 6th 2:30 pm on Wednesday I Never Want to Walk on the Moon Sophia The Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela They Kept Driving Faster and Outran the Rain The Man Who Invented the Calendar The Ghost of Mark Twain The Beautiful Girl in the Bookstore MONSTER: The Roller Coaster Kellogg’s (or: The Last Wholesome Fantasy of the Middle-School Boy) The Man Who Posted Pictures of Everything He Ate Closure Kindness Among Cakes Quantum Nonlocality and the Death of Elvis Presley If I Had a Nickel A Good Problem to Have Johnny Depp, Fate, and the Double-Decker Hollywood Tour Bus Being Young Was Her Thing Angel Echeverria, Comediante Superpopular The Market Was Down The Vague Restaurant Critic One of These Days, We Have to Do Something About Willie Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Missing Bicycle Regret Is Just Perfectionism Plus Time Chris Hansen at the Justin Bieber Concert Great Writers Steal Confucius at Home War If You Love Something Just an Idea Heyyyyy, Rabbits The Best Thing in the World Awards Bingo Marie’s Stupid Boyfriend Pick a Lane “Everyone Was Singing the Same Song”: The Duke of Earl Recalls His Trip to America in June of 1962 The Pleasure of Being Right Strange News Never Fall in Love The World’s Biggest Rip-Off The Walk to School on the Day After Labor Day Kate Moss Welcome to Camp Fantastic for Gifted Teens There Is a Fine Line Between Why and Why Not The Man Who Told Us About Inflatable Women A New Hitler Constructive Criticism The Bravest Thing I Ever Did Rome The Literalist’s Love Poem J.

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“I can’t imagine they would have gotten the rings of Saturn wrong,” he said. “Oh, unless maybe you mean the mural at the entrance? The one for tots?” “Yeah, that,” I said. We walked toward the corner and when we got there I grabbed the string of the tour badge around his neck and twisted it and choked him hard. “What is dark matter?” I said. “What is it?” “I don’t know,” he coughed. “Nobody knows.” I pulled the cord tighter. “We can measure its effects,” he said. “We only know what it isn’t.” “Well, work backwards, bitch! You know what it isn’t, so what is it?” I pulled the cord tighter, and with my other hand I started pinching him in cutesy, creepy ways.

Life Is Simple by Johnjoe McFadden

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, animal electricity, anthropic principle, Astronomia nova, Bayesian statistics, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, COVID-19, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, horn antenna, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, lockdown, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Plato's cave, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, William of Occam

One of the most controversial is the theory put forward by theoretical physicists Lisa Randall and Matthew Reece, of Harvard University, Massachusetts. They reason that dark matter killed the dinosaurs.3 Randall and Reece proposed that our solar system’s rotation around the galaxy periodically brings it close to a thin disc of dark matter in the galactic plane that disturbs the orbits of comets and asteroids to send showers of rocky destruction tumbling towards the earth. At first sight, it would seem that both neutrinos and dark matter are entities beyond necessity in our universe, particularly if you happened to be a dinosaur. To discover why neither we, nor dinosaurs, would have existed without them, we need to probe the origins of matter and particularly its living variety.

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At first, Rubin didn’t believe the data but she and Ford repeated the measurements for more and more stars and obtained exactly the same result. They eventually concluded that spiral galaxies contained about six times more matter than visible stars and that this dark matter was responsible for accelerating the outer stars of the Andromeda galaxy.5 Rubin and Ford’s observations have subsequently been confirmed by many more observations of distant galaxies. Each seems to be surrounded by a halo of unseen cold dark matter. Continuing star formation is due to this invisible halo of dark matter. The halo acts as a kind of gravity shield that deflects much of the supernovae ejecta back into the galaxy. There it can condense to form new stars, such as the sun, but also rocky planets such as the earth.

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Far from being entities beyond necessity, the universe would be a very dull place without these almost massless neutral particles. A dark ecology Dark matter, the material that may have been responsible for exterminating the dinosaurs, makes up about 27 per cent of the universe. A whopping 68 per cent of our universe is made of another mysterious entity known as dark energy. The visible sun, stars and planets account for only 5 per cent of matter-energy. Why has the universe wasted so much of its resources making such a lot of dark and apparently superfluous stuff? In fact, far from being an entity beyond necessity, dark matter has played at least two key roles in our existence. The first was to help make galaxies.

Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand: Fifty Wonders That Reveal an Extraordinary Universe by Marcus Chown

Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Carrington event, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, gravity well, horn antenna, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, microbiome, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Turing machine

In fact, there are recent claims that some but not all of this missing stuff has actually been found in the guise of hot filaments of gas, forming a kind of web of tenuous matter between the galaxies.1 But, in addition to the 4.9 percent ordinary matter, 26.8 percent—almost six times as much—is in the form of dark matter. This gives out no light or at least too little light to be detected by our most sensitive astronomical instruments. We know of its existence only because its gravity tugs at the visible stars and galaxies, causing them to move in a manner different from the prediction of Newton’s law of gravity. As for the identity of the dark matter, your guess is as good as mine. Speculations range from as-yet-undiscovered subatomic particles to fridge-sized black holes surviving from the earliest moments of the Big Bang to relics from the future in which time runs backwards (seriously!).

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But, in addition to the 4.9 percent ordinary matter and the 26.8 percent dark matter, a whopping 68.3 percent of the mass of the universe is dark energy (remember: all energy has an equivalent mass—it weighs something—according to Einstein’s famous E = mc2 formula). The dark energy is invisible, fills all of space, and has repulsive gravity. The repulsive gravity is speeding up the expansion of the universe, which is how the dark energy was discovered in 1998. That’s not long ago at all. Just imagine. Until only a couple of decades ago, science had overlooked this major mass component of the universe. Now, if physicists are baffled by dark matter, they are utterly at sea when it comes to dark energy.

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The new planet was named Neptune. Its discovery created a sensation and made a superstar of Le Verrier.2 It even set him on a true wild-goose chase—searching for a hypothetical planet orbiting closer to the sun than Mercury and dubbed “Vulcan.”3 Newton’s theory of gravity has proved to be the gift that keeps on giving. Dark matter is the Neptune of today. We know it outweighs ordinary matter by a factor of six because we can see it tugging with its gravity on the visible stars and galaxies. But, as yet, we have no idea what it is. 23. LORD OF THE RINGS Galileo thought Saturn was a planet with…ears “The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.”

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, New Journalism, race to the bottom, random walk, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, Skype, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Since neutrinos are the second most numerous particles in the universe after photons, even if each one has only a smidgen of mass, the total could add up to a lot. So some cosmologists had hoped that neutrinos would account for much of the mysterious dark matter, whose presence is only “seen” through its gravitational influence on galaxies and galaxy clusters. But the neutrino’s mass has turned out to be way too tiny to explain dark matter. That means some other particle or particles, hitherto unknown to physics, must exist. The hunt is on, but no good candidate has turned up yet. The findings of Super-K and SNO also set the stage for other neutrino experiments, focused on making precise measurements of how different neutrino flavors morph into one another.

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Understanding CP violation is central to figuring out how matter came to predominate over antimatter in the early universe. Crab Nebula: The gaseous remnant of the supernova that was seen in 1054, located in the constellation Taurus, with a neutron star near its center dark matter: Invisible material whose existence is inferred from its gravitational influence on visible matter in galaxies and galaxy clusters. Dark matter appears to be much more abundant than normal matter, but what it’s made of remains a mystery. At one time, scientists thought that neutrinos could be a major constituent, but now we know that their mass is too small. deuterium: An isotope of hydrogen whose nucleus contains a neutron as well as a proton, instead of a lone proton.

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For astronomers, who have had to rely almost exclusively on electromagnetic radiation in the form of visible light, radio waves, and X-rays from distant celestial bodies, neutrinos offer an exciting new window on the most violent phenomena in nature. In fact, neutrinos may have a lot to do with triggering spectacular stellar explosions in the first place. Some scientists have proposed that a sterile variety of neutrinos could account for so-called dark matter, which makes up nearly a quarter of the universe but remains undetected except through its gravitational tug on galaxies. The imprints left by primordial neutrinos on the faint afterglow of the big bang, which is still measurable with microwave telescopes, could reveal the conditions very soon after the universe was born.

Big Bang by Simon Singh

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Andrew Wiles, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Astronomia nova, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, carbon-based life, Cepheid variable, Chance favours the prepared mind, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, Copley Medal, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, discovery of penicillin, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Freundlich, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Hans Lippershey, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Index librorum prohibitorum, information security, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Karl Jansky, Kickstarter, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Olbers’ paradox, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Paul Erdős, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, scientific mainstream, Simon Singh, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, unbiased observer, Wilhelm Olbers, William of Occam

Other candidates for dark matter come under the heading of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which includes various types of particles that do not form objects like MACHOS, but which might permeate the entire universe, hardly making their presence felt, except through the force of gravity. As yet, there are only vague clues to the nature and amount of dark matter in the universe, which is rather frustrating because cosmologists need a respectable understanding of dark matter before they can fill in some gaps in the Big Bang model. For example, the gravitational influence of dark matter would have played a major role in attracting more ordinary matter in the early stages of the universe, thereby helping to form galaxies. And, at the other end of the timeline, dark matter might play a decisive role in the ultimate fate of the universe. The universe has been expanding ever since the Big Bang, but all of the mass of the universe should have been pulling the matter inwards and gradually slowing down the expansion.

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Something else that keeps Big Bang cosmologists awake at night is dark matter. Observations show that stars orbiting the periphery of galaxies have tremendous speeds, yet the gravitational pull of all the stars closer to the heart of the galaxy is not enough to prevent these peripheral stars from flying off into the cosmos. Therefore, cosmologists believe that there must be vast quantities of dark matter in a galaxy, namely matter that does not shine but which exerts enough of a gravitational pull to keep the stars in their orbits. Although the idea of dark matter dates back to Fritz Zwicky at Mount Wilson in the 1930s, cosmologists are still unsure of its true nature, which is rather embarrassing as calculations imply that the universe has more dark matter than ordinary stellar matter.

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Although the idea of dark matter dates back to Fritz Zwicky at Mount Wilson in the 1930s, cosmologists are still unsure of its true nature, which is rather embarrassing as calculations imply that the universe has more dark matter than ordinary stellar matter. Some candidates for dark matter are so-called massive compact halo objects (MACHOs), a category which includes black holes, asteroids and giant Jupiter-like planets. We would not see such objects in a galaxy, because they do not shine, but they would all contribute to the gravitational attraction within a galaxy. Other candidates for dark matter come under the heading of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which includes various types of particles that do not form objects like MACHOS, but which might permeate the entire universe, hardly making their presence felt, except through the force of gravity.

Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Donald Trump, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Gary Taubes, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, Yogi Berra

Observations of our cosmic neighborhood have led scientists to notch up 70 percent of whatever’s out there to dark energy, the mysterious force that is driving the expansion of the universe. No one knows what dark energy is, and finding out is a major goal in physics. The Standard Model describes but 4 percent of the matter we can see in space. The rest, about a quarter, is dark matter. The name is intentionally unilluminating. Dark matter doesn’t shine or radiate heat, and you can’t see it by bouncing light off it. Many theorists think dark matter is made of supersymmetric particles called “neutralinos,” the lightest kind the supersymmetry theory predicts. Not everyone is a fan of supersymmetry. Critics challenge aficionados with a simple question: If the universe is supersymmetric, where are all the other particles?

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“It would be really strange if everything that exists out there was stuff that our bodies feel. There is simply no reason why we should be so special,” he says. Scientists already know that the universe contains matter that we cannot see or feel. There are vast clumps of dark matter that lurk around galaxies that only reveal their presence by exerting a gravitational pull on the celestial objects around them. Cosmologists believe that dark matter makes up around a quarter of the mass of the universe. How are these worlds hidden from us? Take a good look at the world around you. Everything, including this book in your hands and the chair you are sitting on, is made up from simple building blocks.

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By far the largest is the aptly named Atlas detector, from “A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS,” which is so big it would barely fit in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. The 7,000-metric-ton Atlas and the not-so-small CMS detector were designed with the Higgs particle in mind. They might see far more, though, such as exotic particles of dark matter or extra dimensions. The Higgs boson might pop into existence in any of several ways inside the Large Hadron Collider, but scientists predict the most likely route to be when two gluons—the particles that bind quarks together inside protons—slam together and fuse. The energy released in the collision would theoretically create a Higgs particle with ease, though it would decay immediately afterward.

From eternity to here: the quest for the ultimate theory of time by Sean M. Carroll

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Columbine, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, dematerialisation, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Lao Tzu, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low earth orbit, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, pets.com, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Schrödinger's Cat, Slavoj Žižek, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, synthetic biology, the scientific method, time dilation, wikimedia commons

An earlier version of this argument can be found in Penrose (1979). 241 Most of the matter in the universe—between 80 percent and 90 percent by mass—is in the form of dark matter, not the ordinary matter of atoms and molecules. We don’t know what the dark matter is, and it’s conceivable that it takes the form of small black holes. But there are problems with that idea, including the difficulty of making so many black holes in the first place. So most cosmologists tend to believe that the dark matter is very likely to be some sort of new elementary particle (or particles) that hasn’t yet been discovered. 242 Black-hole entropy increases rapidly as the black hole gains mass—it’s proportional to the mass squared.

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But matter itself comes in different forms: “ordinary matter,” including all of the kinds of particles we have ever discovered in experiments here on Earth, and “dark matter,” some other kind of particle that can’t be anything we’ve yet directly seen. The mass (and therefore energy) in ordinary matter is mostly in the form of atomic nuclei—protons and neutrons—but electrons also contribute. So ordinary matter includes you, me, the Earth, the Sun, stars, and all the gas and dust and rocks in space. We know how much of that stuff there is, and it’s not nearly enough to account for the gravitational fields observed in galaxies and clusters. So there must be dark matter, and we’ve ruled out all known particles as candidates; theorists have invented an impressive menu of possibilities, including “axions” and “neutralinos” and “Kaluza-Klein particles.”

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So there must be dark matter, and we’ve ruled out all known particles as candidates; theorists have invented an impressive menu of possibilities, including “axions” and “neutralinos” and “Kaluza-Klein particles.” All told, ordinary matter makes up about 4 percent of the energy in the universe, dark matter makes up about 22 percent, and dark energy makes up about 74 percent. Trying to create or detect dark matter directly is a major goal of modern experimental physics. See Hooper (2007), Carroll (2007), or Gates (2009) for more details. 48 So how much energy is there in the dark energy, anyway? It’s about one calorie per cubic centimeter. Note that the “calories” used to measure the energy content of food are actually kilocalories (1,000 standard calories).

Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome by Nessa Carey

dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, epigenetics, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kickstarter, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs

Typeset in Janson Text by Marie Doherty Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc For Abi Reynolds, who is always by my side And for Sheldon – good to see you again Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Nomenclature An Introduction to Genomic Dark Matter 1. Why Dark Matter Matters 2. When Dark Matter Turns Very Dark Indeed 3. Where Did All the Genes Go? 4. Outstaying an Invitation 5. Everything Shrinks When We Get Old 6. Two is the Perfect Number 7. Painting with Junk 8. Playing the Long Game 9. Adding Colour to the Dark Matter 10. Why Parents Love Junk 11. Junk with a Mission 12. Switching It On, Turning It Up 13. No Man’s Land 14. Project ENCODE – Big Science Comes to Junk DNA 15.

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Consequently, throughout much of this book we will explore the darkness by using the torch of human genetics. There are many ways to begin shining a light on the dark matter of our genome, so let’s start with an odd but unassailable fact to anchor us. Some genetic diseases are caused by mutations in junk DNA, and there is probably no better starting point for our journey into the hidden genomic universe than this. 1. Why Dark Matter Matters Sometimes life seems to be cruel in the troubles it piles onto a family. Consider this example. A baby boy was born; let’s call him Daniel. He was strangely floppy at birth, and had trouble breathing unassisted.

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JUNK DNA Also by Nessa Carey The Epigenetics Revolution JUNK DNA A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome NESSA CAREY Published in the UK in 2015 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: info@iconbooks.com www.iconbooks.com Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road, Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065 Distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District, 41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925 Distributed in India by Penguin Books India, 7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon 122002, Haryana ISBN: 978-184831-826-7 Text copyright © 2015 Nessa Carey The author has asserted her moral rights.

Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics by Paul Halpern

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmological constant, dark matter, double helix, Eddington experiment, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, luminiferous ether, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation

As Zwicky’s claim was not taken seriously, it took another half century before the search for dark matter began in earnest. The trigger was the finding by astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford that Andromeda and other galaxies don’t have enough visible matter to keep their outer stars moving as fast as they actually do. Galaxies seem to act like merry-go-rounds, with speedy outer horses pulled by unseen mechanisms. Starting in the 1980s, astronomers and particles physicists have conducted searches for dim astronomical objects and/or invisible particles with enough gravitational oomph to constitute dark matter. The focus began to center on cold (slow-moving) dark matter particles that respond to the weak force and gravity but not to electromagnetism (hence their invisibility).

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Searches for such particles have been conducted in converted mine tunnels deep underground, to avoid the “noise” of ordinary particles, as well as in space. At the time of this writing, conclusive evidence for dark matter particles has yet to be found. If dark energy and dark matter were rare phenomena, perhaps we could hold off on explanations and try to tidy up other loose ends in physics. On the contrary, together they constitute 95 percent of everything in space. According to recent astronomical estimates, a whopping 68 percent of the universe is dark energy and fully 27 percent is dark matter, leaving only 5 percent that can be explained through the standard model combined with conventional general relativity.

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Not if you look at the glaring omissions that neither theory can explain. Dark energy, the agent for accelerating the universe, and dark matter, the invisible substance that keeps galaxies from flying apart, represent mysteries on par with those that challenged the quantum pioneers. We have mentioned how the former seems to match the cosmological constant term proposed (and later retracted) by Einstein and later advocated by Schrödinger. However, no one knows the physical source of dark energy, which acts as a kind of antigravity. The nature of dark matter offers another modern-day conundrum. First identified in the 1930s by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in his study of the Coma cluster, it constitutes the unseen mass gravitationally required to keep astronomical structures stable.

Ringworld's Children by Larry Niven

dark matter, friendly fire

Tunesmith waved into a recorded view of neon paint streaming through oil. "Dark matter. The missing mass. Instruments in Einstein space can't find it, but it huddles close around suns in this other domain you've been calling hyperspace. Dark matter makes galaxies more massive, changes their spin--" "We rammed through that?" "Wrong picture, Louis. My instruments didn't record any resistance. We'll test that later. It might have been different if this had reached us." A deep violet comma-shaped shadow. "We find life everywhere we look in this universe. Would it be surprising if an ecology has grown up within dark matter? And predators?" Maybe Tunesmith was mad.

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Tunesmith barely glanced at the view. "They'll be a few minutes matching. We have time. Hindmost, show us what we recorded in this last hyperdrive jump." The hypercamera's record was blank. Louis snickered. Tunesmith reproved him. "Louis, there's nothing to see. We're outside the envelope of dark matter that collects around our star. Where there almost isn't any dark matter, there almost isn't space either! This is why we can travel faster than light does in vacuum, because distance in this domain is drastically contracted. "Now I need only learn why there is more than one characteristic velocity. I'll get that by studying Long Shot.

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"I only held us in hyperdrive for a moment," Tunesmith said, "but these hypothetical predators only have one speed, Louis, and it's fast. 'Singularity' is a mathematical term. Certainly there are mathematics involved, but they may be more complex than just places where an equation gives infinities. Inside this morass of dark matter, the characteristic speed may be drastically lowered. The proof is that we live." "We are being observed," the Hindmost said. "I sense ranging beams from ARM and Patriarchy telescopes and neutrino detectors. Ships begin to accelerate inward. The ship from Sheathclaws houses telepaths of both species, though they can't reach us yet.

Wonders of the Universe by Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Eyjafjallajökull, Ford Model T, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, time dilation, trade route

They are thought to have giant halos of dark matter, a new form of matter unlike anything we have discovered on Earth and which interacts only weakly with normal matter. Despite this, its gravitational effect dominates the behaviour of galaxies today and most likely dominated the formation of the galaxies in the early Universe. This is because we now think that around 95 per cent of the mass of galaxies such as our own Milky Way is made up of dark matter. In some sense this makes the luminous stars, planets, gas and dust an after-thought, although because it is highly unlikely that dark matter can form into complex and beautiful structures like stars, planets and people, one might legitimately claim that it’s rather less interesting.

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In some sense this makes the luminous stars, planets, gas and dust an after-thought, although because it is highly unlikely that dark matter can form into complex and beautiful structures like stars, planets and people, one might legitimately claim that it’s rather less interesting. The search for the nature of dark matter is one of the great challenges for twenty-first-century physics. We shall return to the fascinating subject of dark matter later in the book. The word ‘galaxy’ comes from the Greek word galaxias, meaning milky circle. It was first used to describe the galaxy that dominates our night skies, even though the Greeks could have had no concept of its true scale. Watching the core of our galaxy rise in the night sky is one of nature’s greatest spectacles, although regrettably the light of our cities has robbed us of this majestic nightly display.

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It began 13.75 billion years ago with the Big Bang, and in this embryonic period, known as the Primordial Era, the Universe was a place without the light from the stars, although in its early years the swirling hot matter would have glowed as brightly as a sun. For the first 100 million years, the conditions were far too violent for stars to form. This changed when the Universe had expanded and cooled sufficiently for the weak force of gravity to begin to clump the primordial dust, gas and dark matter into galaxies. With this came the dawning of the second great epoch in the life of our universe: the Stelliferous Era, the age of stars. The moment the first stars were born is one of the most evocative milestones in the evolution of the cosmos. It signals the end of an alien time when the Universe was without structure – a formless void.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apple Newton, Arthur Eddington, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Brownian motion, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Magellanic Cloud, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

If we add up the masses of all the stars that we can see in our galaxy and other galaxies, the total is less than one hundredth of the amount required to halt the expansion of the universe, even for the lowest estimate of the rate of expansion. Our galaxy and other galaxies, however, must contain a large amount of “dark matter” that we cannot see directly, but which we know must be there because of the influence of its gravitational attraction on the orbits of stars in the galaxies. Moreover, most galaxies are found in clusters, and we can similarly infer the presence of yet more dark matter in between the galaxies in these clusters by its effect on the motion of the galaxies. When we add up all this dark matter, we still get only about one tenth of the amount required to halt the expansion. However, we cannot exclude the possibility that there might be some other form of matter, distributed almost uniformly throughout the universe, that we have not yet detected and that might still raise the average density of the universe up to the critical value needed to halt the expansion.

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Coordinates: Numbers that specify the position of a point in space and time. Cosmological constant: A mathematical device used by Einstein to give space-time an inbuilt tendency to expand. Cosmology: The study of the universe as a whole. Dark matter: Matter in galaxies, clusters, and possibly between clusters, that can not be observed directly but can be detected by its gravitational effect. As much as 90 percent of the mass of the universe may be in the form of dark matter. Duality: A correspondence between apparently different theories that lead to the same physical results. Einstein-Rosen bridge: A thin tube of space-time linking two black holes.

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If we could observe them, it would provide a good test of this picture of a very hot early stage of the universe. Unfortunately, their energies nowadays would be too low for us to observe them directly. However, if neutrinos are not massless, but have a small mass of their own, as suggested by some recent experiments, we might be able to detect them indirectly: they could be a form of “dark matter,” like that mentioned earlier, with sufficient gravitational attraction to stop the expansion of the universe and cause it to collapse again. About one hundred seconds after the big bang, the temperature would have fallen to one thousand million degrees, the temperature inside the hottest stars.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

CyberPoint’s solution to all this ethical wrangling was not to stop targeting dissidents, journalists, or Americans; just the opposite. Evenden and his team were told that their contracts would be shifted from CyberPoint to an Emirati LLC called Dark Matter. They would no longer be on loan from the State Department. They would be working directly for the Emiratis, without constraints. Evenden’s bosses gave CyberPoint’s employees a choice: they could join Dark Matter, or CyberPoint would pay for their relocation back to the United States. No questions asked. Half switched over to Dark Matter. Evenden warned his former colleagues to think this through. “You are going to be targeting Americans,” he told them. Either they were in denial or blinded by their fat Emirati paychecks.

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Those who opted not to join Dark Matter were ousted from friend circles. “People we regularly had drinks with, who we’d had over to our house, stopped communicating with us.” And then they were kicked out of the shop. CyberPoint took away key cards and shut down personnel accounts. Evenden and the others who’d chosen to leave had to wait until the company could schedule their moves back to the United States. And once they got back to the States, once they had reckoned with what they had left behind, Evenden sent a tip to the FBI. By the time Evenden reached out to me in mid-2019, Dark Matter was under FBI investigation.

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Their accounts are available at Christopher Bing and Joel Schectman, “Inside the UAE’s Secret Hacking Team of American Mercenaries,” Reuters, January 30, 2019, and “White House Veterans Helped Gulf Monarchy Build Secret Surveillance Unit,” Reuters, December 10, 2019. I learned about Dark Matter’s hacking of FIFA, Qatari officials, and the dragnet that included former First Lady Michelle Obama from my interviews with Evenden and other CyberPoint and Dark Matter employees. This book was the first time any of the details of the hack of Mrs. Obama has been reported. I was able to flesh out the details of Mrs. Obama’s visit via contemporary news articles, including the Associated Press, “First Lady Michelle Obama Arrives in Qatar for Speech,” November 2, 2015; Nick Anderson, “First Lady Urges Fathers Worldwide to Join ‘Struggle’ for Girls’ Education,” Washington Post, November 4, 2015; and Paul Bedard, “Michelle Obama’s 24 Minute Speech in Qatar Cost $700,000,” Washington Examiner, December 9, 2015.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

But it takes a lot of energy to fuse protons because their positive charges repel each other, and temperatures were falling fast just after the big bang, so it was impossible to fuse more protons to form the nuclei of larger atoms. This explains a fundamental aspect of our universe: almost three-quarters of all the atoms in it are hydrogen, and most of the rest are helium. A lot more matter consists of dark matter, stuff we don’t yet understand, though we know it exists because its gravitational pull determines the structure and distribution of galaxies. So, a few minutes after the big bang, our universe consisted of vast clouds of dark matter in which were embedded crackling plasmas of protons and electrons with photons of light flowing through them. Today, we find plasmas only in the centers of stars. Now we must pause and wait about 380,000 years (almost twice as long as our species has existed on Earth).

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Normally, isolated atoms are electrically neutral, because the positive and negative charges of their protons and electrons cancel each other out. So when the first atoms of hydrogen and helium formed, most of the matter in the universe suddenly went neutral, and the tingling plasma evaporated. Photons, the carriers of the electromagnetic force, could now flow freely through an electrically neutral mist of atoms and dark matter. Today, astronomers can detect the results of this phase change, because photons that escaped the plasma generated a thin background hum of energy (the cosmic microwave background radiation) that still pervades the entire universe. Our origin story has crossed its first threshold. We have a universe.

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Together, gravity and matter provided the Goldilocks conditions for the emergence of stars and galaxies. Studies of the cosmic microwave background radiation show that in the early universe, there was little structure at large scales. Think of a gossamer-thin mist of hydrogen and helium atoms floating in a warm bath of dark matter permeated with photons of light. And all of it at more or less the same temperature. We know the early universe was homogenous because we can measure temperature differences in the CMBR, and we find that the hottest parts of the early universe were only about one one-hundredth of a degree warmer than the coolest parts.

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable by James Owen Weatherall

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, butterfly effect, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Carmen Reinhart, Claude Shannon: information theory, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Modelers Manifesto, fixed income, George Akerlof, Gerolamo Cardano, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jim Simons, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, martingale, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Myron Scholes, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, power law, prediction markets, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, tulip mania, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile

Einstein proposed a simple way of figuring out the lower bound for the total amount of dark matter in the universe. He argued that the density of dark matter in the universe as a whole was at least as much as the density within a galaxy (or rather, a group of galaxies known as a cluster). Osborne decided he didn’t buy the argument. For one, Einstein seemed to be making a series of bad assumptions. Worse still, the best evidence that anyone had in 1946 showed that most dark matter was restricted to certain parts of a galaxy, with basically no dark matter in empty space (this still seems to be true). So if anything, you should expect the density of dark matter to be higher in a galaxy than in space as a whole.

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To learn as much about the theory as he could, he picked up a book by Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity, in which Einstein offered an argument about how much dark matter could exist in the universe. Dark matter — literally, stuff in the universe that doesn’t seem to emit or reflect light, which means that we can’t see it directly — was first discovered in the 1930s, by its effects on the rotation of galaxies. Devotees of popular physics know that today, dark matter is one of the most puzzling mysteries in all of cosmology. Observations of other galaxies suggest that the vast majority of the matter in the universe is unobservable, something that is not explained by any of our best physical theories.

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, back-to-the-land, Beryl Markham, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, data science, Drosophila, Elon Musk, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, scientific mainstream, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869

VERA RUBIN RIDGE A special issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research detailing discoveries in the Vera Rubin Ridge is slated to be released in 2020. EVIDENCE OF DARK MATTER Vera C. Rubin, W. Kent Ford, Jr., and Norbert Thonnard, “Rotational Properties of 21 SC Galaxies with a Large Range of Luminosities and Radii, from NGC 4605 (R= 4kpc) to UGC 2885 (R= 122 kpc),” The Astrophysical Journal, 238 (1980), pp. 471–487; J. G. De Swart, Gianfranco Bertone, and Jeroen van Dongen, “How Dark Matter Came to Matter,” Nature Astronomy, 1, no. 3 (2017), p. 0059. 85 PERCENT OF THE “Synopsis: How Dark Matter Shaped the First Galaxies,” American Physical Society (Oct. 2, 2019). LEARNED TO TELL TIME Interview of Vera Rubin by Alan Lightman, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, American Institute of Physics (College Park, Md.: April 3, 1989).

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She also received a National Medal of Science in 1993, the highest scientific award in the United States. Many also believe she should have been awarded a Nobel Prize for her work; see: Randall, “Why Vera Rubin Deserved A Nobel,” The New York Times, and Sarah Scoles, “How Vera Rubin Confirmed Dark Matter,” Astronomy (June 2016). “TO HAVE A FAMILY” Vera Rubin, Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters (New York, Springer Science and Business Media: 1996). SHE HAD FOUR CHILDREN Overbye, “Vera Rubin, 88, Dies; Opened Doors in Astronomy, and for Women,” The New York Times. BECAME A PLANETARY GEOLOGIST Dave Rubin is a sedimentologist in the department of Earth and planetary sciences at U.C.

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* * * — BY THE TIME I joined the science team, Curiosity had holes in its wheels, and its poor drill was beginning to show signs of wear. It had been roving for four years. But the mission was about to enter into one of its most interesting phases: an ascent of the Vera Rubin Ridge, named after the extraordinary scientist who discovered the first evidence of dark matter, mysterious particles thought to comprise roughly 85 percent of the total matter in the universe. As a girl, Rubin had learned to tell time by how the stars outside her window wheeled across the sky. As a young woman, she was encouraged to pursue a career not in astronomy but in painting astronomical objects.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Atahualpa, Cepheid variable, classic study, Commentariolus, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, dark matter, delayed gratification, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Henri Poincaré, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Lao Tzu, Louis Pasteur, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, planetary scale, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, source of truth, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

Analysis of this literally universal experiment confirms that most of the stuff of the universe is invisible—the “dark matter” problem—and that much of this invisible stuff cannot be ordinary matter, like planets and stars, but must be of some exotic form, like the particles predicted by string theories. (String theory, along with M-theory, which portrays the strings as membranes, continues to be a promising method for constructing a unified, quantum theory of gravity, but it remains unfinished.) Important clues to the nature of dark matter were found by astronomers studying supernovae. One class of these exploding stars, the type la supernovae, all seem to reach about the same maximum brightness (once one corrects for idiosyncracies such as differing abundances of nickel and other elements.)

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Supersymmetry theory, as we saw in the previous chapter, predicts the existence of enormous numbers of as yet undetected particles left over from the early universe.* If the theory ripened to the point that it could specify the masses of these particles, it might be possible to test it by looking for them. A ghostly clue that there may be such undetected material in the universe today is proffered by what astronomers call the “dark matter” problem. The masses of galaxies and their clusters can be deduced by measuring the velocity at which stars orbit the centers of the galaxies to which they belong, and at which galaxies orbit the centers of clusters of galaxies.† In case after case, this turns out to add up to something like five or ten times the mass of all the visible stars and nebulae.

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The problem that engaged the attention of Guth, and of his Cornell colleague Henry Tye, was that the grand unified theories predicted the production of far too many magnetic monopoles—roughly one hundred times more monopoles than there are atoms. Given that most of the matter in the universe is invisible—the “dark matter” question—cosmologists generally welcomed the suggestior that massive subatomic particles might make up the deficit, but this was an embarrassment of riches. Searches for monopoles had turned up null results: One event had been recorded, on Valentine’s Day, 1982, on a device built by Bias Cabrera in a basement laboratory at Stanford, but Cabrera’s result had never been repeated, at Stanford or anywhere else.

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, diversification, Donald Trump, energy security, failed state, financial engineering, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Global Witness, high net worth, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, income inequality, joint-stock company, land bank, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, mass immigration, medical malpractice, Navinder Sarao, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Sloane Ranger, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

After a while, you will find yourself speaking this way yourself. So, how much money is there out there, hiding behind this palisade of circumlocution? This is a difficult question to answer: the money is invisible, and kept invisible by well-paid, imaginative and highly intelligent people. It is dark matter and, like dark matter, it can only be studied by recording its effect on things that we can see. Gabriel Zucman, the French economist who has studied Swiss banking, has tried to make these calculations. By analysing the statistical anomalies that banking secrecy creates, he estimates that 8 per cent of all the world’s financial wealth was held in tax havens in 2014: $7.6 trillion, out of a total of $95.5 trillion.

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The misuse of diplomatic immunity by extremely wealthy people has gone under-remarked, Lethal Weapon 2 excepted. 11 – Un-write-about-able The story of Bill Browder’s life as a fund manager in Russia, and his conversion into a human rights activist, is told in his Red Notice: How I Became Putin’s No. 1 Enemy (New York: Simon & Schuster and London: Corgi, 2015). The film that was never shown was directed by Havana Marking, and it was really good. Thanks to Daria Kaleniuk and others for appearing in it. 12 – Dark Matter The 2015 Deutsche Bank paper ‘Dark Matter: The Hidden Capital Flows that Drive G10 Exchange Rates’ by Oliver Harvey and Robin Winkler is available online, and links much of the secret money moving into Britain to Russia. It is ironic that two years later, that same bank paid fines of $630 million to settle US and UK charges that it had moved $10 billion of hidden capital out of Russia in so-called ‘mirror trades’.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. eISBN 978 1 78283 333 8 CONTENTS 1 Aladdin’s Cave 2 Pirates 3 Queen of the Caribbees 4 Sex, Lies and Offshore Vehicles 5 Mystery on Harley Street 6 Shell Games 7 Cancer 8 Nasty as a Rattlesnake 9 The Man Who Sells Passports 10 ‘Diplomatic Immunity!’ 11 Un-write-about-able 12 Dark Matter 13 ‘Nuclear Death is Knocking Your Door’ 14 Say Yes to the Money 15 High-end Property 16 Plutos Like to Hang out Together 17 Breaking Switzerland 18 Tax Haven USA 19 Standing up to Moneyland Notes on Sources Acknowledgements Index 1 ALADDIN’S CAVE When the French rebelled in July 1789 they seized the Bastille, a prison that was a symbol of their rulers’ brutality.

Illustrated Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe by Stephen Hawking

anthropic principle, Apple Newton, cosmological constant, dark matter, Johannes Kepler

If we add up the masses of all the stars that we can see in our galaxy and othergalaxies, the total is less than one-hundredth of the amount required to haltthe expansion of the universe, even in the lowest estimate of the rate of expan-sion. But we know that our galaxy and other galaxies must contain a largeamount of dark matter which we cannot see directly, but which we know mustbe there because of the influence of its gravitational attraction on the orbits ofstars and gas in the galaxies. Moreover, most galaxies are found in clusters, andwe can similarly infer the presence of yet more dark matter in between thegalaxies in these clusters by its effect on the motion of the galaxies. When weadd up all this dark matter, we still get only about one-tenth of the amountrequired to halt the expansion. However, there might be some other form ofmatter which we have not yet detected and which might still raise the averagedensity of the universe up to the critical value needed to halt the expansion.The present evidence, therefore, suggests that the universe will probablyexpand forever.

The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, it's over 9,000, Kuiper Belt, Kwajalein Atoll, lolcat, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Pluto: dwarf planet, polynesian navigation, the scientific method

After puzzling over the results for months, Vera realized that her data could be explained perfectly if each galaxy had, in addition to its visible stars, gas, and dust, an invisible halo of matter contributing to its mass. She had identified the first observational evidence of dark matter. Today, we still don’t know what dark matter actually is, but we certainly know it exists. After Vera’s discovery, dark matter became a linchpin of how astronomers explain the history and evolution of the cosmos, and new observations continued to confirm immense quantities of invisible mass in the universe. The discovery spawned entire new subdisciplines of physics, and Vera went on to eventually win just about every prestigious prize offered to a professional astronomer (with the exception of the Nobel in Physics, which has long had a sizeable blind spot for groundbreaking research done by women).

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The behemoth was twenty-three stories tall and weighed six hundred tons, but despite all that, it could be steered and focused on the sky with pinpoint precision thanks to operators like Pete, who had all been specially trained to run the telescope. It had observed the birthplaces of newborn stars, was instrumental in the discovery of dark matter, and had conducted an exhaustive survey of the sky to assemble a list of any objects emitting radio light. Its size and bright white color had made it a landmark in the area. Driving north on Route 28, it couldn’t be missed, looming over a hill behind a local farm. Except Pete hadn’t seen it. He was scheduled to work the day shift at the 300 Foot on November 16, 1988, and made the drive so often that it took a moment to register what he had—or rather hadn’t—seen that morning, but as he kept driving, an oddity stuck persistently in his head.

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The discovery spawned entire new subdisciplines of physics, and Vera went on to eventually win just about every prestigious prize offered to a professional astronomer (with the exception of the Nobel in Physics, which has long had a sizeable blind spot for groundbreaking research done by women). During most of her research on dark matter, she remained one of the only women working at the observatories that granted her time. Some years later, Vera was observing with a colleague, Deidre Hunter, at Las Campanas Observatory on an evening when, as it turned out, all the astronomers working on the mountain were women. Vera gathered the whole group into one of the control rooms for a photograph to commemorate the event.

The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, card file, Cepheid variable, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Charles Pickering, Ernest Rutherford, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, index card, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, pattern recognition, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The Observatory Pinafore The Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players gave an abridged concert performance of The Observatory Pinafore at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge on October 26, 2000, as part of a banquet and centenary symposium honoring Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. The so-called dark matter demonstrated by Robert Trumpler’s research was interstellar dust. It should not be confused with the mysterious invisible entity given the same name by modern astronomers, who believe dark matter is what holds galaxies together. CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Miss Cannon’s Prize After Harlow Shapley announced the wedding of Cecilia Payne and Sergei Gaposchkin, Miss Cannon made a note on the appropriate page in her diary.

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Trumpler came to these conclusions by observing one hundred open clusters—close associations of stars that were not as densely crowded together as in globular clusters. He calculated each open cluster’s distance two ways, by its apparent brightness and also its apparent diameter. Both values predictably decreased with distance, but the open clusters faded in brightness much faster than they shrank in size. Some form of “dark matter” definitely intervened to absorb their light. As far as Trumpler could tell, the mysterious absorbing medium was confined to the Milky Way, but unevenly distributed; it concentrated along the plane of the galaxy and dissipated near the poles. Shapley had banked on transparency when he estimated the galaxy’s extent at three hundred thousand light-years.

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After she returned to Princeton and married astronomer Bancroft Sitterly in 1937, she continued working, and later became manager of the program in atomic spectroscopy at the National Bureau of Standards. Vera Rubin, who attended Vassar College because of its historic association with Maria Mitchell, received the 2003 Bruce Medal for her measurements of galaxy rotation, which led to the discovery of dark matter. Sandra Moore Faber, the 2012 winner, did her graduate work at Harvard but has spent her career at the University of California Observatories, pursuing the formation, structure, and clustering of galaxies. In 2013 she was one of twelve recipients of the National Medal of Science. The telescope named for Miss Bruce, which Shapley praised as “the great galaxy hunter of the Southern Hemisphere,” was decommissioned in 1950.

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini, Stephen Mihm

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global reserve currency, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Minsky moment, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, unorthodox policies, value at risk, We are all Keynesians now, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

247 The debate over current account imbalances: Nouriel Roubini, “Global Imbalances: A Contemporary ‘Rashomon’ Saga,” November 2006, online at http://www.centrecournot.org/pdf/conference9/Nouriel%20ROUBINI.pdf. This section draws on this paper. 248 “dark matter” explanation: Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, “U.S. and Global Imbalances: Can Dark Matter Prevent a Big Bang?” November 13, 2005, online at http://www.cid.harvard.edu/cidpublications/darkmatter_051130.pdf. 248 This argument has been challenged: Roubini, “Global Imbalances: A Contemporary ‘Rashomon’ Saga,” November 2006. See also Barry Eichengreen, “Global Imbalances: The New Economy, the Dark Matter, the Savvy Investor, and the Standard Analysis,” March 2006, online at http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~eichengr/matter.pdf. 249 “global savings glut”: Ben S.

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They point to the fact that the United States is getting a better return on its foreign investments than foreigners are getting on their U.S. investments, which is hard to explain in the context of a massive current account deficit. But their explanation is simple: there is no current account deficit. It is, they explain, “just a confusion caused by an unnatural set of accounting rules.” Instead, there is “dark matter” out there that the existing accounting has failed to capture. This valuable dark matter is difficult to price because it consists of intangibles that the United States provides: things like insurance, liquidity, and knowledge. The authors put particular emphasis on knowledge, arguing that superior “know-how deployed abroad by U.S. corporations” isn’t captured in the statistics, and that all this talk about a current account deficit is nonsense.

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So we must clear the air by addressing a few key questions: Why have these imbalances materialized in recent years? Are they sustainable? And if not, who should address them, and what policies should they pursue? One of the more specious attempts to account for the current account deficit is the “dark matter” explanation. Proponents of this fairy tale—the economists Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, among others—deny that the current account deficit is really as big as official figures suggest; if it were, they argue, the United States couldn’t possibly be borrowing from the rest of the world at such low rates.

Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

In addition, these white dwarfs will slowly accumulate weakly interacting dark matter particles that orbit the galaxy in an enormous diffuse halo. Once trapped within the interior of a white dwarf, the particles annihilate each other and provide an important source of energy for the cosmos. Dark matter annihilation will replace conventional nuclear burning in stars as the dominant energy source. The power produced by this process is much lower than that produced by nuclear burning in conventional stars. White dwarfs fuelled by dark matter annihilation produce power ratings measured in quadrillions of Watts, roughly comparable to the total solar power intercepted by Earth (approximately 10 17 Watts) .

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His primary research interests are in the fields of astrophysical cosmology (baryonic dark matter, star formation, future of the universe), astrobiology (anthropic principles, S ETI studies, catastrophic episodes in the history of life) , as well as philosophy of science (risk analysis, foundational issues in quantum mechanics and cosmology). A unifYing theme in these fields is the nature of physical time, the relationship of time and complexity, and various aspects of entropy-increasing processes taking place throughout the universe. He wrote one monograph ( QSO Absorption Spectroscopy and Baryonic Dark Matter; Belgrade, 2005) and translated several books, including titles by Richard P.

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White dwarfs fuelled by dark matter annihilation produce power ratings measured in quadrillions of Watts, roughly comparable to the total solar power intercepted by Earth (approximately 10 17 Watts) . Eventually, however, white dwarfs will be ejected from the galaxy, the supply of the dark matter will get depleted, and this method of energy generation must come to an end. Although the proton lifetime remains uncertain, elementary physical considerations suggest that protons will not live forever. Current experiments show that the proton lifetime is longer than about 1033 years (Super­ Kamiokande Collaboration, 1 999) , and theoretical arguments (Adams et a!., 1 998; Ellis et a!. , 1983; Hawking et a!.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Company cultures, which shape worker incentives and determine how a business reacts to changes in the marketplace, have become much more important in the digital age. Today, more than 80 per cent of the value of Standard & Poor’s 500* firms is ‘dark matter’: the intangible secret sauce of success; the physical stuff companies own and their wage bill accounts for less than 20 per cent: a reversal of the pattern that prevailed in the 1970s.27 A large proportion of that dark matter is an amorphous ‘know-how’: the culture, incentives and tacit knowledge that make a modern company tick. The Economist is like that; our journalists gather information from all over the world, analyse it, and filter it through our editorial structures in order to generate pieces of journalism people want to buy.

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Firms can and do fail, and not simply because competitors are offering clearly superior goods or services. This culture, or what economists often call ‘intangible capital’, is increasingly a firm’s most important technology. Knowing what information matters and what to do with it is the difference between a wildly profitable company and a bankrupt one. DARK MATTER AND DISRUPTION Intangible capital consists of the hard-to-grasp behavioural infrastructure that makes modern firms tick. It rests at the heart of most successful firms, from Apple to Goldman Sachs to Honda, and determines how people work and what sort of salary they are able to earn in return.

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A recent analysis considered how much it would cost to duplicate the average firm on the S & P 500: that is, how much you’d have to spend to obtain the machines, buildings, technology, workers and so on that represent the visible components of a company. In the 1970s, the value of those components added up to more than 80 per cent of the firm’s valuation. The rest of the valuation constituted what was then defined as ‘dark matter’: the stuff you can’t just go out and buy. Today, however, these proportions of value are reversed. More than 80 per cent of the value of top firms resides in these intangibles – stuff that simply can’t easily be accounted for; the buildings and salaries and all the rest of it are only a small chunk of what makes a valuable firm valuable.3 This momentous shift occurred as firms shed prosaic operations that could be outsourced to other firms, and concentrated instead on the critical, value-generating work of the business.

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

In general I’m happy to have them around and to have them improve. There is of course a danger that such machines will make harmful decisions, but a danger probably no greater than from humans making such decisions. Having these machines won’t answer the questions about the world that are the most important to me and many others: What constitutes the dark matter of the universe? Is supersymmetry really a symmetry of nature that provides a foundation for and extends the highly successful Standard Model of particle physics we have? These and similar questions can be answered only by experimental data. No amount of thought will provide such answers. Perhaps, given all the information we have about nature, some machine will actually come up with the right answers; indeed, perhaps some physicists have already come up with the answers.

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Perhaps, given all the information we have about nature, some machine will actually come up with the right answers; indeed, perhaps some physicists have already come up with the answers. But the true role of data is to confirm which answers are the correct ones. If some physicist or some machine figures it out, they have no way to convince anyone else that they have the actual answer. Laboratory dark matter detectors or the CERN Large Hadron Collider or possibly a future Chinese collider might get the needed data, but not a thinking machine. ARE WE GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION? SCOTT ATRAN Anthropologist, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris; author, Talking to the Enemy: Violent Extremism, Sacred Values, and What It Means to Be Human Machines can perfectly imitate some of the ways humans think all of the time, and can consistently outperform humans on some thinking tasks all of the time, but computing machines as usually envisioned will not get human thinking right all of the time, because they process information in ways opposite to humans’ in domains associated with human creativity.

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Our most important machines aren’t machines that do better at what humans do but machines that do things we can’t do at all. Our most important thinking machines won’t be faster or better at thinking what we can think; they will think what we can’t think. To solve the current grand mysteries of quantum gravity, dark energy, and dark matter, we’ll probably need intelligences other than human. The extremely complex questions that will come after them may require even more distant and complex intelligences. Indeed, we may need to invent intermediate intelligences that can help us design yet more rarified intelligences that we couldn’t design alone.

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State by Dana Priest, William M. Arkin

airport security, business intelligence, company town, dark matter, disinformation, drone strike, friendly fire, Google Earth, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, index card, information security, Julian Assange, operational security, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Timothy McVeigh, WikiLeaks

A United Nations resolution had authorized the NATO alliance to use military force to stop Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi from brutalizing opponents to his rule. But the air strike on his command-and-control compound in Tripoli, in which one of his sons and three grandsons died, seemed to indicate he had gotten himself on a kill list, too. CHAPTER ELEVEN Dark Matter Besides the damage inflicted on the enemy by the CIA’s killer drones, paramilitary forces killed dozens of al-Qaeda leaders and hundreds of its foot soldiers in the decade after 9/11. But troops from a more mysterious organization, based in North Carolina, have killed easily ten times as many al-Qaeda, and hundreds of Iraqi insurgents as well.

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Its commanders—headquartered at Fort Bragg and the adjoining Pope Air Force Base in Fayetteville, North Carolina—still consider the organization to be officially “unacknowledged,” meaning its true purpose and everything it does is classified, and therefore, as far as the public is concerned, it does not exist. “We’re the dark matter,” a strapping U.S. Navy SEAL once explained. “We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen.” When its officers are working in civilian government agencies or U.S. embassies abroad, which they do quite a lot, they dispense with uniforms, unlike the rest of their military comrades.

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After 9/11, they had come up with all sorts of new names to hide their secret military subunits: The Secret Army of Northern Virginia, Task Force Green, Task Force Blue, Task Force 11, then Task Force 20, then Task Force 121. In fact, they change their task force numbers so often that even their American colleagues sometimes “aren’t sure who we are,” one officer explained, acknowledging that obscurity was the goal. All these task forces are part of JSOC, which sits at the center of the secret universe as the dark matter that shapes the world in ways that are usually not detectable. Like the CIA, the Joint Special Operations Command has become the president’s personal weapon against terrorists, one both Presidents Bush and Obama have wielded often over the years, with little or no input from Congress or the larger public policy community that has weighed in on life-and-death policy options since the beginning on what is now the country’s longest war, the war against al-Qaeda.

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, British Empire, charter city, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, epigenetics, European colonialism, experimental economics, financial innovation, Flynn Effect, fundamental attribution error, glass ceiling, income inequality, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, land reform, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, mental accounting, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, Republic of Letters, rolodex, social contagion, social web, sparse data, spinning jenny, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, wikimedia commons, working-age population, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Yet by wrapping these values, motivations, and worldviews together, giving them God’s blessing, and linking them to a contingent afterlife, some Protestant faiths created powerful cultural recombinations that not only produced even WEIRDer psychologies but also contributed to economic growth, the effectiveness of democratic institutions, and higher suicide rates. Dark Matter or Enlightenment? In the 17th and 18th centuries, a complex of interrelated ideas about constitutional governments, liberty, impartial law, natural rights, progress, rationality, and science had begun to consolidate in the minds of leading European intellectuals such as John Locke, David Hume, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Thomas Paine, and Adam Smith. This flotsam of WEIRD ideas had been accumulating for centuries, pushed along by the swelling river of psychological dark matter—individualism, dispositionalism, analytic thinking and impersonal prosociality—that I’ve been analyzing throughout this book.

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This flotsam of WEIRD ideas had been accumulating for centuries, pushed along by the swelling river of psychological dark matter—individualism, dispositionalism, analytic thinking and impersonal prosociality—that I’ve been analyzing throughout this book. This psychological dark matter—invisible and hard to detect like physical dark matter—has long been manifesting in the charters and constitutions of free cities, monastic orders, and universities, as well as in canon law. Enlightenment thinkers drew from and recombined these ideas and concepts using minds equipped with a proto-WEIRD psychology. Both Locke and Rousseau, for example, saw society as built on a social contract between individuals in which the government’s authority derived from the consent of the governed. That is, they began to understand society as a voluntary association—specifically, as a corporation.

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Market Mentalities How Work Became Virtuous Be Yourself: The Origins of WEIRD Personalities It’s Big, but How Big? Part IV: Birthing the Modern World 12. Law, Science, and Religion Universal Laws, Conflicting Principles, and Individual Rights Representative Governments and Democracy The WEIRDest Religion Dark Matter or Enlightenment? 13. Escape Velocity Wiring Up the Collective Brain More Inventive? Psychology and Innovation in the Modern World Escaping the Trap 14. The Dark Matter of History Guns, Germs, and Other Factors Globalization and Its Discontents Appendix A. Milestones in the Marriage and Family Program Appendix B. Additional Plots Appendix C. The Psychological Impacts of Relational and Residential Mobility Notes Bibliography Index Also by Joseph Henrich A Note About the Author Copyright Farrar, Straus and Giroux 120 Broadway, New York 10271 Copyright © 2020 by Joseph Henrich All rights reserved First edition, 2020 E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71045-3 Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

“to take the sting out”: Anjana Ahuja, “‘Grief Tech’ Avatars Aim to Take the Sting Out of Death,” Financial Times, December 20, 2022. landmark 2015 book: Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015). “This is a difficult archive to write about”: Browne, Dark Matters, 91–92. “a biometric technology”: Browne, Dark Matters, 91. “Branding in the transatlantic slave trade”: Browne, Dark Matters, 91. “an object among other objects”: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 89. “relate to our self in the third person”: Nancy Colier, “The Branding of the Self,” Psychology Today, August 15, 2012.

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She logged back on and posted, but reluctantly; she knew there was something wrong with a culture that valued public performances of a virtuous self over more tangible solidarities and relationship building. These views are born of my students’ own experiences and enhanced by our readings, particularly Simone Browne’s landmark 2015 book, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Browne, a professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, traces the origins of modern-day branding to the literal branding of African people in the transatlantic slave trade. “This is a difficult archive to write about,” Browne observes, “where iron instruments fashioned into rather simple printed type became tools of torture.

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consumers content moderators copyrights and trademarks Corporate Self university course Counterlife, The (Roth) Covid pandemic; as bioweapon; China and; conspiracy theories about; as culling the herd; Disinformation Dozen and; far right and far-out alliance and; “Five Freedoms” and; Gates and; gyms during; health and wellness cultures and; individualism and; lockdowns in; long Covid; masks in; origin of the virus; as portal for change; profiteering from; race and class disparities and; relief programs during; religious people and; risk factors and; schools and; shock doctrine in; social media and; tech companies and; tests for the virus; Trump and; workers and Covid vaccines; adverse reactions to; Freedom Convoy and; mandates, passports, and apps; nanoparticles in; Nazi Germany analogies and; patents on and profits from; racial oppression analogies and; reproductive health and; restaurants and; shedding claims about; “slavery forever” video and; vaccine-autism myth and Crackdown Croatia Culture and Imperialism (Said) Cuomo, Andrew currency customization DailyClout Daily Command Brief Dark Matters (Browne) Darwin, Charles Darwish, Mahmoud data Davis, Angela Davis, Mike death de Bres, Helena Debt Collective Deception (Roth) DeepBrain AI Inc. deep state Deepwater Horizon de Hooge, Anna Delingpole, James dementia Demjanjuk, John democracy Democratic Party denial Depression, Great Descent of Man, The (Darwin) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Diagolon diagonalism; “body people” and; far right and far-out; Querdenken Dickens, Charles Didulo, Romana diphtheria disabilities; changeling myths and; forced sterilization and; Nazi Germany and; see also autism disaster capitalism disaster doppelgangers Discourse on Colonialism (Césaire) Disinformation Dozen doi’kayt (“hereness”) Don’t Look Up doppelgangers and doubling; aging as; Brunelle’s portraits of; in Capgras delusion; in changeling myths; confrontations with; diet and fitness and; digital disaster; evil twins; fascist; Freud’s views on; Israel-Palestine conflict and; in literature and film; machine-made; in multiverse stories; originals replaced by; origin of “doppelganger”; parent-child relationship as; racial; self-branding as; souls as; taking on life of their own; thinking as; twinning Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Double, The (Dostoyevsky) Double, The (film) Double, The (Saramago) Dowd, Maureen drug companies, see pharmaceutical companies Dual Du Bois, W.

Peer-to-Peer by Andy Oram

AltaVista, big-box store, c2.com, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, dark matter, Dennis Ritchie, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, independent contractor, information retrieval, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, moral hazard, Network effects, P = NP, P vs NP, p-value, packet switching, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, power law, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, semantic web, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vernor Vinge, web application, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

Slashdot moderation system, A reputation system that resists pseudospoofing: Advogato Aiken, Alexander, Reputation metrics AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) attacking by shilling, Attacks and adversaries protocol-centric addressing, Nothing succeeds like address, or, DNS isn’t the only game in town–An explosion of protocols AIMster, Immediate information sharing: The new instant messaging services Akamai Technologies, Active caching and mirroring Albert, Rka, Initial experiments, Simulating fault tolerance all points payment model, The difficulty of distributed systems: How to exchange micropayments among peers node-specific tickets and, Micropayments in the Free Haven context all you can eat business models, All you can eat alt newsgroups, Usenet America Online (AOL) and Gnutella, Gnutella’s first breath amortized pairwise payment model, The difficulty of distributed systems: How to exchange micropayments among peers Anderson, David, Contents of this book, SETI@home–The peer-to-peer paradigm, Contributors Anderson, Ross, Document revocation , The Eternity Service anonymity analysis of, An analysis of anonymity–An analysis of anonymity attacks on, Attacks on anonymity computational, An analysis of anonymity–An analysis of anonymity Crowds software and, Crowds Freenet and, Requests on the Internet, Risks involved in web server logging, Special problems posed by peer-to-peer systems Napster users and, Napster partial, Partial anonymity peer-to-peer, Anonymity and peer-to-peer–Anonymous Gnutella chat, Privacy in data-sharing systems perfect forward, An analysis of anonymity–An analysis of anonymity reliability and, Reliability with anonymity–Reliability with anonymity types of, Anonymity for anonymous storage–Partial anonymity vs. accountability, A case study: Accountability in Free Haven why it is needed, Risks involved in web server logging Anonymizer.com, Acknowledgments, Anonymizing proxies anonymizing proxies, Anonymizing proxies, Other anonymity tools anonymous digital cash (see digital cash) Gnutella chat, Anonymous Gnutella chat macropayment digital cash (see macropayment digital cash schemes) publishing systems, Trust in other systems Eternity Service, The Eternity Service Freenet, Freenet–Conclusions, Freenet problems with, Content certification Publius, Publius–Publius in a nutshell searching technologies, Trust and search engines–Deniability remailers, Mixmaster Remailers–General discussion servers, Peer-to-peer models and their impacts on accountability storage (Free Haven), Anonymity for anonymous storage–Partial anonymity anti-censorship strategy, Red Rover–Acknowledgments AOL (America Online) and Gnutella, Gnutella’s first breath application service provider (ASP), PCs are the dark matter of the Internet application-to-application conversations, Conversations and peers Arecibo radio telescope, Radio SETI Arnold, Ken, Remaking the Peer-to-Peer Meme ARPANET, A revisionist history of peer-to-peer (1969-1995) ASP (application service provider), PCs are the dark matter of the Internet Asthagiri, Nimisha, Contents of this book, Security–Taxonomy of Groove keys, Contributors asymmetric algorithm, default, Security characteristics of a shared space asymmetric bandwidth, Asymmetric bandwidth, Users as consumers, users as providers asymmetric keys, Taxonomy of Groove keys authenticators (MAC), Mutually-suspicious shared spaces fetching lost messages, Fetching lost messages supporting message fanout, Message fanout–Message fanout author-anonymity, Anonymity for anonymous storage, An analysis of anonymity automatic pass-along participation and Napster, File sharing: Napster and successors avatars, selling, Reputation for sale—SOLD!

…

Even if you assume that the average DNS host has 10 additional addresses of the form foo.host.com, the total number of peer-to-peer addresses now, after only 4 years, is of the same order of magnitude as the total number of DNS addresses, and is growing faster than the DNS universe today. As new kinds of Net-connected devices like wireless PDAs and digital video recorders such as TiVo and Replay proliferate, they will doubtless become an important part of the Internet as well. But for now, PCs make up the enormous majority of these untapped resources. PCs are the dark matter of the Internet, and their underused resources are fueling peer-to-peer. Real solutions to real problems Why do we have unpredictable IP addresses in the first place? Because there weren’t enough to go around when the Web happened. It’s tempting to think that when enough new IP addresses are created, the old “One Device/One Address” regime will be restored, and the Net will return to its pre-peer-to-peer architecture.

…

Instead of trying to store these files in a central database, Napster took advantage of the largest pool of latent storage space in the world—the disks of the Napster users. And thus, Napster became the prime example of a new principle for Internet applications: Peer-to-peer services come into being by leveraging the untapped power of the millions of PCs that have been connected to the Internet in the last five years. PCs are the dark matter of the Internet Napster’s popularity made it the proof-of-concept application for a new networking architecture based on the recognition that bandwidth to the desktop had become fast enough to allow PCs to serve data as well as request it, and that PCs are becoming powerful enough to fulfill this new role.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Technology also fights back against climate change: from vat-grown meat, to genetically modified plastic eaters, to direct air capture, to space-based solar power, there is, in the end, no shortage of answers. Much else is revolutionised. This novel toolkit re-accelerates fundamental science, allowing researchers to unravel the dark matter and dark energy, profound mysteries that sit at the heart of our understanding of the cosmos. We might even detect the ‘dark force’, an even more mysterious fifth force of nature acting as a bridge to dark matter and energy. We should expect great and popular new art – the Shakespeare of computer games, the Beethoven of VR, the J.K. Rowling of DNA. There is scope for major new genres and new media to emerge.

…

A Nature poll of 1500 scientists found that 70 per cent had failed to reproduce results.42 In some fields up to 50 per cent of studies fail to replicate.43 The figures compound corrosive evidence of methodological error like small sample sizes, inaccurate statistical analyses, bias and even fraud in much scientific work, a system in which the gaming of results for maximum impact trumps rigour.44 What's more, as in cancer research, the accumulation of science generally creates its own problem: there is simply too much relevant material for scientists to consume. Important, often older work is thus regularly missed.45 Some, like the physicist Lee Smolin, maintain that progress on the most fundamental challenges has been particularly disappointing. Questions like the relationship between quantum theory and gravity, or the nature of dark matter and dark energy, remain unanswered. He argues that from the end of the eighteenth century physics leapt forward in twenty-year intervals. This progress has stopped: ‘since the end of the 1970s there has not been a genuine breakthrough in our understanding of elementary-particle physics.’ 46 Sabine Hossenfelder is blunter still: ‘Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics,’ she argues.

…

Science is supposedly built around an organised scepticism; but there is a chance that it has calcified into arrogant scientism, buying too heartily into its own dogmas; cutting itself off from strange or seemingly unproductive avenues for reasons of bureaucracy or narrow-mindedness. As I write, I've been leafing through a recent edition of Scientific American. It contains multitudes: the largest ever experiment to detect neutrinos, experiments to find new particles and identify dark matter, pioneering research on supermassive black holes in the early universe, explorations inside neutron stars and studies of quantum entanglement. It doesn't feel like a struggling area, and that isn't the word I'd use. Instead science is both an inspiring success and also subject to increasingly potent diminishing returns, especially in its most radical and fundamental guises.

Science...For Her! by Megan Amram

Albert Einstein, blood diamond, butterfly effect, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, double helix, Google Glasses, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, pez dispenser, Schrödinger's Cat, Steve Jobs, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Wall-E, wikimedia commons

A NEUTRON STAR: 16,800,000,000,000 lbs. Real Khloe Kardashian over here. HELL: 9,357,753,975,867,564,57 9,846,735,732,342 lbs. HEAVEN: 0 lbs. ;) A BLACK HOLE: 0 lbs. ;) Heating Up & Cooling Down * * * Thermodynamics is the study of how heat is transferred from one thing to another. Dark matter is good at absorbing heat. Um, speaking of “dark matter?”—I love black men! ;) FIG. 3.2 Sorry to be TMI but they are great lovers! I got bit by the jungle fever bug (malaria) when I was like thirteen and I have not looked back. FIG. 3.3 FIG. 3.2 FIG. 3.3 THREE FUN WAYS TO ENJOY A DATE Even If You Are White and Your Date Isn’t the Same Race as You * * * Go to a movie that involves lots of races!

…

., x Chelsea, xvii chemistry, 31–61, 63, 190 of cooking, 32–35 childbirth, 23 children, 10–11 Chloe, viii Chris, xiii Christina, ix Christine, xv Christmas trees, 97–99 chromosomes, 18 Chunky Love, ix Claire, xii Claire-Marie, ix Clara, ix Class, 24 Claudia, xi climate change, 103 coal, 102 coma, 23 computers, 151 confabulating, 101 Cookies, ix cooking, 32–35 Cori, Carl Ferdinand, 174 Cori, Gerty, 174 Courtney, xiv covalent bonds, 55 cover letter, girlfriend, 134–35 cover-ups, 79, 89 Craigslist, 154 Cris, ix Cristy, ix crocus, 100 Crystal, ix Crystal Glass, ix Curie, Irene, 170 Curie, Marie, 60, 170, 173, 174 Curie, Pierre, 174 Cynthia, xv D daisy, 100 Dana, xvii Dani, xix Daniella, xviii Danielle, xiv dark matter, 72 Darwin, Charles, 26 dating, 154–59 online sites for, 154–56 Davida, viii Dawn, xv Day-Lewis, Daniel, 15 death, 20–23, 50, 51 Debbie, xv Deen, Paula, 33–35, 89 dendrology, 91–99 Denise, xviii depression, 128 Dereka, xii Deschanel, Zooey, 80 Devil Wears Prada, The (Weisberger), 119 diagnosis, 126 diamonds, 45, 102 Diana, xvii Diaz, Cameron, 15 disease, 123–26 displacement, 65 DNA, 17–18, 138 Donica, xix Donna, xvi double helix, 17 Drew, xiii driving, women and, 65–68 drugs, 90, 131–32 E Earth, 147, 150 age of, 147 earth sciences, 87–114 Eat, Pray, Love (Gilbert), 119 E. coli, 130 economics, 159–61 Edna, xvi eggs, 2–3, 18 freezing of, 157 egg whites, 34 Einstein, Albert, 75 electronic music, 162 electrons, 55 elements, 46–49, 57 Eliana, viii Elizabeth, xi Ella, ix Ellen, viii Ellie, xiii e-mail, 151 Emily, xi Emma, xi employment, 174–75 Erica, xiv Erin, xiv Eryn, xviii Esther, viii ethanol, 39 eukaryotes, 14 Eve, 28 Evelyn, x evolution, 26–28 vs. religion, 27–28 expiration dates, 130 extinction, 26 extraterrestrial life, 150 Ezri, xv F face mash, 19 Faith, xi fallopian tubes, 136 Family, 24 fats, 33 female orgasms, 107 fertilization, 3 Fifty Shades Freed (James), 119 Fifty Shades of Grey (James), 119 final exam, 190–91 floriculture, 100–101 flowers, study of, 100–101 Fluffy, xix Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 131 food poisoning, 130 formaldehyde, 45 4-vinylguaiacol, 44 Francesca, xi Franklin, Rosalind, 138 fruit salad, 34 G G., ix Gabriella, x Galileo Galilei, 75 gamma radiation emissions, 57 garden burgers, 34 gas, 56 gay-ball warming, 103 genes, 17 Genesis 4:1, 119 genetics, 16–19 Genus, 24 Getgo, ix Giana, xi Gina, xviii “gin and Drano,” 37 girlfriend cover letter, 134–35 Girls’ Guide to Fishing and Hunting, The (Bank), 119 global warming, 103–6 contributing to, 105 fashion staples for, 106 glycogen, conversion of, 174 Golda, xix Gone Girl (Flynn), 119 Goodall, Jane, 170, 173 Goodnight Moon (Brown), 111 Grace, x Gregoria, xviii gravity, 147 H H.P.T., xix Hailey, x hairspray, 105 Hamm, xi Hannah, x Harissa, xix Harper, x Heather, xiii Heidi, viii Hemings, Sally, 72 He’s Just Not That into You (Behrendt), 119 Holly, xvii homosexuality, 77 hoodies, 79 Hooke, Robert, 12 Hoover, J.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

A distant echo of that moment came in 2012, when Francisco Kitaura and his team at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Potsdam, Germany, developed a new algorithm based on artificial intelligence, called KIGEN, to map the “dark matter” of the cosmos. Dark matter makes up some 23 percent of the universe, compared to just 5 percent “normal matter” of visible stars, planets, dust, and gases—and both are flung across the 72 percent that consists purely of “dark energy.” Understanding just where and how the dark matter has been distributed since the Big Bang is essential to gaining deeper knowledge of the universe’s dynamics, but the computational task is immense. Summing up the contribution of the new algorithm, Kitaura says: “With the help of AI, we can now model the universe around us with unprecedented accuracy and study how the largest structures in the cosmos came into being.”1 That is a pretty smart machine—and it’s the kind of smart machine we can all love because, again, it is pure augmentation.

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The best use of his human talent is in the “wet lab” preclinical studies where a compound is applied to live disease and it’s time to figure out just how it could be formulated to treat a patient, with sensitivity to toxicity and dose tolerance.2 Both of these are realms where smart machines are on the rise but don’t threaten jobs, because the goals are so immense that today’s labor supply doesn’t begin to match the requirements of the tasks in their unautomated states. There are not enough pharmacologists in Framingham, or indeed the world, to pore over the tens of trillions of data points that Berg’s AI system processes in its analysis of tissue samples. All the astronomers ever churned out by the world’s universities could not map the dark matter lurking among the 54,000 known galaxies of the universe. We’re guessing that there are no neo-Luddites out there trying to smash any of this machinery. The question is, then: Why don’t all applications of smart machines feel as helpful as these? What really is so different about these combinations of humans and machines?

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

In the 1970s the astronomer Vera Rubin discovered that stars toward the outer reaches of our Milky Way galaxy are rotating around the center of the galaxy much faster than we’d expect on the basis of our best theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity. But rather than give up on general relativity, most astronomers instead prefer to postulate the existence of invisible dark matter permeating the galaxy. If the distribution of dark matter is just right, then general relativity can correctly account for the speed of stars on the outer edges of the galaxy. By comparison to the popularity of dark matter, new theories of gravity have been pursued by relatively few astronomers. So far I’ve made little distinction between conventional explanations and complex models. This blithe conflation of the two has perhaps bothered some readers.

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See also Firefox; Linux; MathWorks competition; open source software computer games: addictive quality of, 146, 147 for folding proteins (see Foldit) connectome, human, 106, 121 conversation, offline small-group, 39–43 conversational critical mass, 30, 31, 33, 42 Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology, 150 Cox, Alan, 57 Creative Commons, 219, 220 creative problem solving, 24, 30, 34, 35, 36, 38. See also problem solving Crick, Francis, 79–80, 104 Critical mass: for chain reaction, 29–31 conversational, 30, 31, 33, 42 dark matter, 127 data: citation of, 195 theft of, 104 databases, online: of all the world’s knowledge, 4–5 of American Chemical Society, 164 biological, 121 GenBank, 4, 6–7, 9, 108 of Open Dinosaur Project, 150–51 specified by grant agencies, 191 data-driven intelligence, 112–16 in biology, 116–19 complemented by citizen science, 151 for machine translation, 124–25.

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics by Jim Al-Khalili

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, clockwork universe, complexity theory, dark matter, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Laplace demon, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Olbers’ paradox, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, time dilation, Wilhelm Olbers

Others, such as those involving the cat and the demon, have, in the eyes of some, yet to be satisfactorily laid to rest. When choosing my greatest enigmas in physics, I have not homed in on the biggest unsolved problems—for example, what dark matter and dark energy, which between them make up 95 percent of the contents of our universe, are made of, or what, if anything, was there before the Big Bang. These are incredibly difficult and profound questions to which science has yet to find answers. Some, like the nature of dark matter, that mysterious stuff that makes up most of the mass of galaxies, may well be answered in the near future if particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva continue to make new and exciting discoveries; others, like an accurate description of a time before the Big Bang, may remain unanswered forever.

…

I set them out here merely to highlight how much more we still need to learn about the Universe and our place in it. I begin with ten problems that fall into the first category—those to which I anticipate science finding satisfactory answers within my lifetime: 1. Why is there more matter than antimatter in the Universe? 2. What is dark matter made of? 3. What is dark energy? 4. Will fully functional invisibility cloaks be possible? 5. How far can we push chemical self-assembly toward explaining life? 6. How does a long strand of organic material fold up into a protein? 7. Is there an absolute limit to human life spans? 8. How are memories stored and retrieved in the brain?

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, backtesting, Black Swan, book scanning, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, computer age, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data is the new oil, data science, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental subject, Google Glasses, happiness index / gross national happiness, information security, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lifelogging, machine readable, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, personalized medicine, placebo effect, prediction markets, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shai Danziger, software as a service, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, Steven Levy, supply chain finance, text mining, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Contest to automatically grade student-written essays: Kaggle, “Develop an Automated Scoring Algorithm for Student-Written Essays,” Competition, February 10, 2012. www.kaggle.com/c/asap-aes. Mark D. Shermis and Ben Hamner, “Contrasting State-of-the-Art Automated Scoring of Essays: Analysis,” Contrasting Essay Scoring, April 12, 2012. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/44416236/NCME%202012%20Paper3_29_12.pdf. Contest to predict the distribution of dark matter in the universe: Kaggle, “Mapping Dark Matter,” Competition, May 23, 2011. www.kaggle.com/c/mdm. Heritage Health Prize ($3,000,000): Kaggle, “Improve Healthcare, Win $3,000,000,” Competition, April 4, 2011. www.kaggle.com/host/casestudies/hpn. More Kaggle case studies: Anthony Goldbloom, “Machines Learn, but Can They Teach?”

…

.), and a graduate student (Germany); $100,000 in prize money sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation (established by a founder of Hewlett-Packard) went to these winners, who developed the best means to automatically grade student-written essays. Their resulting system grades essays as accurately as human graders, although none of these three winners had backgrounds in education or text analytics. And guess what kind of expert excelled at predicting the distribution of dark matter in the universe? Competing in a contest sponsored by NASA and the Royal Astronomical Society, Martin O’Leary, a British PhD student in glaciology, generated a method the White House announced has “outperformed the state-of-the-art algorithms most commonly used in astronomy.” For this contest, O’Leary provided the first major breakthrough (although he was not the eventual winner).

…

—Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business The organizations I’ve worked with have mostly viewed the competition in business as a race that benefits from sharing, rather than a fight, where one’s gain can come only from another’s loss. The openness of crowdsourcing aligns with this philosophy. —Stein Kretsinger, Founding Executive of Advertising.com One small groundbreaking firm, Kaggle, has taken charge and leads the production of PA crowdsourcing. Kaggle has launched 53 PA competitions, including the essay-grading and dark matter ones mentioned above. Over 50,000 registered competitors are incentivized by prizes that usually come to around $10,000 to $20,000, but climb as high as $3 million. These diverse minds from more than 200 universities and 100 countries, about half academics, have submitted over 144,000 attempts for the win.2 An enterprise turns research and development completely on its head in order to leverage PA crowdsourcing.

The Cancer Chronicles: Unlocking Medicine's Deepest Mystery by George Johnson

Apollo 11, Arthur D. Levinson, Atul Gawande, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Cepheid variable, Columbine, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Magellanic Cloud, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, phenotype, profit motive, seminal paper, stem cell

Feinbaum, and Victor Ambros, “The C. elegans Heterochronic Gene lin-4 Encodes Small RNAs with Antisense Complementarity to lin-14,” Cell 75 (December 1993): 843–54. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8252621] 50. the importance … has been overblown: Harm van Bakel et al., “Most ‘Dark Matter’ Transcripts Are Associated with Known Genes,” PLOS Biology 8, no. 5 (May 18, 2010): e1000371; [http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000371] and Richard Robinson, “Dark Matter Transcripts: Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing?” PLOS Biology 8 (May 18, 2010): e1000370. [http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000370] 51. a sweeping new theory: Leonardo Salmena, Pier Paolo Pandolfi, et al., “A ceRNA Hypothesis: The Rosetta Stone of a Hidden RNA Language?”

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Only then can we truly understand the cellular circuits and how they can go wrong. Junk that is not junk. Genes—99 percent of them—that reside in our microbes rather than in our own cells. Background seemed to be trading places with foreground, and I was reminded of what happened in cosmology when most of the universe turned out to be made of dark matter and dark energy. Yet for all the new elaborations, the big bang theory itself was left standing. It wasn’t so clean and simple as before, but it provided the broad strokes of the picture, a framework in which everything, aberrations and all, made sense. The same appeared to be happening with the hallmarks.

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Try as he might, Maxwell’s demon will ultimately be defeated. In the end, the Echthroi always win. Epilogue Joe’s Cancer A life-view by the living can only be provisional. Perspectives are altered by the fact of being drawn; description solidifies the past and creates a gravitational body that wasn’t there before. A background of dark matter—all that is not said— remains, buzzing. —JOHN UPDIKE, Self-Consciousness The next spring at the ranch, I’m told, the salsola was as bad as ever. I wasn’t there to see it. During that year our marriage ended, seventeen years after it had begun. For a long time our lives had been diverging. The cancer had brought us closer but now it was gone.

The Infinity Puzzle by Frank Close

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, dark matter, El Camino Real, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Simon Singh, Ted Sorensen

How much of this is true, and how many of these bizarre names will one day become part of the lexicon of science, is for the future. However, there is one aspect of supersymmetry that could prove most profound: SUSY might be the source of the dark matter that appears to dominate the material universe. In cosmologists’ simulations of the large-scale universe, dark matter is the glue that binds the galaxies, preventing them from spiraling apart and probably having helped to form them in the first place. From the motion of galaxies we can infer that 90 percent of the universe consists of stuff that is dark—in the sense that it does not shine in any wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum.

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This is analogous to the way 350 the infinity puzzle that the stars form, but whereas stars made of conventional particles feel strong and electromagnetic forces, which enable them to shine, the conglomerates of neutral “-inos” have no such ability. Inert lumps of dark matter populating space accompanied by occasional “conventional” particles, such as make us, could be the nature of the universe. If SUSY particles are discovered, and turn out to have these properties, it would prove a beautiful convergence between high-energy particle physics and cosmology. Having once believed that we were at the center of the universe, and then seen our location shifted into the outer reaches of one out of billions of galaxies, the stuff that makes us might turn out to be no more than flotsam in a sea of dark matter. big bang day When the Large Hadron Collider was approved in 1993, some wondered if it would ever become reality.

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From the motion of galaxies we can infer that 90 percent of the universe consists of stuff that is dark—in the sense that it does not shine in any wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum. This implies that it is impervious to the electromagnetic force. Lightweight neutrinos have these properties, but the models of galactic dynamics work best if the dark matter consists of massive particles. However, no such particles are known in the standard model. In SUSY, such beasts are expected. Moreover, if the lightest superparticles are electrically neutral siblings of the photon or gluon—known as “photino” and “gluino”—they could be stable and form large-scale clusters through their mutual gravitational attraction.

A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh

A. Roger Ekirch, big-box store, card file, dark matter, Evgeny Morozov, game design, index card, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Minecraft, off grid, Rubik’s Cube, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, statistical model, the built environment, urban planning

They knew how buildings actually worked, but also that buildings consist, for the most part, of sprawling back labyrinths of maintenance rooms and side corridors that residents—even the most dutiful of apartment owners—never visit or realize exist. For a burglar, these spaces on the outer margins of architectural consciousness are like the dark matter of the built environment. Laundry rooms, fire escapes, employee staircases, emergency exits, rooftop boiler rooms; the list goes on and on. An overlooked hinterland nonetheless central to any building’s ability to function, these sorts of facilities permeate hotels and apartment complexes. From a burglar’s point of view, these sorts of spaces are temptations: secondary passageways and points of entry over which few people feel they have responsibility.

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The deep interiors of buildings such as hotels tended to be relatively unprotected, in his experience; this meant that once you got past the entrances and lobbies and had wandered farther into a building’s core, you could expect to find fewer people walking around, whether they were guards on patrol or residents taking out the garbage. Every building had its rhythms. These service corridors were the internal hinterlands—the architectural dark matter—so beloved by Bill Mason. The Internet has been a godsend to burglars, Dakswin pointed out. He had been going online to research different neighborhoods, zooming in to see specific buildings on Google Street View to scope out everything from window heights—and thus potential routes into someone’s home—to the presence of fences and shrubbery that could provide welcome cover.

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In one of the film’s most iconic scenes, McClane evades capture by climbing through an air duct—this after falling down an HVAC shaft when the machine gun he has been using as an anchorage point fails—giving the building’s ventilation system a second life as an escape route and adding to the popular mythology of the ventilation system as an overlooked, parallel system of circulation within a building. As we saw with Bill Mason, these vents are part of the architectural dark matter—the invisible backstage—that makes up so much of the built environment. Indeed, McClane’s actions reveal a new type of architectural space altogether—a topological condition that we might call Nakatomi space, wherein buildings reveal near-infinite interiors, capable of being traversed through all manner of nonarchitectural means, with their own exhilarating form of boundless fluidity.

Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier

business cycle, carbon tax, dark matter, deskilling, failed state, information security, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, price stability, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

The second was Votes and Violence 23 the converse question of why autocracies become more dangerous at higher levels of income. Finally, and most mysteriously, once these income-related effects of democracy and autocracy were allowed for, there remained a further pure effect of democracy that was making societies more at risk of violence. Like some unobservable dark matter it was lurking as a constant across societies. What was it? These were not easy questions. The key insight came by the simple psychological technique of imagining myself in the position of being a former dictator in one of the countries of the bottom billion who had caved in to pressure from donors to democratize.

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Well, the awkward problem with preemptive purges is that they are not compatible with the rule of law: the technique depends upon punishing people even though they haven’t done anything. This sort of conduct collides with even fairly modest levels of democracy. The idea that the ability to mount a purge would be reduced as a result of democracy was a plausible explanation for the dark matter. If leaders could no longer mount preemptive purges they might 24 WARS, GUNS, AND VOTES be less able to keep the lid on political violence. This might be why, over and above those effects of democracy that depended upon the level of income, there was the pure effect that increased political violence.

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Whatever the limitations of the present regime, it is clearly massively more democratic than that of Saddam Hussein. Yet Hussein presided over a relatively peaceful country. It was not an attractive peace, but it was a peace of sorts, and it most surely depended upon preemptive repression rather than citizen consent. So a weakening of technologies of repression is, I think, a likely explanation for the dark matter: the higher risk of political violence that comes from democracy. Why, then, should the net effect of democracy be increasingly favorable as income rises? I think the answer lies in those effects that I started with: accountability and legitimacy. The stark and straightforward reason that in the bottom billion the accountability and legitimacy effects of democracy do not reduce the risk of political violence is that in these societies, democracy does not deliver either accountability or legitimacy.

Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture by Justin McGuirk

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, dark matter, Day of the Dead, digital divide, Donald Trump, Enrique Peñalosa, extreme commuting, facts on the ground, gentrification, Guggenheim Bilbao, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income per capita, informal economy, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Leo Hollis, mass immigration, megaproject, microcredit, Milgram experiment, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, place-making, Silicon Valley, starchitect, technoutopianism, unorthodox policies, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, value engineering, Washington Consensus

For Cruz, the only way forward is not to play by the existing rules, but to start redesigning those institutions. In San Ysidro, he has been seeking to change the zoning laws to allow a richer and more empowering community life. And changing legislation means engaging with what has been called the ‘dark matter’* – not just the physical fabric of the city, but its regulations. * A term coined by the architect Wouter Vanstiphout, later used in the title of Dan Hill’s 2012 book, Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary. This is the very definition of the activist architect, one who creates the conditions in which it is possible to make a meaningful difference. Cruz himself, who has a tendency to slip into academic jargon, calls it ‘expanded modes of practice’.

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Thinking back to two of his heroes, Alison and Peter Smithson, Alfredo claims that they were sidelined because ‘they didn’t engage in the politics enough’. This is simplistic, but what I understand by it is that for the Smithsons and other modernist builders of social housing, the going was good when they could count on governments seeking them out, but not when it was the other way around. Being an activist architect means engaging in the dark matter of politics to make your case when the politicians have no particular plans in mind. By and large, the Venezuelan architecture community does not seek out these challenges, partly because of the social stigma attached to the barrios, but also because of a traditional high-culture education which taught them that architecture is the design of refined objects.

Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, megastructure, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, time dilation

Most notably, the distances between the stars, and thus the distances between any planetary systems that may surround them, exceed what ­human intuition suggests by enormous f­actors. The strangeness of the universe begins with distances that surpass easy understanding. Astronomers have now concluded that two mysterious, invisible, and entirely disparate entities—­dark ­matter and dark energy—­ permeate and dominate the universe in mass and energy terms.1 Dark ­matter, revealed by its gravitational effects on “ordinary ­matter,” consists of particles that are entirely unknown to us at the pres­ent time. The “ordinary” form of m ­ atter resides primarily in vast clouds of hot gas that permeate ­giant clusters of galaxies; to a lesser extent, we find ordinary ­matter in the stars that form the vis­i­ble units of the universe.

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See Atacama Large Millimeter Array Alpha Centauri, 10, 19–20, 43, 183, 208 Aluminum, 137, 153 Ammonia, 161–62 Anaxagoras, 124 Andromeda galaxy, 208 Angel, Roger, 195 Ariel (Atmospheric Remote-­sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-­survey), 186 Arrhenius, Svante, 124 Asteroids, 16, 21, 54, 63, 136–39, 218–23 Astronomical unit, 21 Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), 48, 142–44, 147, 196, 202 Atmospheres of exoplanets, 42, 60, 106–7, 172, 181, 185 composition of, 107, 172, 181, 185 heat trapping by, 42 observation of, 60, 106 Baikonur Cosmodrome, 51 Barnard’s star, 20 Batygin, Konstantin, 22–23, 139–40 Beaulieu, Jean-­Phillipe, 81 Beta Pictoris, 71 Binary star systems, 96–97, 146 Biosignatures, 158, 171–73, 192 Borucki, William, 51, 53 Boss, Alan, 31 Boyajian, Tabetha, 92, 95 247 Index Brown, Michael, 22, 139 Brown dwarfs, 41, 69, 82 Butler, Paul, 2, 32 California-­Kepler Survey (CKS), 129 Campbell, Bruce, 31 Carbon, 106, 153 Carbon dioxide, 106, 137, 162, 164, 172–73, 199 Carbon monoxide, 60, 72, 137 Carrington event, 123, 168–69 Cassini spacecraft, 164 CCD detectors, 108 Center for Astrophysics, 46, 109, 157 Center of mass, 15–19, 37, 43, 96–97 Cerro Pachón, 72–73 Charbonneau, David, 55 CHEOPS (CHaracterising ExOPlanet Satellite), 125–26 Chu, Stephen, 212 Copernican princi­ple, 32 Coronagraphic mask, 69, 72–73, 182, 190–93 Coronagraphy, 69–71, 205 CoRoT spacecraft, 53–54 Dark energy, 10–11 Dark ­matter, 10–11 Deep Space Industries, 222 Discovery Channel Telescope, 48 Domagal-­Goldman, Shawn, 174 Dominion Astrophysical Observatory, 31 Doppler, Johann, 30 Doppler effect, 30 Doppler tomography, 109 Draugr, 26 Dressing, Courtney, 123 Dust, 54, 68, 72, 90, 94, 97, 106, 115, 135, 137, 139, 143–47, 151, 159, 172, 204, 210–11 Dyson, Freeman, 94, 212, 224 Dyson sphere, 94 Eccentricity, 35–38 Eclipse, 75, 96, 173 Einstein, Albert, 8, 74–82, 205–6, 214–17 Einstein ring, 76, 205–6 Electromagnetic radiation.

Hawai'I Becalmed: Economic Lessons of the 1990s by Christopher Grandy

Alan Greenspan, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, dark matter, endogenous growth, inventory management, Jones Act, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Maui Hawaii, minimum wage unemployment, open economy, purchasing power parity, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996

The bill proposed limitations on the total amount of the credit per year. A similar provision appeared in the administration bill HB 722. Anthony Lawrence Clapes has argued that Hawai‘i has not done nearly enough to attract high tech. See Anthony Lawrence Clapes, Blue Wave Millennium: A Future for Hawai‘i. (Honolulu: Dark Matter Press, 2000). Paul Romer and Robert Lucas are among the leading writers in this area. See Paul Romer, “The Origins of Endogenous Growth,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 8:1(1994): 3–22; and Robert E. Lucas, Jr., “On the Mechanics of Economic Development,” Journal of Monetary Economics 22(1988): 3–42.

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Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. ———“Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Reply.” American Economic Review, 90(5)(December 2000): 1397–1420. Clapes, Anthony Lawrence. Blue Wave Millennium: A Future for Hawai‘i. Honolulu: Dark Matter Press, 2000. Crampon, L. J. Hawai‘i’s Visitor Industry, Its Growth and Development. University of Hawai‘i, School of Travel Industry Management, 1976. Eisner, Robert. How Real Is the Federal Deficit? New York: The Free Press, 1986. Grandy, Christopher. “...and Maybe Government Didn’t Grow Much, After All.”

China's Great Wall of Debt: Shadow Banks, Ghost Cities, Massive Loans, and the End of the Chinese Miracle by Dinny McMahon

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, bank run, business cycle, California gold rush, capital controls, crony capitalism, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, financial innovation, fixed income, Gini coefficient, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, industrial robot, invisible hand, low interest rates, megacity, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, money market fund, mortgage debt, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, Silicon Valley, subprime mortgage crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban planning, working-age population, zero-sum game

United States in 2020: Yutao Sun and Cong Cao, “Will China Become World’s Largest Research Spender by 2020?,” Analysis, China Policy Institute, December 4, 2014, https://cpianalysis.org/2014/12/04/will-china-become-worlds-largest-research-spender-by-2020/. on dark matter: Gianfranco Bertone, Behind the Scenes of the Universe: From the Higgs to Dark Matter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 1. to research neutrinos: “Daya Bay Experiment Begins Taking Data,” Cern Courier, September 23, 2011, http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/47189. than ever before: Rebecca Morelle, “China’s Science Revolution,” BBC, May 23, 2016, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-0192822d-14f1-432b-bd25-92eab6466362.

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According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, relative to the size of its economy, China already spends more than the European Union on R&D, and is on track to surpass total spending by the United States in 2020. Much of that money has been invested in visionary, one-of-a-kind research facilities, like the world’s largest laboratory for astroparticle physics, buried more than two kilometers underground in Sichuan, which is used for experiments on dark matter. And the sprawling underground complex being built in southeast China that will be used to research neutrinos. And the radio telescope in Guizhou Province that is the biggest of its kind in the world, with a half-kilometer diameter that allows scientists to look deeper into the night sky than ever before.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

To compound matters, we understood very little. Graphs of microbial populations projected on a screen had large sections labeled “unknown.” I was reminded of the way that modern physicists portray the universe, more than ninety-five percent of which is described as “dark matter” and “dark energy.” Dark matter and energy are dark because we don’t know anything about them. This was biological dark matter, or dark life. Many scientific concepts—from time to chemical bonds to genes to species—lack stable definitions but remain helpful categories to think with. From one perspective, “individual” is no different: just another category to guide human thought and behavior.

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For an estimate of the size of our microbiome see Bordenstein and Theis. (2015). For viruses within viruses see Stough et al. (2019). For a general introduction to the microbiome see Yong (2016) and a special issue of Nature on the human microbiome (May 2019): www.nature.com/​collections/​fiabfcjbfj [accessed October 29, 2019]. dark matter, or dark life: In a sense, all biologists are now ecologists—but disciplinary ecologists have a head start and their methods are starting to seep into new fields: A number of biologists are starting to call for the application of ecological methods to historically non-ecological fields of biology.

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk

Black Lives Matter, card file, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, desegregation, digital map, Donald Trump, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, government statistician, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, index card, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, public intellectual, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Noxubee County, Mississippi, E.D. 52–21, sheet 1A. 92.  “Noxubee County,” The Mississippi Encyclopedia, https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/noxubee-county/. 93.  To see how Black studies can and should be made central to our histories and theories of surveillance, see Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 94.  Price, “A Check on Underenumeration in the 1940 Census,” 47. 95.  Price, “A Check on Underenumeration in the 1940 Census,” 47. 96.  Appendix to Field Division, Bureau of the Census, “Rough Draft: Historical Report of 1940 (16th Decennial) Census Made from the Records That Were Available in 1948 with Emphasis on the Field Aspects” (1948), in Folder “16th Decennial Census 1940—Historical Report of 1940 Census,” Box 2, Entry P 26, RG 29, NARA, D.C. 97.  

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Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Saburo Moriyama; Reki Moriyama,” File No. 100–15947, May 13, 1943, in Case File 146–13–2–16–288, Entry A1-COR 146–13, RG 60, NARA, College Park, MD. 75.  Konrad Linke, “Tanforan (Detention Facility),” Densho Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Tanforan_%28detention_facility%29/. 76.  Weglyn, Years of Infamy, 80, 226. 77.  On the long history of travel permits and racialized surveillance in the United States, see Browne, Dark Matters, chapter 2. 78.  Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied, 258. 79.  Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied, 3. 80.  “Japanese Residing in the Metropolitan Area of Washington, D.C., April 1, 1940,” in FDR Library, Morgenthau Diary, Book 655, August 10–12, 1943, Microfilm reel 190, frame 197.

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On China and its distinct approach to socialist data, see Ghosh, Making It Count. One could also study data generated by monarchical governments and arrive at work like William Deringer, Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); or study data from slavery-centered systems through works like Browne, Dark Matters, Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery, and Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text 36, no. 4 (2018): 57–79. Andrew Whitby offers a broad synthetic survey of census history in The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations, From the Ancient World to the Modern Age (New York: Basic Books, 2020). 29.  

To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, Brownian motion, Commentariolus, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, fudge factor, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, music of the spheres, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Pierre-Simon Laplace, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions

Biologists who are interested in chromosomes or nerve cells study animals like fruit flies and squid, not noble eagles and lions. Elementary particle physicists are sometimes accused of a snobbish and expensive preoccupation with phenomena at the highest attainable energies, but it is only at high energies that we can create and study hypothetical particles of high mass, like the dark matter particles that astronomers tell us make up five-sixths of the matter of the universe. In any case, we give plenty of attention to phenomena at low energies, like the intriguing mass of neutrinos, about a millionth the mass of the electron. In commenting on the prejudices of the pre-Socratics, I don’t mean to say that a priori reasoning has no place in science.

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There are also eight mathematically similar “gluon” fields responsible for the strong nuclear interactions, which hold quarks together inside protons and neutrons. In 2012 the last missing piece of the Standard Model was discovered: a heavy electrically neutral boson that had been predicted by the electroweak part of the Standard Model. The Standard Model is not the end of the story. It leaves out gravitation; it does not account for the “dark matter” that astronomers tell us makes up five-sixths of the mass of the universe; and it involves far too many unexplained numerical quantities, like the ratios of the masses of the various quarks and electron-like particles. But even so, the Standard Model provides a remarkably unified view of all types of matter and force (except for gravitation) that we encounter in our laboratories, in a set of equations that can fit on a single sheet of paper.

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., 381 Cremonini, Cesare, 173, 180 Crombie, A. C., 137, 375 Ctesibius, 35, 41 cube, 10, 12, 17, 162, 163n, 275, 278–79 cubic equations, 109 Cutler, Sir John, 220 Cuvier, Georges, 265 Cyril of Alexandria, 50–51 d’Alembert, Jean, 248 Dalton, John, 11, 259 Damascus, 104, 117, 118 dark energy, 83, 165, 265 dark matter, 9, 264 Darwin, Charles, 24, 172, 200, 248, 265–66, 383 days of the week, 77n De analysi per aequationes number terminorum infinitas (Newton), 224 Dear, Peter, 125, 269, 373, 380 deduction, xv, 19–21, 132, 164, 189, 197, 201–3, 205, 247, 264–65, 289 deferents, 88–92, 93, 97, 110, 149, 150, 160, 180, 303–6, 324–24 Demetrius of Phaleron, 32 Democritus, 7, 11–14, 44, 46–47, 65, 110–11, 260 De Motu (On Motion) (Galileo), 173 density of Earth vs. water 240 Newton and, 232 De Revolutionibus (Copernicus), 153–58, 183–84 derivative, 223 Descartes, René, 37, 40, 141, 194, 201, 202–14, 218, 223, 229, 236, 246, 248, 342, 346–48 Descartes’ law, 37, 207 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World (Galileo), 185–87, 193, 199 Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences (Galileo), 190, 193–94 Dicks, D.

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

bioinformatics, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deepfake, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hyperloop, independent contractor, job automation, low earth orbit, messenger bag, mirror neurons, off grid, pattern recognition, phenotype, ride hailing / ride sharing, supervolcano, time dilation

UPGRADE Blake Crouch is a bestselling novelist and screenwriter. His novels include the New York Times bestseller Dark Matter, and the international bestselling Wayward Pines trilogy, which was adapted into a television series for FOX. Crouch also co-created the TNT show Good Behavior, based on his Letty Dobesh novellas. He lives in Colorado. BY BLAKE CROUCH Wayward Pines Pines – Wayward – The Last Town Andrew Z. Thomas/Luther Kite Series Desert Places – Locked Doors – Break You Stirred – Serial Killers Uncut Standalone Novels Run – Abandon – Snow Bound – Famous Eerie – Draculas – Dark Matter Recursion – Upgrade Letty Dobesh Series The Pain of Others – Sunset Key Grab Other Stories And Novellas *69 – Remaking – On the Good, Red Road Shining Rock – The Meteorologist Unconditional – Perfect Little Town Hunting Season Story Collections Fully Loaded – Thicker Than Blood The Fear Trilogy First published in the US 2022 by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York First published in the UK 2022 by Macmillan This electronic edition first published in the UK 2022 by Macmillan an imprint of Pan Macmillan The Smithson, 6 Briset Street, London EC1M 5NR EU representative: Macmillan Publishers Ireland Ltd, 1st Floor, The Liffey Trust Centre, 117–126 Sheriff Street Upper, Dublin 1, D01 YC43 Associated companies throughout the world www.panmacmillan.com ISBN 978-1-5290-4538-3 Copyright © 2022 by Blake Crouch Jacket Images: DNA © Getty Images, figures © Arcangel Author photograph © Matthew Staver Design: Neil Lang, Pan Macmillan Art Department The right of Blake Crouch to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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For being the rocket engine on my books, thanks to everyone at PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE and BALLANTINE BOOKS, but especially GINA CENTRELLO, KARA WELSH, KIM HOVEY, JENNIFER HERSHEY, QUINNE ROGERS, KATHLEEN QUINLAN, CINDY BERMAN, and CAROLINE WEISHUHN. For your tireless work on my behalf, and for being the best publicist I’ve ever had, thank you, DYANA MESSINA. For my beautiful covers on Dark Matter, Recursion, and now Upgrade, thank you, CHRIS BRAND. For publishing me so well in the UK, a big hug to the incomparable WAYNE BROOKES, and everyone at PAN MACMILLAN. For reading the ungainly early drafts of Upgrade and sharing your feedback, which improved these pages immeasurably, thanks to my early readers—CHUCK EDWARDS, BARRY EISLER, JOE HART, CHAD HODGE, MATT IDEN, DAVID KOEPP, STEVE KONKOLY, ANN VOSS PETERSON, and MARCUS SAKEY.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

But these could continue for trillions of years—time enough, perhaps, for the long-term trend for living systems to gain complexity and ‘negative entropy’ to reach a culmination. All the atoms that were once in stars and gas could be transformed into structures as intricate as a living organism or a silicon chip—but on a cosmic scale. Against the darkening background, protons may decay, dark matter particles annihilate, occasional flashes when black holes evaporate—and then silence. In 1979, Freeman Dyson (already mentioned in section 2.1) published a now-classic article whose aim was ‘to establish numerical bounds within which the universe’s destiny must lie’.5 Even if all material were optimally converted into a computer or superintelligence, would there still be limits on how much information could be processed?

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See also big bang Coursera, 98 creationism, 195, 196 Crick, Francis, 204–5 CRISPR/Cas9, 66–67, 73–74 Crutzen, Paul, 31 cryonics, 81–82 Cuba, environmental plan of, 45 Cuban missile crisis, 17–18, 20 Curiosity rover, 127–28, 143 cyberattack, threat of, 20–21, 94–95 cybertech, benefits and vulnerabilities of, 5, 6–7, 63, 109–10 cyborg technologies, 7, 151 dark matter, 179 Dartnell, Lewis, 217 Darwin, Charles, 121–22, 175, 194, 195, 196, 214. See also evolution Dasgupta, Partha, 34 death: assisted dying, 70–71; organ transplants and, 71 Deep Blue, 86 DeepMind, 86–87, 106 demographic transition, 30 Dengue virus, 74 designer babies, 68–69 Deutsch, David, 192 developing countries: clean energy for, 48–49, 51; effective redeployment of existing resources for, 224; genetically modified (GM) crops and, 66; impact of information technology on, 83–84; megacities of, 22, 29, 77, 109; need for good governance in, 28–29; need to bypass high-consumption stage, 27, 36; population trends in, 30–31.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

The majority of the observable universe looks to be empty space, offering at best one-in-a-million odds that, set down randomly within it, you would find yourself in a galaxy. Given that the universe is gradually expanding, these odds can only get worse as time marches on. Mysterious halos, filaments, and clouds of “dark matter,” seemingly immune to all forces in the universe save for gravity, are what hold galaxies and galactic clusters together. A galaxy’s interior is mostly void, filled with, on average, one proton per cubic centimeter. If a galaxy’s stars were the size of sand grains, the average distance between them would be on the order of a few miles.

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Mountain extolled the possible virtues: besides imaging alien Earths, the light-gathering power of an 8-meter or 16-meter mirror would revolutionize the rest of space-based astronomy, allowing astrophysicists to witness the formation of supermassive black holes and probe the cosmic distribution of dark matter. More generally, he said, large, cheap mirrors could also prove useful for beaming solar power to receiving stations on Earth, or for monitoring our own planet’s changing atmosphere at the resolution of individual clouds to constrain weather forecasts and climate-change projections. Some months after my discussion with Mountain, the NRO presented NASA with a smaller but still significant gift: two unused space telescopes and related hardware sitting in a restricted clean room in upstate New York.

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., 196, 198, 215, 221–23 Butler, Paul, 55, 58–70, 96, 114 Caldeira, Ken, 181 California, 105–7, 112–13 gold rush in, 105–6, 111, 112–13 Calvin, Melvin, 15, 19–20, 25 Cambrian Period, 138–39, 143–45, 182 Cameron, James, 258 Campbell, Joseph, 261 Canada, 244–48 Canadian Shield, 246 Capella, 239 carbon, 123, 131, 132, 134, 135, 140, 141, 175, 179, 182 carbonate-silicate cycle, 175–81, 184 carbon cycle, organic, 175 carbon dioxide (CO2), 124, 132, 134–37, 140, 141, 157, 159–62, 168, 170, 172, 173, 175–82, 184 Carboniferous Period, 131, 132 Carina Nebula, 238 Carnegie Institution, 251 Carpenter, Scott, 100 Carter, Jimmy, 240 Cash, Webster, 219–20 Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, 96 Challenger, 3, 188–89 Chandra X-Ray Observatory, 192, 209 Chaotian Eon, 139 Charbonneau, David, 228–30, 232 charged-coupled devices (CCDs), 51–53 China, 21–22 chlorofluorocarbons, 134, 142 chlorophyll, 141, 143 Christmas Tree Cluster, 238 Clinton, Bill, 196, 215 clouds, 161–62, 164, 206 coal, 125, 131, 134, 136, 137, 144, 160, 184 Columbia, 189, 196 comets, 2, 3, 19, 76–77, 140 Halley’s, 3 Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, 192, 209 computers, 43–44 Constellation program, 196, 198, 203, 204, 215, 221, 223 convergent evolution, 21 Cook, James, 85–86 Copernican Principle (principle of mediocrity), 83, 89, 91 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 81–83, 86, 87, 89, 91, 200 Cornell University, 39, 42 coronagraphic TPF, 217–22, 224, 231, 249 coronagraphs, 217 cosmology, 77–82 Copernican Principle (principle of mediocrity) in, 83, 89, 91 inflationary theory in, 89–92 modern, 86–87, 91 see also astronomy Cosmos, 240 Costanza, Robert, 74–75 Crab Nebula, 30 Crabtree, William, 84 Crutzen, Paul, 134–35 Cuban missile crisis, 23–24 cyanobacteria, 140–44, 175, 183 Daily Mail, 74 dark energy, 88, 90 dark matter, 206 Darwin, Charles, 200 Davidson, George, 113 deep time, 145–46 Democritus, 79, 80, 92, 238 Demory, Brice, 259 De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) (Lucretius), 80–81 De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Orbs) (Copernicus), 82 Devonian Period, 128, 130–32 Diamandis, Peter, 258 dinosaurs, 30, 136, 144 Discovery, 189 DNA, 40, 141, 143, 170 dolphins, 16, 20–21 Drake, Frank, 9–17, 27–45, 101, 167–68, 240 Arecibo transmission of, 39–41 orchids of, 37–38 Drake equation, 16–25, 28–29, 38–39, 41, 42, 183 longevity of technological civilizations (L term) in, 22–25, 38–39, 41, 42 Draper Laboratory, 256 Dyson, Freeman, 104 Dyson spheres, 104, 105 Earth, 109 asteroid strike on, 30 atmosphere of, 3, 132, 134–35, 139, 140, 144, 157–60, 168–69, 174–77, 206, 238 “Blue Marble” images of, 212, 239–41 carbonate-silicate cycle on, 175–81, 184 climate of, 123–24, 128, 132–37, 142, 144, 156–57, 160–62, 173–75, 184 in early cosmology, 77–82 energy consumption on, 103–4 extinctions on, 43, 135, 184 faint young Sun problem and, 173–75 formation of, 2, 7, 20, 139, 173 geologic time periods of, 128–45 glaciation on, 132–34, 142, 174, 176, 178, 179, 183 human population of, 43, 100, 134, 136 ice caps of, 128, 132–33, 135, 136, 184 Laughlin’s idea for moving orbit of, 76–77 Laughlin’s valuation of, 73–76 oxygen on, 139–44, 159, 171, 180–82, 200, 238 Snowball Earth events, 142, 174, 179 Sun’s distance from, 83, 86 tectonic plates of, 30, 105, 111, 128, 140, 144, 176, 229 union of organisms with geophysical systems on (Gaia hypothesis), 175, 176, 178, 183 water on, 3, 30, 158–61, 174, 177–80, 182 Earth, life on, 31, 154 diversification and explosion of, 138–39, 143, 144, 182 emergence of, 4, 7, 19–20, 238 end of, 7–8, 31–32, 75–77, 159, 180–83 essential facts of, 29–30 humanity’s ascent, 144–46 intelligent, 20–21, 182–83 jump from single-celled to multicellular, 28 redox reactions and, 168 Earth-like planets, 29, 32–34, 71–72, 99, 227–28 Earth-size or Earth-mass planets, 6, 53–54, 56, 200, 227, 251 ecology and economics, 74 economic growth, 102, 103 Eddington, Arthur, 35 Edison, Thomas, 106 Einstein, Albert, 35, 87 Elachi, Charles, 211–12, 214, 221 electricity, 103, 136 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 254 Endeavour, 190 endosymbiosis, 143 energy, 103–4, 136–38 from fossil fuels, 103, 124–27, 137, 154, 160, 184 Engelder, Terry, 126 Epicurus, 80 Epsilon Eridani, 10–11 Eshleman, Von, 35 ethanol, 137 eukaryotes, 143, 144 European Southern Observatory (ESO), 60, 64, 66 European Space Agency, 222 evolution, 183 convergent, 21 of universe, 88–89 exoplanetology, 13, 14, 34, 51, 193 exoplanets, 5, 27–28, 87, 222–23, 263 51 Pegasi b, 50, 53, 54, 58–59 Alpha Centauri Bb, 98–99 biosignatures and, 167–72, 261–62 Blue Marble images of, 212–15 distinguishing between various compositions of, 251 Earth-like, 29, 32–34, 71–72, 99, 227–28 Earth-size or Earth-mass, 6, 53–54, 56, 200, 227, 251 formation of, 109 GJ 667Cc, 65–69, 72 Gliese 581c, 163 Gliese 581d, 163 Gliese 581g (Zarmina’s World), 63–64, 68, 69, 72, 163 Gliese 876b, 60 habitability of, 154–83 HD 85512b, 163–64 Jupiter-like, 13, 28, 50, 56, 59, 60, 108, 109, 226, 228, 248–49 Laughlin’s valuation of, 71–77 migration theory and, 108 Neptune-like, 56, 108–9, 251 “Next 40 Years” conference on, 225–35, 263 observation of stars of, 33 snow line idea and, 110 super-Earths, 228–29, 251, 262 transits of, 53 TrES-4, 228 exoplanet searches, 5–7, 13–14, 32–33, 69–70 and false-alarm discoveries, 52–53 press releases on progress in, 163–65 SETI and, see SETI spectroscopy in, see spectroscopy, spectrometers see also telescopes Ferguson, Chris, 185–86 financial markets, 111–12 Fischer, Debra, 59, 61, 62, 69, 96 Ford, Eric, 249–50 Ford, Henry, 125 fossil fuels, 103, 124–27, 137, 154, 160, 184 fracking (hydraulic fracturing), 126–27 Gaia hypothesis, 175, 176, 178, 183 galactic planetary census, 54 galaxies, 87, 88, 99, 238 Andromeda, 31, 191, 238 Hubble Telescope and, 191 Local Group of, 88 Milky Way, see Milky Way Galileo, 241–42 Galileo Galilei, 81–83, 210 Galliher, Scot, 257 Garrels, Robert, 178 gas, natural, 125–27, 137, 184 Gemini telescopes, 199–200, 203 General Dynamics Astronautics time capsule, 100–103 geologic time periods, 128–45 geology, 110–11, 123 glaciers, 132–34, 142, 174, 176, 178, 179, 183 Glenn, John, 100 Goldin, Dan, 194, 211, 215, 242 governments, Urey on, 102 gravitational lenses, 35–37 Great Observatories, 192, 197, 209 Greece, ancient, 77, 92, 238 Green Bank conference, 15–25, 27–28, 101, 167–68, 240 greenhouse gases, 124, 134, 137, 157, 160, 174, 175 carbon dioxide, see carbon dioxide methane, 140, 142, 168–71, 174, 200 Grunsfeld, John, 197–99, 225–26, 235 Guedes, Javiera, 96 Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, 74–75 “Habitable Zones around Main Sequence Stars” (Kasting), 155–56, 159 Hadean Eon, 139–40, 156 Halley, Edmond, 84 Halley’s comet, 3 Hart, Michael, 174, 178 Hays, Paul, 176–79 heliocentrism, 79–82 Hiroshima, 23 Holmes, Dyer Brainerd, 100–101 Holocene Epoch, 133–35, 145 Horrocks, Jeremiah, 84 Howard, Andrew, 62 How to Find a Habitable Planet (Kasting), 167 Hu, Renyu, 259 Huang, Su-Shu, 15, 19 Hubble, Edwin, 86–87 Hubble Space Telescope, 189–93, 195, 197–99, 205–7, 209, 218–19, 226 human genome project, 234 hydraulic fracturing (fracking), 126–27 hydrogen, 159, 170–72 Icarus, 155 ice ages, 132, 133, 142–43 Industrial Revolution, 22, 134 inflationary theory, 89–92 Ingersoll, Andrew, 159 intelligence, 20–21, 23, 32, 182–83 interferometry, 213–14, 216, 231 International Space Station (ISS), 187, 189, 197, 202, 207–8, 210 interstellar travel, 44–45, 100–101 iron, 141 James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), 193–99, 202–4, 209, 215, 216, 218, 220, 225, 262 Jensen-Clem, Becky, 259 Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), 211–12, 216, 219, 221–25, 231 Johnson, Lyndon B., 101 Journal of Geophysical Research, 178 Jupiter, 76, 109, 191, 239 Galileo’s study of, 81 Kepler’s laws and, 83 moons of, 28, 110 Jupiter-like planets, 13, 28, 50, 56, 59, 60, 108, 109, 226, 228, 248–49 Kasdin, Jeremy, 219–20 Kasting, Jerry, 150–52 Kasting, Jim, 150–67, 169–84 children of, 153 Kasting, Sandy, 150 Kasting, Sharon, 153 Keck Observatory, 59, 60, 62, 66, 118 Kennedy, John F., 224 Kennedy Space Center, 185 Kepler, Johannes, 82, 83 planetary motion laws of, 82–84 Kepler field stars, 41 Kepler Space Telescope, 13–14, 53–54, 56, 62, 71–73, 98, 108–9, 166, 201, 225, 229–30, 263 Kirschvink, Joseph, 142 Knapp, Mary, 259 Korolev, Sergei, 186 Kuchner, Marc, 217–18 Kuiper Belt, 76 Large Magellanic Cloud, 238 Lasaga, Antonio, 178 Late Heavy Bombardment, 3, 140 Laughlin, Greg, 5–6, 48–50, 53–57, 69–70, 93–100, 107–12, 114–15, 117–20 Alpha Centauri planet search and, 94–98 idea to move Earth, 76–77 magnetic toy of, 93–94 SETI as viewed by, 99 valuation equation of, 71–77 laws of nature, 155–56 Lederberg, Joshua, 15, 16, 167–68 Le Gentil, Guillaume, 85, 117 Leinbach, Mike, 185–86 Lick, James, 112–14 Lick Observatory, 58, 61, 62, 70, 113–19 life, 32 on Earth, see Earth, life on intelligent, 23, 32 single-celled, 20 technological, see technological civilizations light: photons of, 72, 89, 115–16, 156, 191, 193–94, 201, 202, 213, 216, 237–38 polarization of, 115–16 waves of, 213–14, 216 Lilly, John, 15–16, 20–21 Local Group, 88 Lovelock, James, 168, 170, 174–76, 178, 181–83 Lucretius, 80–81 Lyot, Bernard, 217 Madwoman of Chaillot, The, 36 Manhattan Project, 23 Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research, 127, 149 Marcellus formation, 126–30, 137, 138, 141, 144, 160 Marconi, Guglielmo, 48 Marconi Conference Center, 48–50, 53–57 Marcy, Geoff, 57–63, 69, 70, 114, 194, 230–32, 235 Margulis, Lynn, 175 Mars, 19, 50, 87, 100, 107, 109, 155, 167, 179, 191, 192, 239 Kepler’s study of, 82, 83 missions to, 187, 188, 196, 207, 221 water on, 28, 179 Marshall, James, 105–6, 112 Martian Chronicles, The (Bradbury), 98–99 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 251–52, 259 ExoplanetSat project, 256–57 “Next 40 Years of Exoplanets” conference at, 225–35, 263 Mayor, Michel, 58 McPhee, John, 145 mEarth Project, 228–29 mediocrity, principle of (Copernican Principle), 83, 89, 91 Mercury, 82, 109, 239 meteorites, 20 methane, 140, 142, 168–71, 174, 200 methanogens, 140, 142, 169 microbes, 28 Miletus, 77 Milky Way, 16–17, 25, 31, 39, 41, 79, 86–87, 191, 237, 238 Sun’s orbit in, 95 Miller, George P., 101 Miller, Stanley, 19 Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science, 48, 74 mitochondria, 143 Moon, 3, 76, 100, 229, 242 in early cosmology, 78, 83 formation of, 30, 139 Moon, missions to, 188, 196, 221, 224 Apollo, 1, 50, 151, 187, 202, 212, 239 Morrison, Philip, 15, 18–19, 21, 23–24 Mosely, T.

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark matter, epigenetics, gravity well, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, mandelbrot fractal, microbiome, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, precautionary principle, printed gun, quantum entanglement, traveling salesman, Turing test

This is noticeable; there are sensors that register these occasional atomic hits, also the pass-throughs. It is also true that there is a continuous flood of dark matter and neutrinos always flying through the ship, as they do through everything in the universe, but these interact very weakly indeed; once a day or so, a flash of Cherenkov radiation sparks in the water tanks, marking a neutrino hitting a muon. Once in a blue muon. Same with the dark matter, which visible matter moves through as if through a ghost ether, a ghost universe; once or twice a weakly interactive massive particle has chipped away from a collision and registered on the detectors.

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It seems a gamma ray shot through the ship and made an unlucky hit, collapsing the wave function in a quantum part of the computer that runs the ship. It’s such bad luck that Devi wonders darkly if it might have been sabotage. Badim doesn’t believe this, but he too is troubled. Particles shoot through the ship all the time. Thousands of neutrinos are passing through them right this second, and dark matter and God knows what, all passing right through them. Interstellar space is not at all empty. Mostly empty, but not. Of course they too are mostly empty, Devi points out, still grumpy. No matter how solid things seem, they are mostly empty. So things can pass through each other without any problems.

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Problem of deceleration really quite severe, given our tremendous speed. Analogy describing the problem, from out of the classic literature on the subject: it is as if one is trying to stop a bullet with tissue paper. Quite an eye-opener of an analogy. Exotic physics, for example creating drag against dark matter, or putting dark energy to use, or quantum entangling the ship with slower versions of the ship, or with large gravity wells in parallel universes, etc.: these are all impractical at best. Wishes. Fantasies. Pie in the sky. Which is a mysterious metaphor. Food from nowhere? Land of Cockaigne? People used to be hungry often, as they were in the last years of wakefulness in the ship.

What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge by Marcus Du Sautoy

Albert Michelson, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, banking crisis, bet made by Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne, Black Swan, Brownian motion, clockwork universe, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, Georg Cantor, Hans Lippershey, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, music of the spheres, Necker cube, Paul Erdős, Pierre-Simon Laplace, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, Turing test, wikimedia commons

A scientist is more interested in the things he or she can’t understand than in telling all the stories we already know how to narrate. Science is a living, breathing subject because of all those questions we can’t answer. For example, the stuff that makes up the physical universe we interact with seems to account for only 4.9% of the total matter content of our universe. So what is the other 95.1% of so-called dark matter and dark energy made up of? If our universe’s expansion is accelerating, where is all the energy coming from that is fuelling that acceleration? Is our universe infinite? Are there infinitely many other infinite universes parallel to our own? If there are, do they have different laws of physics?

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For example, there might be something large beyond our cosmic horizon that is pulling on the galaxies we can see, causing an unusual drift in certain regions of the night sky. Although we might not be able to see such things, we can still experience their effect on the things we can see. What we can know is not limited to what we can see. It’s how we know about dark matter. The gravitational behaviour of the things we can see makes sense only if there is more stuff out there. It is how we discovered Neptune. Although we eventually saw Neptune with our eyes, it was mathematically predicted by the effect it was having on the planets around it. If there is something beyond our cosmic horizon that we can’t see, it can still pull the gravitational strings inside our bubble.

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306–9 continuum hypothesis 400–1, 403, 404, 405, 410 Copernicus, Nicolaus 178, 193, 210, 238 corpus callosotomy 309–11 cosmic horizon, visible 214, 221, 223, 226–7, 229, 230, 243 cosmic microwave background 221, 224–5, 226, 227–8, 229, 293–4 cosmic ray interactions 103, 105, 125, 142–3, 258 cosmological argument 406 cosmological constant 215, 224, 230 cosmology: ancient Greek 81; dark energy and 223–4; homogeneity and 234–5, 305; religion and 234–40 see also under individual area of cosmology Couch Adams, John 196–7 Coulson, Charles 15 Crick, Francis 321, 347 Curtis, Heber 204 Cusanus, Nicolaus 191–2 Cygnus X–1 276–7 Dalai Lama 236, 354 Dalton, John 89 Darboux, Gaston 39 dark matter/dark energy 7, 222, 223–4, 227, 234, 365 Darwin, Charles 56, 230 Dawkins, Richard 13, 236, 237; The God Delusion 13, 15 de la Rue, Warren 10 death: consciousness and 8, 318, 354–5; dementia and 318; life after 8, 354–5; science and battle against 2 Delos, oracle of the island of 373–4 Delta baryon 108, 109, 110 dementia 318 Dennett, Daniel 358 Descartes, Rene 198, 304, 307, 330–1, 350, 359, 372, 406 Dhammapada, The 333 dice: ancient world and 21–2, 31, 32; atomic structure of 72–3, 77, 78–80, 81, 82–4, 88, 91–2, 94, 103, 111–13, 114, 121, 125, 127, 175, 187; Bell’s theorem and 171; black holes and 285, 289; calculus and 30–2, 33, 34, 88; Cantor set and 65–6; Cardano and 23–4; chaos theory and 41, 43, 44, 48, 54–5, 66–8, 157, 408, 419; consciousness and 304, 308–9, 321, 325, 338, 343; evolution and 56–7, 58–9; God and 22; infinity and 187, 188, 220, 242–3; microscope and 78–9, 80; Newton’s laws of motion and 32–3, 35–6, 67, 78, 88, 154; Pascal/Fermat and 24–8; predicting fall of, history of 21–8; quantum entanglement and 172–3; shape of universe and 188, 207, 208–9; symmetry and 111–17, 120, 121, 125; uncertainty principle and 160, 163–4, 167; uranium decay and 132–3, 158; what we cannot know and 407, 408, 414, 417, 419, 420 Diophantus 371; Arithmetica 374–5 Dirac, Paul 104, 174 DNA 1, 4, 56–7, 59, 61, 321 Doppler effect 214–15, 268 double-slit light experiment 134–6, 143, 144–7, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152–3, 154, 157, 161–2, 163, 165, 166, 169, 170, 171, 173 Douspis, Marian 226 down quark 117, 118, 119, 120, 121 dualism 330–1, 332 echolocation 57 Eddington, Arthur 271–2, 277 EEG 305, 314–16, 323, 340 Egypt, ancient 251, 332, 366, 368 Ehrsson, Henrik 329, 330, 331 eightfold way 113, 118, 119 Einstein, Albert 131, 275, 276, 277, 299; black holes and 277; Brownian motion and 92, 93–5, 123; cosmological constant and 215, 224; E=mc2 and 108, 167, 168; equivalence, principle of 267–9; expanding universe and 215–17; model of light 139, 141, 142, 143, 147; photoelectric effect and 141, 142, 143, 147; religion and 296–7; quantum entanglement and 172–3; quantum physics and 132, 170, 171, 172–3; space-time, reaction to concept of 262, 264; theory of general relativity 5, 6, 7–8, 115, 143, 168, 215, 219, 220, 248, 265, 267–72, 273, 275–6, 277, 278, 281–2, 285, 288, 293, 299; theory of special relativity 11, 105, 141, 143, 248, 252, 253–64, 296–7, 299, 359 élan vital 358, 408 electricity, Thomson’s experiments to understand 95–6, 140 electromagnetic force 107, 108, 274 electromagnetism 34, 104, 107, 108, 136, 138–43, 417 electron 48, 407; chaos theory and 70, 402; discovery of 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101; electromagnetic force and 107; hydrogen atom and 274; mass of 126, 127, 230; muon and 104, 105; particle model of light and 136–7, 140–3; periodic table and 103, 106, 116, 125; photoelectric effect and 140–1; quarks and 119–20, 125, 126, 127; string theory and 127; uncertainty principle and 133, 167–70; Young’s double-slit experiment and 143–56, 160, 161–3, 171, 173 electron microscopes 78–9 Elkies, Noam 375 emergent phenomena/emergence 331–2, 356 entropy of a system 285–7, 288, 290, 293 environment, man’s effect upon 2, 6, 53 epileptic seizures 309, 323–4, 326 epistemology 70, 170, 177–8, 179, 226, 411–12, 418 equivalence, principle of 267–9 Erdős, Paul 377–8 Eta particle 115 Euclid 271, 378–9, 380, 401; Elements 367–8, 390 Euler, Leonhard 34, 415 European space agency 187 event horizon 276, 277, 278, 282, 283, 285, 287, 288, 289, 290, 405 Everett, Hugh 155 evolution 2, 8, 56–66; Cambrian explosion of life 58; consciousness and 319–20, 346; Dalai Lama and 354; discovery of new knowledge and 2, 233; fractal tree of life and 60–2; God and 230, 411; mismanaged ecosystems and 55; origin of life and 56–66; pattern spotting and 20; probability/chaos theory and 54–5, 56–66; random mutation and 8, 56–62; solar system/universe 32–41, 43, 55, 133, 155, 177, 206, 220, 223, 234, 299, 377, 411 expanding universe 3, 5, 7, 214–29, 248, 291, 292, 293, 294, 335, 365; accelerating rate of expansion 3, 7, 221, 222–5, 291, 365, 408; Big Bang and 219–21; discovery of 214–18, 365; infinite universe and 225–9; multiverse and 227–35 extraterrestrials 8, 143, 239–40 Fermat, Pierre de 24, 25, 26–7, 28, 36; Fermat’s Last Theorem 4, 8, 36, 176–7, 374–5, 410, 420 Fermi, Enrico 106 Fermilab 122 Ferreira, Pedro 226 Feynman, Richard 3, 121, 131, 132, 155, 159, 174, 276, 305; diagrams 121; Lectures on Physics 158 Fitch, Frederic 413 Flanagan, Owen 349–50 fluid dynamics 34, 44–5 fMRI scanner 4, 305, 315–16, 323, 333–9, 350, 351, 354, 356–7, 416 Fourier, Joseph 34 fractals 60–2, 65, 66, 67, 68, 168, 364; fractal tree of life 60–2 fractions 49, 82–6, 101, 117, 191, 369, 370, 391, 394–5, 396 Franklin, Melissa 122–5, 240 Franklin, Professor W.

The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman Dyson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, dark matter, double helix, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Plato's cave, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, undersea cable

She found that the visible matter in galaxies is not heavy enough to explain the speed of their internal motions. She deduced from her observations that galaxies are pervaded by dark matter, invisible to our telescopes. Nobody knows what dark matter is. It is another deep mystery remaining to be explored. We know only that it is there, and that it weighs more than all the stuff that we can see. Besides discovering and exploring dark matter, Rubin raised four children and crusaded publicly for the advancement of women in science. I was recently chairman of a committee that organized a scientific conference with a list of distinguished scientists as members.

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

We automatically don glasses and become an animal with keener eyesight. That may save the child from infection, but it also revises what a human being is. How will that continue changing in our lifetime? Already, we’re masters of the invisible. Just as we accept that the universe is mainly invisible dark matter and dark energy, we accept the reality of protozoans and viruses even though we can’t see them without a microscope, or perhaps as stationary oddities in the pages of a textbook—which few people are tempted to do. We believe in television and radio waves, gnomelike quarks, GPS, microwaves, the World Wide Web, gosling photons, a mantilla of nerve endings in the brain, the voiceless hissing of background fizz from the Big Bang, planets orbiting many stars in the night sky—some hospitable to life.

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They’re also real workhorses, fluting the air until it’s breathable, promoting photosynthesis on the land and in the oceans, decomposing dead organisms and recycling their nutrients. In industry, we breed them to ferment dairy products and to process paper, drugs, fuel, vaccines, cloth, tea, natural gas, precious metals; they help mop up our oil spills. We yoke them like oxen and set them to work. But just as most of the mass in the universe (94 percent) is “dark matter,” this largest biomass on our planet escapes the naked eye, yet is the invisible Riviera of the visible world. How remarkable it is that we’re not only renaming our age, we’re on the threshold of redefining ourselves as a completely different kind of animal than we ever imagined. For years, we thought DNA told the whole story.

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., 112–17 population of, 72 as seen from space, 16–17, 18, 19 sky parks in, 77–78 City Hall, Chicago, 83 city parks, 83 clams, 57 Clarke, Ann, 157–67 Clarke, Bryan, 156–67 Cleverbot, 227–28 cliff swallows, 115–16 close work, 192 Clostridium difficile, 301–2 clouds, 12 coal, 21, 106 Coan, James, 178 cocaine, 298 cochlear implants, 253 cockatoos, 202 cod, 59–60 Cold War, 146 Collins, Francis, 289 colon disease, 302 Colorado, 40 compassion, 176 computers, 13, 87, 175, 187, 194, 197, 203, 211, 220, 222, 224, 226, 230, 256, 261, 270 condors, 132 consciousness, 200, 216, 217, 219, 228–29 cooking, 190 Copenhagen, 78 copper, 21 coral bells, 80–81 cordite, 153 corn, 71, 153 corncrakes, 133, 137 Cornell University, 209–25 corpus callosum, 177 cosmos, 125 cottontails, 129 cougars, 117 Council House 2 building, 94 courtly love, 190 cows, 71 coyotes, 117, 118 crabs, 138 “cradle to cradle,” 87 cranes, 124 Creative Machines Lab, 218, 223–24 creativity, 196 Crick, Francis, 274 crickets, 173–74 Cronin, Lee, 237 crops, 71 Crutzen, Paul, 9, 313 cucumbers, 89 cuneiform, 235 Curitiba, Brazil, 107 cyborg anthropology, 262 cyborg dragonflies, 146–47 cyborgs, 146–47, 251, 260, 262–63 daffodils, 125 Dakar, Senegal, 314 dandelions, 132 Dantuluri, Phani, 261 dark energy, 172 dark matter, 172 Darwin, Charles, 156, 268, 276 Dayak people, 107 day lilies, 125 deception, 219 Decker Yeadon, 92 deer, 133 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 146–47, 209, 225, 236, 256, 258–59 dengue fever, 302 Denmark, 101 depression, 196 Desertec, 106 diabetes, 301 diamondbacks, 118–19 dianthus, 125 Dietikon, Switzerland, 82 digoxin, 302 dinosaurs, 31, 154 Djairam, Dhiradj, 104, 105 DNA, 160, 263, 274–75, 278–79, 281, 282, 287 of extinct species, 151–52, 153–54, 160–63, 166–67 dodos, 163 dog roses, 132 dogs, 140, 144, 145–46, 147, 148, 149 dolphins, 147, 202, 204, 216 domestic animals, 11, 71, 140 Dominoni, Davide, 114 dopamine, 298 Dourada, Fazenda, 123 droughts, 41, 46 Duckworth, Tammy, 259, 260 dung beetles, 164 Dust Bowl, 41 Dutch Hunger Winter, 283 ears, 245–46 Earth: as seen from air, 20–21 as seen from space, 16–18, 19, 305 Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (Hamilton), 314 Eastgate Centre, 92, 93–94 echolocation, 147 École Polytechnique de Montréal, 181 eczema, 301 Edison, Thomas, 191, 306 Edmonton Airport, 83 education, 286 Edwards, Andres, 88 Eggerthella lenta, 302 Eggleson, Kathleen, 183–84 eggs, 160–61, 279 Eisenberger, Naomi, 177 electricity, 76, 78, 91, 97, 99, 100–103, 104, 184–87, 191, 213 electronic campfires, 193 elements, 34–35 elephants, 202, 217 underpass for, 124 in war, 144, 145–46 Ellis, Erle, 126 Eloxochitl, 112 emotions, 214, 222–23 empathy, 190, 219, 228 Energy Department, U.S., 64 England, 132 English ivy, 132 EnsnAired, 98 Environmental Protection Agency, U.S., 86–87 epigenetics, 279–86 Estonia, 77 eucalyptus, 132 Eureqa machine, 219–20, 221 European badgers, 124 Eve (robot), 221 Everglades, 129, 130, 133, 315 evolution, 208, 211, 219, 224, 251, 276–77, 279 microbes’ effects on, 292–93 extinction, 12 of birds, 139 of Miami blue butterfly, 131 orangutans and, 27–28 of Partula, 156–59 of plants, 315 and resurrection of species, 151–52, 153–54, 161–63, 208 of trilobites, 29, 30 extinctions, great, 60, 154, 305 eyeglasses, 171 factories, 71 false indigoes, 125 famine, 276, 277, 285, 286 Fantastic Voyage, 181 farming fish, 60 Faroe Islands, 78 farsightedness, 192 fecal transplants, 302 Ferrer, Miguel, 136 ferrets, 132 fertilizers, 36, 64 fiber optics, 97 field mice, 134 fighting, 190 finches, 156 Finger Lakes, 31, 131 fire ants, 132 fireflies, 181 fishermen, 56–60 fleecy electricity, 35 Flegr, Jaroslav, 297 floods, 41 Florida, 117, 131 Florida rosy wolfsnail, 157 flounder, 65 food, 7 Forbes, 235 Forbidden City, 235 Ford Motor Company, 87–88 forests, 54 fossil fuels, 10, 34, 51, 307 fossils, 9, 29–30, 31, 32, 33–34, 35, 36, 43, 57 Fountainhead, The (Rand), 59 foxes, 129, 133, 134 foxgloves, 125 France, 72, 124, 296, 298 Frankenstein (Shelley), 212–13 Franklin, Rosalind, 274 Fraser, Bill, 135 frogs, 80, 125, 131, 132 Frozen Ark, 155, 160, 163–64 frozen food, 317 fruit flies, 293–95 fungi, 289-90, 300 G8 Summit, 315 Gabriel, Peter, 201–3 Galileo Galilei, 220 Galveston, Tex., 50 Gambia, 131 gardening, hydroponic, 83 gardens, 38–39 urban, 74 vertical, 79–85 Gardens by the Bay, 78 gas, 106 Gaudi, Antoni, 236 geckos, 180 genetic mutations, 277 Genghis Khan, 272–73, 274 geoengineering, 53–54 geographic change, 11 Geological Society of London, 9 Geological Survey, U.S., 299 geothermal warmth, 95 Germany, 72, 78, 83, 101, 124, 132, 298 solar panels in, 106–7 Gershenfeld, Neil, 202–3 gestures, 26–27 giraffes, 276 global consciousness, 18 global warming, 11, 38–42, 154, 307–8 agriculture and, 56 in Bangladesh, 51–53 and development of seas, 64–65 evidence of, 108 extreme weather and, 36–43, 314 fishermen and, 56–57 gardens affected by, 38–39 habitats rearranged by, 133–40 human rights and, 48 glowworms, 144 glucocorticoids, 283 golden eagles, 132 Golden Lion Tamarin Conservation Program, 123 golden toads, 162 Golding, William, 162 Google, 192, 210 Google Glass, 260–61 gophers, 115 gorgonian, 38 grains, 71 Grand Canyon, 126 granite, 58–59 GraphExeter, 184–85, 317 grasshoppers, 173–74 Grassy Key, 131 great apes, 202 great auks, 151 Great Depression, 108 Greece, 124 Green Apple concept car, 103 Green Belt Corridor, 124 greenhouses, 90 Greenland, 42 green mussels, 131 Green over Grey, 83 growing season, 42 Guam, 139, 157 Guam rail, 139 Guatemala, 88 Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn), 218 Gurdon, John, 150, 160 Gut Erlasee Solar Park, 106–7 Guthrie, Barton, 261 habitat loss, 154 Haiyan, Typhoon, 46 Hamilton, Clive, 314 Hansen, James, 314 Hansmeyer, Michael, 236 Harvard University, 235 Hastings, Battle of, 190 heart, 150, 239, 248, 249, 250–51, 281 heat, 41 heaters, 87 heat recycling, 95–108 Helm, Barbara, 114 Henri, Pascal, 84 herbs, 89 Hernandez, Isaias, 264–65 herons, 193–94 Heuchera plants, 80–81 High Line, 77 Hitler, Adolf, 273 hockey, 40 Holocene, 9 Homer, 262 Honda, 236 Hong Sun Hye, 102 horse chestnut trees, 153 Horse Island, 58 horses, 137–38, 140, 145–46 hostas, 125 Hudson River, 54–55 hulls, 91 human genome, 13 Human Genome Project, 270, 274, 282, 285, 289, 300 Human Microbiome Project, 289 human rights, global warming and, 48 humans: as eusocial, 288 geographic expansion of, 10 geography changed by, 11 history of, 71 orangutan genes shared by, 3 population growth of, 10 technological changes to bodies of, 13 tools used by, 7, 9 humans, environmental effects of: climate change, see global warming and possibility of nuclear winter, 8–9 hummingbirds, 126 hunter-gatherers, 71 Huntington’s disease, 271 Hurricane Irene, 57 Hurricane Katrina, 46 hurricanes, 31, 41, 43, 55 Hurricane Sandy, see Sandy, Hurricane hybrid cars, 100 Hyde Park, 142 hydroelectronic power, 100, 107 hydroponic gardening, 83, 89, 90 Icarus, 224 icebergs, 195–96, 197 Iceland, 77 ice packs, 41–42 iCub, 218–19 iGlasses, 261 igloos, 86 iguanas, 131 Ike Dike, 50 Iliad (Homer), 262 India, 88, 107, 132, 175 Indian mongoose, 132 Indonesia, 132, 313 induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS), 150–51, 160–63 industrial farming, 60 Industrial Revolution, 34, 106, 185–86, 232, 235, 267 Inheritors, The (Golding), 162 insects, 166 insulin pumps, 253 intelligence of plants, 205–7 International Union for Conservation of Nature, 313 Internet, 199–200, 235 Inuit, 86 invasive species, 132, 154 Iran, 147 Iraq War, 258 Ireland, 132 Irene, Hurricane, 57 irises, 125 iron fertilization, 53 Island of Dr.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

Our most important mechanical inventions are not machines that do what humans do better, but machines that can do things we can’t do at all. Our most important thinking machines will not be machines that can think what we think faster, better, but those that think what we can’t think. To really solve the current grand mysteries of quantum gravity, dark energy, and dark matter, we’ll probably need other intelligences beside human. And the extremely complex harder questions that will come after those hard questions may require even more distant and complex intelligences. Indeed, we may need to invent intermediate intelligences that can help us design yet more rarefied intelligences that we could not design alone.

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Perceiving movies takes a lot more processing power, in part because there is the added dimension of time (do objects persist as the camera moves?). In a few years we’ll be able to routinely search video via AI. As we do, we’ll begin to explore the Gutenberg possibilities within moving images. “I consider the pixel data in images and video to be the dark matter of the Internet,” says Fei-Fei Li, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “We are now starting to illuminate it.” As moving images become easier to create, easier to store, easier to annotate, and easier to combine into complex narratives, they also become easier to be remanipulated by the audience.

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Previous discoveries helped us to recently realize that 96 percent of all matter and energy in our universe is outside of our vision. The universe is not made of the atoms and heat we discovered last century; instead it is primarily composed of two unknown entities we label “dark”: dark energy and dark matter. “Dark” is a euphemism for ignorance. We really have no idea what the bulk of the universe is made of. We find a similar proportion of ignorance if we probe deeply into the cell, or the brain. We don’t know nothin’ relative to what could be known. Our inventions allow us to spy into our ignorance.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World by David Deutsch

agricultural Revolution, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Bonfire of the Vanities, Charles Babbage, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, dark matter, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, first-past-the-post, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, Gödel, Escher, Bach, illegal immigration, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Jacquard loom, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mirror neurons, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales of Miletus, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Review, William of Occam, zero-sum game

But, more profoundly, I expect that Edison was misinterpreting his own experience. A trial that fails is still fun. A repetitive experiment is not repetitive if one is thinking about the ideas that it is testing and the reality that it is investigating. That galaxy project was intended to discover whether ‘dark matter’ (see the next chapter) really exists – and it succeeded. If Edison, or those graduate students, or any scientific researcher engaged upon the ‘perspiration’ phase of discovery, had really been doing it mindlessly, they would be missing most of the fun – which is also what largely powers that ‘one per cent inspiration’.

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That is to say, the truth is that People are significant in the cosmic scheme of things; and The Earth’s biosphere is incapable of supporting human life. Consider Hawking’s remark again. It is true that we are on a (somewhat) typical planet of a typical star in a typical galaxy. But we are far from typical of the matter in the universe. For one thing, about 80 per cent of that matter is thought to be invisible ‘dark matter’, which can neither emit nor absorb light. We currently detect it only through its indirect gravitational effects on galaxies. Only the remaining 20 per cent is matter of the type that we parochially call ‘ordinary matter’. It is characterized by glowing continuously. We do not usually think of ourselves as glowing, but that is another parochial misconception, due to the limitations of our senses: we emit radiant heat, which is infrared light, and also light in the visible range, too faint for our eyes to detect.

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We do not usually think of ourselves as glowing, but that is another parochial misconception, due to the limitations of our senses: we emit radiant heat, which is infrared light, and also light in the visible range, too faint for our eyes to detect. Concentrations of matter as dense as ourselves and our planet and star, though numerous, are not exactly typical either. They are isolated, uncommon phenomena. The universe is mostly vacuum (plus radiation and dark matter). Ordinary matter is familiar to us only because we are made of it, and because of our untypical location near large concentrations of it. Moreover, we are an uncommon form of ordinary matter. The commonest form is plasma (atoms dissociated into their electrically charged components), which typically emits bright, visible light because it is in stars, which are rather hot.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Every Thursday evening, The Big Bang Theory—a TV show about a group of eccentric astrophysicists—regularly topped the American charts. Tens of millions break out in laughter as Leslie dumps Leonard because he prefers string theory over loop quantum gravity. For three months, more than three million Americans picked Cosmos over The Bachelor each Sunday night, choosing dark matter and black holes over the drama of a rose ceremony.13 Movies about rocket science—from Apollo 13 to The Martian, from Interstellar to Hidden Figures—consistently top box-office charts and collect countless golden statues. Although we glamorize rocket scientists, there’s an enormous mismatch between what they have figured out and what the rest of the world does.

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Connoisseurs of Uncertainty “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what—that is what our theory amounts to.”22 This is how the astrophysicist Arthur Eddington described the state of quantum theory in 1929. He may as well have been speaking about our understanding of the entire universe. Astronomers live and work in a dark mansion that’s only 5 percent lit. Roughly 95 percent of the universe is made up of ominous-sounding stuff called dark matter and dark energy.23 They don’t interact with light, so we can’t see or otherwise detect them. We know nothing about their nature. But we know that they’re there because they exert gravitational force on other objects.24 “Thoroughly conscious ignorance,” physicist James Maxwell said, “is the prelude to any real advance in knowledge.”25 Astronomers reach beyond the borders of knowledge and take a quantum leap into a vast ocean of unknowns.

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Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), available at http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/Eddington.2008.pdf. 23. Brian Clegg, Gravitational Waves: How Einstein’s Spacetime Ripples Reveal the Secrets of the Universe (Icon Books, 2018), 150–152; Nola Taylor Redd, “What Is Dark Energy?,” Space.com, May 1, 2013, www.space.com/20929-dark-energy.html. 24. NASA, “Dark Energy, Dark Matter,” NASA Science, updated July 21, 2019, https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy. 25. James Clerk Maxwell, The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell, vol. 3, 1874–1879 (New York: Cambridge University Press 2002), 485. 26. George Bernard Shaw, toast to Albert Einstein, October 28, 1930. 27.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

Kennedy’s analysis usefully explores various new uses of “number” in daily life within businesses not normally thought of as in the social media sector, but it does so without some of the detail and, particularly, the wider theoretical links to labor relations, as understood by Marx, that we provide later in this chapter. 37. Browne, Dark Matters. We are not claiming datafied labor relations (or data relations) are slavery; such hyperbole would be offensive. We are making a comparison in terms of the degree and continuity of surveillance that is normal in various regimes of labor. 38. On the expansion of extraction, see Mezzadra and Neilson, “Frontiers of Extraction”; and compare Morozov, “Will Tech Giants Move” on “data extractivism.” 39.

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Respectively, Schiller, Digital Capitalism; Castells, Network Society; Cohen, Truth and Power; Dean, Neoliberal Fantasies; Srnicek, Platform Capitalism; and Zuboff, “Big Other.” 132. Cohen, Truth and Power, Chapter 1. Occasionally, where we refer exclusively to capitalism’s informational dynamics, we will use the term informational capitalism for shorthand. 133. Browne, Dark Matters. 134. Foucault, Biopolitics; Brown, Undoing; Harvey, History of Neoliberalism; and Dardot and Laval, The New Way. 135. Note that, reflecting perhaps Foucault’s own divergence from Marx, commodification has a curious role in Brown’s book. It is generally absent as a term, and Brown notes Foucault’s dismissal of its importance (Brown, Undoing, 66), but it also reappears at certain points, at least as an accompaniment to her main arguments about neoliberalism as a model for valuing the world in economic terms (Brown, Undoing, 45).

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“Plausible Cause: Explanatory Standards in the Age of Powerful Machines.” Vanderbilt Law Review 70, no. 4 (2017): 1249–1301. Bridges, Khiara. The Poverty of Privacy Rights. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos. New York: Zone Books, 2015. Browne, Simone. Dark Matters. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. Brunton, Finn, and Helen Nissenbaum. Obfuscation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. The Second Machine Age. New York: W. W. Norton, 2016. Bucher, Taina. “The Algorithmic Imaginary: Exploring the Ordinary Affects of Facebook Algorithms.”

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Donald Davies, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, fake news, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper

Since the chance of catching two stars in our own Galaxy in perfect alignment is minuscule, astronomers would have to monitor millions of stars each night to catch a handful of events in progress. But that’s precisely what the Princeton University astronomer Bohdan Paczynski urged his colleagues to do, since the payback could mean valuable insights into what makes up the elusive “dark matter” that holds the Galaxy together. What’s more, in 1991, with then-student Shude Mao, he proposed gravitational microlensing as a means to search for extrasolar planets. His idea was that a planet around the foreground star would alter the magnifying properties of the lens dramatically and thereby betray its presence.

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Oppenheimer (American Museum of Natural History) Current observations suggest that brown dwarfs are common, perhaps a third or a quarter as numerous as stars. Thus our Galaxy alone would contain tens of billions of them. Since they are faint and hard to detect, some astronomers had speculated initially that brown dwarfs could be an important constituent of the “dark matter” that dominates the Galactic mass budget. That doesn’t appear to be the case: even a hundred billion of these lightweights would not add up to much. Shrouded Origins As their ranks have grown, so has our interest in unraveling the origin of these peculiar objects. One obvious clue is that brown dwarfs are common as isolated, free-foating objects both in young star clusters and in the feld, but relatively rare as companions to stars.

More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos by Dava Sobel

Astronomia nova, Charles Babbage, Commentariolus, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres

The Sun is only one star among two hundred billion in the Milky Way—and relegated to a remote region far from the galactic center. The Milky Way is just one galaxy in a Local Group of neighbors, surrounded by countless other galaxy groups stretched across the universe. All the shining stars of all the galaxies are as nothing compared to the great volume of unseen dark matter that holds them in gravitational embraces. Even dark matter is dwarfed by the still more elusive entity, dark energy, that accounts for three quarters of a cosmos in which the very notion of a center no longer makes any sense. A small corner of today’s known universe, depicted in this Hubble telescope Deep Field image, is many times more vast than the once-shocking distance Copernicus allowed between Saturn and the stars.

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See by Gary Price, Chris Sherman, Danny Sullivan

AltaVista, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, dark matter, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, HyperCard, hypertext link, information retrieval, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, machine readable, machine translation, natural language processing, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, search engine result page, side project, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, web application

As we discussed in Chapter 2, search engines use programs called crawlers to find and retrieve Web pages stored on servers all over The Invisible Web 57 DEFINITION The Invisible Web Text pages, files, or other often high-quality authoritative information available via the World Wide Web that generalpurpose search engines cannot, due to technical limitations, or will not, due to deliberate choice, add to their indices of Web pages. Sometimes also referred to as the “Deep Web” or “dark matter.” the world. From a Web server’s standpoint, it doesn’t make any difference if a request for a page comes from a person using a Web browser or from an automated search engine crawler. In either case, the server returns the desired Web page to the computer that requested it. A key difference between a person using a browser and a search engine crawler is that the person is able to manually type a URL into the browser window and retrieve that Web page.

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Text pages, files, or other often high-quality information available via the World Wide Web that general-purpose search engines cannot, due to technical limitations, or will not, due to deliberate choice, add to their indices of Web pages. Sometimes erroneously referred to as the “deep Web” or “dark matter.” keyword. A word or phrase entered in a query form that a search system attempts to match in text documents in its database. limit (limiting). Using search engine structure to reduce the returned set of possible hits by specifying certain criteria such as Web page date, country of origin, or by using field searching to restrict the search to specific parts of Web pages. metasearch engine.

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., 317 customization databases, 60–61 invisible Web, 93 local weather, 102.103 MetaCrawler, 45 research toolkits, 111, 113 Cybercafe Search Engine database, 203 cyberterms, 204 412 The Invisible Web D dams, register of, 356 DARE: Directory in Social Sciences — Institutions, Specialists, Periodicals, 374 dark matter, definition, 57 Data Query: World Development Indicators, 373 Database of Award-Winning Children’s Literature, 321 databases. See also specific databases content storage, 78–79 crawlers and, 67–68 customization, 60–61 document delivery services, 154 dynamic content, 130–132 keywords searchable, 14 relational, 61, 75 search engines and, 59–61 specialized content focus, 93 Web interface access, 7 dates, timeliness and, 108–109 deep Web, 57, 82–83 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), U.S., 1, 3 Defense Research Reports (Canada), 363 Defensive Driving Training Locator (NSC), 384 Delphion Intellectual Property Network, 98, 276 Demographic Data (Government Information Sharing Project), 371 demographic information resources, 102, 216, 371–372 dentists, 294–295 Dentists Register and Rolls of Dental Auxiliaries (U.K.), 295 Denver Public Library, Western History Photos, 266–267 Department of Agriculture (USDA), 171 Economics and Statistics System, 171 Foreign Import/Export Data, 195 nutrient database for standard reference, 253–254 Plants Database, 348 Department Of Commerce (DOC), U.S., State Exports Database, 196 Department of Defense (DOD), U.S.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations by David Pilling

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Branko Milanovic, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Erik Brynjolfsson, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, financial repression, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, off grid, old-boy network, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peak oil, performance metric, pez dispenser, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, science of happiness, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

So the economy is shrinking, but everyone is getting a better deal. Lots of what tech is doing is destroying what wasn’t needed. The end result is you’re going to have less of an economy, but higher welfare.” From the economy’s perspective, he was suggesting that Spotify and similar companies are like dark matter. Instead of pumping GDP out, they suck it in and make it disappear. And yet they are providing a valuable service that people are willing to pay for. What this does to our economy, as conventionally measured, is a complicated subject about which there is considerable controversy. So it is worth unpicking into several strands.

…

Without going into detail, the World Bank basically works backward by calculating how much capital we must have to produce so much income. Having taken into account natural capital and physical capital, the missing amount must be institutional capital. It is a little like the assumptions scientists make about dark matter. If you remember the parable of the two islands, one where people trust each other (and trade) and one where they don’t (and don’t), then attributing a large portion of income to institutional capacity is not ridiculous. Still, the bank’s numbers seem implausibly high in comparison to natural capital.

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

., “A Natural Product Telomerase Activator as Part of a Health Maintenance Program,” Rejuvenation Research, September 7, 2010, www.liebertonline.com/doi/full/10.1089/rej.2010.1085. 78 Chris Woolston, “Pricey Telomerase Supplements, Touted as Longevity Boosters, Are Unproven,” Los Angeles Times, December 20, 2010, www.latimes.com/health/la-he-skeptic-telomeres-20101220,0,6925196,print.story. 79 See www.tasciences.com/ta-65/. 80 “Genome Announcement a Milestone, but Only a Beginning,” CNN, June 26, 2000, http://archives.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/06/26/human.genome.05/index.html. 81 Epigenetics is one of these new discoveries. See Brandon Keim, “Early Reports from the ‘Dark Matter’ of the Genome,” Wired News, December 22, 2010, www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/genomic-dark-matter/. 82 John Lauerman, “Complete Genomics Drives Down Cost of Genome Sequence to $5,000,” Bloomberg News, February 5, 2009, www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&refer=home&sid=aEUlnq6ltPpQ. 83 “Your Genome in Minutes: New Technology Could Slash Sequencing Time,” ScienceDaily, December 31, 2010, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101220121111.htm. 84 Francis Collins, “A Genome Story: 10th Anniversary Commentary,” Scientific American, June 25, 2010, www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum by Temple Grandin, Richard Panek

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, David Brooks, deliberate practice, double helix, ghettoisation, Gregor Mendel, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, Khan Academy, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

Same thing with junk DNA. If you messed around with it, the gene’s “computer program” would not work. I was hardly alone in harboring this deep suspicion. For years, scientists had been taking the idea of junk DNA less and less seriously. In fact, geneticists had started preferring the terms noncoding DNA and dark matter, both of which suggested that this kind of DNA was simply a mystery, not garbage. As I stood reading the article in the airport, I felt vindicated after so many years, which is always nice, but that’s not what jumped out at me. The article—amid many others that day and in the weeks to come that emphasized the non–junk DNA angle—was based on the results of a massive federal research effort called the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements, or Encode.

…

But that Tinker Toy model represents a strand of DNA that’s stretched out. A strand of DNA completely unfurled would be about ten feet long. But it’s not unfurled. Instead, DNA is so tightly coiled that it fits inside the microscopic cell nucleus. By looking at DNA in its natural state, Encode researchers found, as the Times reported, “that small segments of dark-matter DNA are often quite close to genes they control.” Now that, I thought, is a mindblower. Until then, scientists had been thinking about DNA in its stretched-out form. But if you envision DNA as a tightly wound coil—and while I was standing in the airport, holding the Times in my hands, that’s exactly what my picture brain was doing—then a noncoding piece of DNA could be flipping switches on coding DNA that’s hundreds of thousands of base pairs away.

Endurance: A Year in Space, a Lifetime of Discovery by Scott Kelly, Margaret Lazarus Dean

Apollo 11, clean water, dark matter, game design, inventory management, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, Skype, space junk, the scientific method, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, Virgin Galactic, Y2K

I would never question anyone else’s experience, but this vantage point has never created any particular spiritual insight for me. I am a scientifically minded person, curious to understand everything I can about the universe. We know there are trillions of stars, more than the number of grains of sand on planet Earth. Those stars make up less than 5 percent of the matter in the universe. The rest is dark matter and dark energy. The universe is so complex. Is it all an accident? I don’t know. I was raised Catholic, and as is the case in many families, my parents were more dedicated to their children’s religious development than they were to their own. Mark and I attended catechism classes until one day in the ninth grade, when my mother got tired of driving us.

…

Putting a telescope in orbit outside the atmosphere and past the reach of light pollution has changed the field of astronomy. By observing distant stars, scientists have been able to make discoveries about how fast the universe is expanding, how old it is, and what it is made of. Hubble has helped us to discover new planets in new solar systems and confirmed the existence of dark energy and dark matter. This one scientific instrument has revolutionized what we know about our universe, and the task of repairing it—which always brings the risk of damaging or even destroying its sensitive components—is an enormous responsibility. Once our training was in full swing, we spent a lot of time in simulators.

…

The Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments like the AMS have transformed our understanding of the universe in recent years. We had always assumed that the stars and other matter we could observe—200 billion galaxies each with 100 billion stars on average—made up all of the matter that existed. But we now know that less than 5 percent of the matter in the universe is actually observable. Finding dark energy and dark matter (the rest of what’s out there) is the next challenge for astrophysics, and the AMS is searching for them. Removing and stowing the insulation from the main bus unit is a relatively simple task for a spacewalk, but as with everything we do in zero g, it is harder than you would think—sort of like trying to pack your suitcase if it were nailed to the ceiling.

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Brownian motion, California gold rush, Cepheid variable, clean water, Copley Medal, cosmological constant, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Attenborough, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Gregor Mendel, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, Magellanic Cloud, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, out of africa, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, supervolcano, Thomas Malthus, Wilhelm Olbers

Zwicky's talent was for big ideas. Others—Baade mostly—were left to do the mathematical sweeping up. Zwicky also was the first to recognize that there wasn't nearly enough visible mass in the universe to hold galaxies together and that there must be some other gravitational influence—what we now call dark matter. One thing he failed to see was that if a neutron star shrank enough it would become so dense that even light couldn't escape its immense gravitational pull. You would have a black hole. Unfortunately, Zwicky was held in such disdain by most of his colleagues that his ideas attracted almost no notice.

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When, five years later, the great Robert Oppenheimer turned his attention to neutron stars in a landmark paper, he made not a single reference to any of Zwicky's work even though Zwicky had been working for years on the same problem in an office just down the hall. Zwicky's deductions concerning dark matter wouldn't attract serious attention for nearly four decades. We can only assume that he did a lot of pushups in this period. Surprisingly little of the universe is visible to us when we incline our heads to the sky. Only about 6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about 2,000 can be seen from any one spot.

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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).

Quarantine by Greg Egan

cosmic microwave background, dark matter, disinformation, fudge factor, intermodal, pattern recognition, placebo effect, Schrödinger's Cat, time dilation, warehouse robotics

And the whole point of The Bubble is that we never will know. I have other theories, though, if you don’t like that one. Maybe the Bubble Makers are made of cold dark matter—axions, or some other weakly interacting particle which we’ve never been able to detect with much efficiency. If that were the case, we might have done them relatively little harm—but they decided that our technology was getting uncomfortably close to the point where it could start to affect them. There were plenty of astronomers searching for cold dark matter in the twenties and the early thirties—and their equipment was becoming a little more sensitive, and a little more accurate, every year.

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One by Debora MacKenzie

Anthropocene, anti-globalists, butterfly effect, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Donald Trump, European colonialism, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, machine translation, megacity, meta-analysis, microcredit, planetary scale, reshoring, social distancing, supply-chain management, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

The actual pathogens behind these are often not even determined, as this is not needed for treatment. Instead, doctors use wide-spectrum antibiotics for bacteria, or with viruses—like Covid-19—they just try to keep the patient alive until the patient’s antiviral immune response kicks in. “Illuminating this biological dark matter,” the Hopkins team argued, “would focus pathogen discovery efforts on established damage-causing microbes.” Aggressively doing such diagnosis in a few sentinel locations, perhaps in zoonosis hotspots, might reveal the next big threat early as it starts jumping to people. To do more specific diagnosis of syndromes, hospital labs need new kinds of diagnostic technologies that can distinguish a wide range of pathogens.

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Diagnostics manufacturers are now making automated “panels” of tests that can recognize the DNA or RNA of, say, a dozen respiratory or gut viruses, a huge improvement over old methods based on growing pathogens in culture to identify them, which is slow and insensitive. Making this kind of capability available more widely, including in countries that cannot afford it now but have hotspots of disease emergence, would illuminate a lot of pathogenic “dark matter” and give us a much stronger idea of exactly what pathogens we are contending with. For now, the most widely used diagnostic panels on the market are designed for routine hospital practice and mostly look for the usual suspects that cause most human infection. In sentinel sites looking for surprises, it would be good to have something that can spot the unexpected and unknown.

Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boeing 747, car-free, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, cosmological constant, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, David Sedaris, desegregation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lake wobegon effect, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, mirror neurons, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, stem cell, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Tenerife airport disaster, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route

Or consider a still unresolved example: physicists currently think that 96 percent of all the matter and energy in the universe is invisible—so-called dark matter and dark energy. The virtue of this highly counterintuitive (not to say cockamamie) proposal is that it makes sense of scientific findings that would otherwise call into question the theory of gravity. This is a classic example of extremely strong prior beliefs (we really believe in gravity) trumping extremely strong counterevidence. It remains to be seen whether the dark-matter theory will ultimately seem as foolish as proposing that Orion loiters in the sky every fifty-two years or as prescient as predicting the existence of Neptune

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Ellis’s story, 273–79, 280, 294–95 Cook, James, 353n Copernicus, Nicolaus, 127, 357n Coulter, Ann, 148n Courbet, Gustave, 328 credulity, 167–68 cross-dressing theory of comedy, 324n Cruikshank, George, 54 Cuban Missile Crisis, 153 ’Cuz It’s True Constraint, 104–9, 130, 163 Dadaism, 328, 329 dark energy, 126n dark matter, 126n Darwin, Charles, 131–32 data, and error-prevention, 305–6 Davidson, Osha Gray, 275–76, 284n, 383n death-wish response to error, 26–27 decision studies (error studies), 11–12 defensiveness (defenses), 213–18 “better safe than sorry,” 216, 216n blaming other people, 215–16 certainty and, 165–70 denial and, 229–30, 306, 307 near-miss, 214–15, 216 out-of-left-field, 214–15, 216 time-frame, 213–14, 216 definition of wrongness, 10–17 Defoe, Daniel, 258, 382n delusion, 38–39, 40, 351n dementia, 80n democracy, 311–16, 386n denial, 209–10, 228–34, 375–76n Innocence Project and, 233–39, 242–43 Dennett, Daniel, 369n depression, 336 Descartes, René, 6, 33, 113–15, 118–22, 318–19, 349n, 362–63n desegregation of schools, 274–77 desert mirages, 50 Design of Everyday Things (Norman), 211 despair, 258–59, 265 developmental psychology, 100–101, 197–98, 289–92, 307, 385n deviance, 34–35n Dickinson, Emily, 283 Diderot, Denis, 29, 38 direct elections, 312–14 disagreement deficit, 149–54 disillusionment, 53, 252n distal beliefs, 95–96, 359–60n distribution of errors theory, 34–35 Divine Right of Kings, 312 divorce, 248–49, 266–69 divorce rate, 268–69n DNA testing, 222–23, 226–27, 376n, 379n error rate, 223n Innocence Project, 227, 233–39, 242–43 dogma (dogmatic beliefs), 287.

Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code by Matthew Cobb

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, factory automation, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, post-materialism, Recombinant DNA, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

As Cleland and Copley put it, ‘the fact that we have not discovered any alternative life forms cannot be taken as evidence that they do not exist’. That is logically correct, but it is hardly an enticing starting point for a research programme and would not be taken seriously by any funding agency. Physicists have realised that 95 per cent of the Universe is made of stuff we cannot directly detect – dark matter and dark energy – because calculations of the amount of matter in the Universe based on gravitational effects revealed a substantial discrepancy between observed and expected values. For the shadow biosphere to be more than day-dreaming, a similarly overwhelming signature of its existence would be necessary.

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For the shadow biosphere to be more than day-dreaming, a similarly overwhelming signature of its existence would be necessary. Those intrigued by the remote possibility of weird life have come up with some potential indicators of its existence, such as the supposedly anomalous varnish that is found on desert rocks.29 However, something as impressive as the indirect evidence of the existence of dark matter and dark energy would be required for this hypothesis to be taken seriously. * The potential for synthetic biology is enormous. Scientists are already able to integrate unnatural amino acids into proteins, for example by manipulating enzymatic machinery associated with an ‘amber’ stop codon (UAG) that has been introduced into bacteria, yeast, the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans and even mammalian cells.30 A synthetic form of transfer RNA is used to allow the UAG codon to code for an unnatural amino acid, thereby producing a novel protein.

…

L. and Cavalcanti, A. R. O., ‘Consequences of stop codon reassignment on protein evolution in ciliates with alternative genetic codes’, Molecular Biology and Evolution, vol. 25, 2007, pp. 179–86. Rinke, C., Schwientek, P., Sczyrba, A. et al., ‘Insights into the phylogeny and coding potential of microbial dark matter’, Nature, vol. 499, 2013, pp. 431–7. Roberts, R. B. (ed.), Microsomal Particles and Protein Synthesis, London, Pergamon, 1958. Roberts, R. B., ‘Alternative codes and templates’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, vol. 48, 1962, pp. 897–900. Robertson, M. P. and Joyce, G. F., ‘The origins of the RNA world’, Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology, vol. 4, 2012, article a003608.

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (New York: William Morrow, 2016). 9. Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). 10. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (New York: Crown Books, 2001), and Clyde W. Ford, Think Black: A Memoir (New York: Amistad, 2019). 11. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke, 2015). See also Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology (New York: Polity, 2019). 12. Clyde W. Ford, Think Black: A Memoir (New York: Amistad, 2019). 13. Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (New York: NYU Press, 2018). 14. David Golumbia, “Do You Oppose Bad Technology, or Democracy?

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Lisa Gitelman, 1–14 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); David Lyon, “Surveillance, Snowden, and Big Data: Capacities, Consequences, Critique,” Big Data & Society (July–December 2014): 1–14. 14. cf. Sarah Brayne, “Big Data Surveillance: The Case of Policing,” American Sociological Review 82, no. 5 (2017): 977–1008; Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Shoshana Amielle Magnet and Tara Rodgers, “Stripping for the State: Whole Body Imaging Technologies and the Surveillance of Othered Bodies,” Feminist Media Studies 12, no. 1 (2011): 101–118; Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018). 15.

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Kate Crawford, “Artificial Intelligence’s White Guy Problem,” New York Times (June 25, 2016). 38. Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey, eds., Thinking through the Skin (London: Routledge, 2001). 39. Steve Anderson, Technologies of Vision: The War between Data and Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017). 40. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 41. Emily Horowitz, Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2015). 42. John Borneman, Cruel Attachments: The Ritual Rehab of Child Molesters in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 43.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

This apparent general lack of interest by the biological community in aging and mortality beyond a relatively small number of devoted researchers stimulated me to begin pondering these questions. As it appeared that almost no one was thinking about them in quantitative or analytic terms, there might be a possibility for a physics approach to lead to some small progress. Consequently, during interludes between grappling with quarks, gluons, dark matter, and string theory, I began to think about death. As I embarked on this new direction, I received unexpected support for my ruminations about biology as a science and its relationship to mathematics from an unlikely source. I discovered that what I had presumed was subversive thinking had been expressed much more articulately and deeply almost one hundred years earlier by the eminent and somewhat eccentric biologist Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in his classic book On Growth and Form, published in 1917.4 It’s a wonderful book that has remained quietly revered not just in biology but in mathematics, art, and architecture, influencing thinkers and artists from Alan Turing and Julian Huxley to Jackson Pollock.

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Although it hardly grabs the same kind of attention, this accelerating socioeconomic expansion has had and will continue to have a significantly more profound effect on your life, your children’s lives, and their children’s lives than all of the wonders and paradoxes of the exponentially expanding cosmic universe and its archetypal mythologies of dark matter, dark energy, and the Big Bang. The most obvious manifestation of the exponential rate at which our social and economic lives have been expanding is provided by the huge population explosion that has occurred over the past two hundred years or so. After two million years of slow, steady growth the number of human beings living on the planet is estimated to have eventually reached the billion mark around 1805.

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Names that you might not have heard of, such as Adolphe Quetelet, Thomas Young, and William Froude. I also included a few personal anecdotes to illustrate how I came to think about some of these problems, and, in particular, how I transitioned from being obsessed with elementary particles, strings, dark matter, and the evolution of the universe to trying to understand cells and whales, life and death, cities and global sustainability, and why companies die. A critical point in this transition was my meeting with the eminent ecologist and wonderful scientist Jim Brown. In chapter 3, I related the story of how this fortuitous encounter and my subsequent long-term engagement with the Santa Fe Institute came into being and how it led to an extraordinary collaborative relationship that changed my life, and I believe his, too.

Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World by Sinclair McKay

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, dark matter, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, German hyperinflation, haute couture, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mikhail Gorbachev, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, uranium enrichment

The Zeitzeugenbörse – a contemporary witness exchange – has been aiming to capture and record the voices of ordinary Berliners from right the way across the century: their lives and experiences through the traumas of the decades. The old sense that the German people had to suppress their own experiences of suffering had the unintended effect of creating a mass of historic dark matter: silence and obscurity when it came to certain epochal events. The wonderful academics and volunteers who run the Zeitzeugenbörse have been working in recent years to ensure that a generation of Berlin voices is never lost. It is these voices that can help guide us through a century both of terror and of stubborn fortitude.

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By early 1933, Hitler’s ascension to the Chancellorship having been followed almost immediately by the burning of the Reichstag, enabling the Nazis to blame and whip up rage against the communists, hold a heavily freighted election and swiftly impose iron-gripped totalitarianism, Einstein understood that if anything he had underestimated the terrible forces at play; the dark matter exerting such strange effects across the nation. The night after the Reichstag fire, Einstein told his mistress: ‘I dare not enter Germany because of Hitler.’6 But this did not mean that he would keep his silence. Einstein sailed for Belgium, where he delivered this ringing statement: ‘As long as I have any choice in the matter, I shall live only in a country where civil liberty, tolerance and equality of all citizens before the law prevail.

…

Then came the shock of the German invasion of Russia in 1941, and the evacuation of nuclear physics programmes from the larger cities out to the Urals and Kazakhstan. A young scientist who had joined the Soviet Air Force – Georgy Flyorov – noticed that Western scientific journals now had limited information about nuclear progress, and surmised that in the midst of that intelligence dark matter, top-secret work was underway. He wrote directly to Stalin: ‘It is essential not to lose any time in building the uranium bomb.’11 Flyorov was put into contact with senior physicists. At a time when the Nazi armies were brutalizing the country, there was an agonizing dilemma and it was to do with money.

Engineering Infinity by Jonathan Strahan

augmented reality, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, gravity well, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, post scarcity, quantum entanglement, Schrödinger's Cat, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski

Its mind was diamondoid processing nodes and smart dust swarms and cold quantum condensates in the system's outer dark. Its eyes were interferometers and WIMP detectors and ghost imagers. The first thing the server saw was the galaxy, a whirlpool of light in the sky with a lenticular centre, spiral arms frothed with stars, a halo of dark matter that held nebulae in its grip like fireflies around a lantern. The galaxy was alive with the Network, with the blinding Hawking incandescence of holeships, thundering along their cycles; the soft infrared glow of fully grown servers, barely spilling a drop of the heat of their stars; the faint gravity ripples of the darkships' passage in the void.

…

In an eyeblink it clumped into hadrons, almost faster than the server could follow - the baby had its own arrow of time, its own fast heartbeat, young and hungry. And then the last scattering, a birth cry, when light finally had enough room to travel through the baby so the server could see its face. The baby grew. Dark matter ruled its early life, filling it with long filaments of neutralinos and their relatives. Soon, the server knew, matter would accrete around them, condensing into stars and galaxies like raindrops in a spiderweb. There would be planets, and life. And life would need to be served. The anticipation was a warm heartbeat that made the server's shells ring with joy.

Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, cosmological principle, dark matter, Dava Sobel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, germ theory of disease, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, linked data, low earth orbit, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, power law, profit motive, remunicipalization, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sparse data, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, time dilation

We see, scattered across deep space, galaxies with "active nuclei," quasars, galaxies distorted by collisions, their spiral arms disrupted, star systems blasted with radiation or gobbled up by black holes—and we gather that on such timescales even interstellar space, even galaxies may not be safe. There is a halo of dark matter surrounding the Milky Way, extending perhaps halfway to the distance of the next spiral galaxy (M31 in the constellation Andromeda, which also contains hundreds of billions of stars). We do not know what this dark matter is, or how it is arranged— but some† of it may be in worlds untethered to individual stars. If so, our descendants of the * A value that nicely approximates modern estimates of the number of planets orbiting stars in the Milky Way Galaxy

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

If the strong nuclear force was stronger or weaker, carbon couldn’t be created in stars. If the gravitational constant was stronger, stars would be very short-lived; if it was weaker, stars wouldn’t shine or make the heavy elements. The universe also has very low entropy or disorder, which may be responsible for time’s forward sense or “arrow.” In addition, the cosmic values of dark matter and dark energy neither prohibit structures from forming nor cause a collapse too soon for life to be able to form. The point is that while the universe would be physically sensible if any of these quantities took different values, it wouldn’t be a universe with life containing life as we know it.

…

The first fine-tuning argument was the fact that the age of a biological universe cannot be too short or too long, “Dirac’s Cosmology and Mach’s Principle” by R. H. Dicke 1961. Nature, vol. 192, pp. 440–41. Since then, the idea has been explored by a number of physicists, for example: Coincidences: Dark Matter, Mankind, and Anthropic Cosmology by J. Gribbin and M. Rees 1989. New York: Bantam. Also: The Goldilocks Enigma: Why Is the Universe Just Right for Life? by P. Davies 2007. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. For a philosophical perspective, see A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology by A.

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

Keith Clark, “Negation as Failure,” in Logic and Databases, ed. Herve Gallaire and Jack Minker (New York: Plenum, 1978), 293. 39. Wanda Zamen, “HP Computers Are Racist,” YouTube.com, December 10, 2009. 40. For a fuller explanation of how digital epidermalization operates in this example, see Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 161–164. 41. Julianne Hing, “HP Face-Tracker Software Can’t See Black People,” Colorlines, December 21, 2009, www.colorlines.com. 42. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room 18 (2005): 26–51. 43.

…

Feminist scholar Shoshana Magnet has already outlined the racial, classed, and gendered dimensions of this machinic process. And surveillance theorist Simone Browne has argued that this biometric objectification constructs newly minted racial truths. See Shoshana Magnet, When Biometrics Fail: Gender, Race, and the Technology of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 61. Brad Weslake, “Explanatory Depth,” Philosophy of Science 77, no. 2 (2010): 273–294. 62. Kate Crawford, “The Hidden Biases of Big Data,” Harvard Business Review, April 1, 2013, http://hbr.org. 63. Geoffrey Bowker, “Data Flakes: An Afterward to ‘Raw Data’ Is an Oxymoron,” in Gitelman, “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, 170. 64.

The City by Tony Norfield

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Irish property bubble, Leo Hollis, linked data, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game

But their solution is to assume away the existence of different rates of return and instead to invent extra US foreign assets that do not appear in the statistics. I would be the last to argue that US statistics capture every cent of reality, but this is to ignore an evident fact that the yields are different. The extra US assets are given the name ‘dark matter’ and, as one might expect, including this results in the US having a net surplus on its investment position.24 This feat is achieved by ‘redefining the stock of assets in a way that more explicitly shows the value of the underlying services’. This transforms US imperialism’s economic and financial power, its ability to appropriate value from the world economy, into a payment the rest of the world makes to the US for the services rendered!

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Other bond and longer-term loan interest rates are based upon the benchmark rate for government securities. 21A useful recent book on international finance is Brett Christophers, Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism, Chichester: Wiley- Blackwell, 2013. 22Ricardo Hausmann, ‘Good Credit Ratios, Bad Credit Ratings: The Role of Debt Structure’, third draft of a paper prepared for the Conference on Rules-Based Fiscal Policy in Emerging Market economies, Oaxaca, Mexico, 14 to 16 February 2002. 23BEA, ‘US International Transactions, 1960–present’, 2014, Table 1.1, lines 6 and 14, at bea.gov. 24Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, ‘Global Imbalances or Bad Accounting? The Missing Dark Matter in the Wealth of Nations’, Centre for International Development at Harvard University, Working Paper No. 124, January 2006, pp. 3–8, at hks.harvard.edu. 25Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism. 26The ‘offshore’ Chinese renminbi currency has the ISO code CNH, and this might be used instead of the ‘onshore’ CNY.

The Four Horsemen by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett

3D printing, Andrew Wiles, cognitive dissonance, cosmological constant, dark matter, Desert Island Discs, en.wikipedia.org, phenotype, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker

We don’t know, but we have some interesting hypotheses to think about. What did the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees look like? We don’t know, but we do know a bit about it. We know the continent on which it lived (Africa, as Darwin guessed), and molecular evidence tells us roughly when (between 6 million and 8 million years ago). What is dark matter? We don’t know, and a substantial fraction of the physics community would dearly like to. Ignorance, to a scientist, is an itch that begs to be pleasurably scratched. Ignorance, if you are a theologian, is something to be washed away by shamelessly making something up. If you are an authority figure like the Pope, you might do it by thinking privately to yourself and waiting for an answer to pop into your head – which you then proclaim as a ‘revelation’.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

But inference to the best explanation also gets us a great deal more than either deduction or enumerative induction does. It’s inference to the best explanation that gives science the power to expand our ontology, giving us reasons to believe in things we can’t directly observe, from subatomic particles—or maybe strings—to the dark matter and dark energy of cosmology. It’s inference to the best explanation that allows us to know something of what it’s like to be other people on the basis of their behavior. I see the hand drawing too near the fire and then quickly pull away, tears starting in the eyes while an impolite word is uttered, and I know something of what that person is feeling.

…

Hunting for Root Cause: The Human “Black Box” Eric Topol Professor of translational genomics, Scripps Research Institute; cardiologist, Scripps Clinic Root-cause analysis is an attractive concept for certain matters in industry, engineering, and quality control. A classic application is to determine why a plane crashed by finding the “black box”—the tamper-proof event-data recorder. Even though this box is usually bright orange, the term symbolizes the sense of dark matter, a container with critical information to help illuminate what happened. Getting the black-box audio recording is just one component of a root-cause analysis of why a plane goes down. Each of us is gradually being morphed into an event-data recorder by virtue of our digital identity and presence on the Web.

New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind by Noam Chomsky

Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, tacit knowledge, theory of mind, Turing test

Shall we understand metaphysical naturalism to be the demand for unity of nature? If so, it could be taken as a guiding idea, but not as a dogma. “Ninety percent of the matter of the universe,” physicists tell us, “is what is now called dark matter – dark because we don’t see it; dark because we don’t know what it is,” indeed “we do not have the slightest idea of what 90 percent of the world is made of.” (Weisskopf 1989). Suppose dark matter turns out to be crucially different from the 10 per cent of the world about which there are some ideas. The possibility cannot be discounted in principle; stranger things have been accepted in modern science.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization by K. Eric Drexler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Bill Joy: nanobots, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, double helix, failed state, Ford Model T, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Higgs boson, industrial robot, iterative process, Large Hadron Collider, Mars Rover, means of production, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nick Bostrom, performance metric, radical decentralization, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Thomas Malthus, V2 rocket, Vannevar Bush, Vision Fund, zero-sum game

They’re more different than most people think. PART 3 EXPLORING DEEP TECHNOLOGY CHAPTER 7 Science and the Timeless Landscape of Technology THE GREAT STORY OF THE WORLD Near the dawn of known time, before any hint of an Earth or a Sun, the pre-stellar universe was a realm of dark matter and incandescent gas that expanded, cooled, and faded to darkness as space itself stretched. There were ripples in that sea of matter, slight concentrations of mass that drew more mass together, collapsing to form the seeds of galaxies. The physics of gravitation—and of light, heat, and fluid dynamics—describes these collapses along with the lesser collapses within them that gave birth to a generation of stars that brought light into a time of universal darkness.

…

With the Higgs boson, physicists observed the final particle predicted by the Standard Model, a crowning yet frustrating achievement. Physicists had hoped that they would find something else, a terrestrial clue to physics beyond the Standard Model. There must be something beyond. Galactic dynamics shows the effects of mass in the form (it seems) of unobserved dark-matter particles, and the expansion of the cosmos itself is being driven ever faster by an unexplained dark-energy field. Beyond this, the equations themselves call out for amendment or replacement. Gravitation doesn’t fit with the rest (but only deep down, in as-yet unobservable ways), and even the compatible parts of the Standard Model have a patchwork quality, where at the bottom, physicists hope to find a more unified fabric.

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

It’s just that our economic tools, at this early stage of the “science,” are too crude to calculate the trade-off. After all, economics as a science is about two hundred years old. When it’s as old as physics or astronomy, we’ll get much better measures of standard of living. Freedom or leisure is about as cosmically important as the dark matter, or dark energy, of the universe. It’s just that our minds have been darkened by economists like Milton Friedman. Yet Friedman himself had half an idea as to who is better off (Barbara v. Isabel), even when he was writing libertarian-type tracts like Free to Choose. Friedman’s very life was an indictment of the ideas in the book.

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But that means on the Internet, where people flinch because it’s like a flashlight shining in your eyes, you find yourself involuntarily turning away from a thick, clunky German abstraction a nanosecond before you have had the time to absorb it. The way German makes a car wreck of three or four abstract nouns, you have to see the damn thing in print, and stare at the word longer than the digital world will let you. At any rate, I see more people reading cold, hard print—the kind that pulls the light into its dark matter without flashing any back—in Germany. And maybe it’s because people can stare at a sentence and think about it a little longer when it’s in print that it seems to me I can get into the kind of long and thoughtful political conversations over there that I never seem to have here. I should be clear: we can be thoughtful.

Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson

clockwork universe, dark matter, Dava Sobel, fail fast, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Murano, Venice glass, music of the spheres, Plato's cave, power law, quantum entanglement

And something otherwise undetectable was exerting very marked gravitational effects, that if caused by a mass would outmass the visible matter of the universe ten to one. Then there appeared to be a kind of reverse gravity effect as well, an inexplicable accelerating expansion of space. People spoke of dark matter and dark energy, but these were names only—names that left the mysteries untouched. What they were was better explained by the existence of extra dimensions, first suggested by Kaluza and Klein, and then put to use by Bao.” Galileo said, “Explain them to me.” He felt himself become equations in the clouds inside him.

…

The best way to conceptualize some of the extra ones is to imagine them enfolded or implicate in the dimensions we sense.” A long, flat red sheet appeared before him; it rolled lengthwise into a long thin tube. “Seen in two dimensions this looks like a ribbon, but in three dimensions it’s obviously a tube. It’s like that all through the manifolds. Dark matter has to be very weakly interacting but at the same time registering gravitationally at ten times the mass of all visible matter. That is an odd combination, but Bao considered it as a dimension we only were seeing part of, a hyperdimension or manifold that enfolds our dimensions. That manifold happens to be contracting, you could say, which gives the effect in our sensible universe of the extra gravity we detect.

…

“I thought you said time was the fourth dimension,” Galileo said. “No. For one thing, what we call time turns out to be not a dimension but a manifold, a compound vector of three different dimensions. But put that aside for a second, and let’s finish with the spatial manifold. Dimension four we still call dark matter, as a gesture to our first awareness of it.” “Four,” Galileo repeated. “Yes, and dimension five in some ways counterbalances the action of four, as it is the perceived accelerating expansion of space-time. Aspects of this dimension are called dark energy.” “Do these dimensions pass through each other, then?”

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

anthropic principle, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, different worldview, epigenetics, gravity well, heat death of the universe, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, Kim Stanley Robinson, land tenure, new economy, phenotype, quantum entanglement, stem cell, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship

Random change was not the goal anyway. Acceptance was. Happiness— Ann’s true happiness, whatever that might be— now so far away, so hard to imagine. He ached to think of it. It was extraordinary how much physical pain could be generated by thought alone— the limbic system a whole universe in itself, suffused with pain, like the dark matter that suffused everything in the universe. “Have you talked to Michel?” Ursula asked. “No. Good idea.” He called Michel, explained what had happened, and what he had in mind to do. “My God, Sax,” Michel said, looking shocked. But in only a few moments he was promising to come. He would get Desmond to fly him to Da Vinci to pick up the treatment supplies, and then fly on up to the refuge.

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And a magnetic monopole detector, orbiting the sun out of the plane of the ecliptic, had captured a trace of what looked to be a fractionally charged unconfined particle with a mass as big as a bacterium— a very rare glimpse of a “weakly interacting massive particle,” or WIMP. String theory had predicted WIMPs would be out there, while the revised standard did not call for them. That was thought provoking, because the shapes of galaxies showed that they had gravitational masses ten times as large as their visible light revealed; if the dark matter could be explained satisfactorily as weakly interacting massive particles, Sax thought, then the theory responsible would have to be called very interesting indeed. Interesting in a different way was the fact that one of the leading theorists in this new stage of development was working right there in Da Vinci, part of the impressive group Sax was sitting in on.

…

Everyone in these moments attended to her very closely, in effect mesmerized; she had been working at Da Vinci for a year now, and everyone there smart enough to recognize such a thing knew that they were watching one of the pantheon at work, discovering reality right there before their eyes. The other young turks would interrupt her to ask questions, of course— there were many good minds in that group— and if they were lucky, off they would all go together, mathematically modeling gravitons and gravitinos, dark matter and shadow matter— all personality and indeed all persons forgotten. Very productive exciting sessions; and clearly Bao was the driving force in them, the one they relied on, the one they had to reckon with. It was disconcerting, a bit. Sax had met women in math and physics departments before, but this was the only female mathematical genius he had ever even heard of, in all the long history of mathematical advancement, which, now that he thought of it, had been a weirdly male affair.

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

bank run, dark matter, The Spirit Level

That of Goodge Street stands on the corner of Chenies Street and Tottenham Court Road, while that of Stockwell has been converted into a war memorial. These portals could be knocked down, and the deep tunnels filled in, but what would be the purpose? Underground space has acquired the status of dark matter, unseen yet somehow maintaining the structure of the visible world. The portals are the gateways to immensity containing all that is hidden and all that is forgotten. A character in The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells, in fear of the extraterrestrial invaders, states that You see, how I mean to live is underground.

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

Isaac Newton did not have a good definition of force, and in fact, was not happy about the concept since it seemed to require a kind of magical “action at a distance,” which was not allowed in mechanistic explanations of nature. While genetics is one of the largest and fastest growing fields of biology, geneticists still do not agree on precisely what the term gene refers to at the molecular level. Astronomers have discovered that about 95% of the universe is made up of “dark matter” and “dark energy” but have no clear idea what these two things actually consist of. Psychologists don’t have precise definitions for idea or concept, or know what these correspond to in the brain. These are just a few examples. Science often makes progress by inventing new terms to describe incompletely understood phenomena; these terms are gradually refined as the science matures and the phenomena become more completely understood.

…

We saw an example of this back in chapter 2—it was the invention of the electronic computer, and its capacity for modeling complex systems such as weather, that allowed for the demonstration of the existence of chaos. More recently, extremely powerful land and space-based telescopes have led to a flurry of discoveries in astronomy concerning so-called dark matter and dark energy, which seem to call into question much of what was previously accepted in cosmology. No new set of technologies has had a more profound impact on an established field than the so-called molecular revolution in genetics over the last four decades. Technologies for rapidly copying, sequencing, synthesizing, and engineering DNA, for imaging molecular-level structures that had never been seen before, and for viewing expression patterns of thousands of different genes simultaneously; these are only a few examples of the feats of biotechnology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

R48– R58 Groenewegen, Peter, 1995, A Soaring Eagle: Alfred Marshall 1842–1924, Aldershot: Edward Elgar Hansen, Alvin H., 1939, ‘Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth’, American Economic Review, 29(1), pt I, pp. 1–15 Hausmann, Ricardo and Federico Sturzenegger, 2007, ‘The Missing Dark Matter in the Wealth of Nations and Its Implications for Global Imbalances’, Economic Policy, 22(51), pp. 470–518 Hayek, Friedrich A., 1979, A Conversation with Friedrich A. von Hayek: Science and Socialism, Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research ________, 1986, ‘The Moral Imperative of the Market’, in The Unfinished Agenda: Essays on the Political Economy of Government Policy in Honour of Arthur Seldon, London: Institute of Economic Affairs ________, 1994, Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue, ed.

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Ricardo, Works and Correspondence, IV, p. 23. 14.  Ibid., p. 21. 15.  King, David Ricardo, p. 88. 16.  Ricardo, Works and Correspondence, IV, pp. 28, 32. 17.  Ibid., p. 35. 18.  Ibid., p. 33. 19.  Ibid., p. 41. 20.  Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, 2007, ‘The Missing Dark Matter in the Wealth of Nations and Its Implications for Global Imbalances’, Economic Policy, 22(51), pp. 470–518. 21.  Mark Muro, Jonathan Rothwell, Scott Andes, Kenan Fikri and Siddharth Kulkarni, 2015, ‘America’s Advanced Industries’, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC; www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/AdvancedIndustry_FinalFeb2lores-1.pdf 22.  

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today by Linda Yueh

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bike sharing, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, Corn Laws, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, export processing zone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, forward guidance, full employment, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, lateral thinking, life extension, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, non-tariff barriers, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, price mechanism, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, technological determinism, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working-age population

Todd, Oxford: Clarendon Press, bk IV, ch. 2, para 12. 13. Ricardo, Works and Correspondence, IV, p. 23. 14. Ibid., p. 21. 15. King, David Ricardo, p. 88. 16. Ricardo, Works and Correspondence, IV, pp. 28, 32. 17. Ibid., p. 35. 18. Ibid., p. 33. 19. Ibid., p. 41. 20. Ricardo Hausmann and Federico Sturzenegger, 2007, ‘The Missing Dark Matter in the Wealth of Nations and Its Implications for Global Imbalances’, Economic Policy, 22(51), pp. 470–518. 21. Mark Muro, Jonathan Rothwell, Scott Andes, Kenan Fikri and Siddharth Kulkarni, 2015, ‘America’s Advanced Industries’, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC; www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/AdvancedIndustry_FinalFeb2lores-1.pdf 22.

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, National Institute Economic Review, 224, pp. R48–R58 Groenewegen, Peter, 1995, A Soaring Eagle: Alfred Marshall 1842–1924, Aldershot: Edward Elgar Hansen, Alvin H., 1939, ‘Economic Progress and Declining Population Growth’, American Economic Review, 29(1), pt I, pp. 1–15 Hausmann, Ricardo and Federico Sturzenegger, 2007, ‘The Missing Dark Matter in the Wealth of Nations and Its Implications for Global Imbalances’, Economic Policy, 22(51), pp. 470–518 Hayek, Friedrich A., 1979, A Conversation with Friedrich A. von Hayek: Science and Socialism, Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research ———, 1986, ‘The Moral Imperative of the Market’, in The Unfinished Agenda: Essays on the Political Economy of Government Policy in Honour of Arthur Seldon, London: Institute of Economic Affairs ———, 1994, Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue, ed.

Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Arthur Eddington, asset allocation, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, carbon-based life, centralized clearinghouse, cosmic abundance, cosmic microwave background, dark matter, Gordon Gekko, high-speed rail, informal economy, invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Blériot, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pluto: dwarf planet, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, space junk, space pen, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, trade route

When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented among them. When I pore over the data that establish the mysterious presence of dark matter and dark energy throughout the universe, sometimes I forget that every day—every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth—people kill and get killed in the name of someone else’s conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God kill in the name of their nation’s needs or wants.

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., 166, 175 Classification Act of 1949, 268–69 Clinton, Bill, 6 Close Encounters of the Third Kind (film), 37 Colbert, Stephen, 186–88 Cold War, 5–6, 59, 80, 87, 111, 192, 200, 219 Collier’s, 111 Columbia space shuttle, 12, 15, 60, 96, 130, 142, 156, 199–201, 210 Columbus, Christopher, 8, 87 Comet Halley, 88 Comet Hyakutake, 47 Comet Ikeya-Seki, 88 comets, 103, 116, 255 eccentric orbits of, 115 ecosystems and impact of, 51–52 impact rate of, xi long-period, 46–47 risk of impact by, 46–47 short-period, 46 water and, 48 Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, 52, 88, 102 Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2008, 289 Commerce, Department of, US, 305 Commercial Space Launch Act of 1984, 5 Commission on Implementation of United States Space Exploration Policy, 13 Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry, 146, 316–19 appointments to, 316–17 establishment of, 316 personnel matters and, 318–19 termination of, 319 Communist Party, Soviet, 121 Congress, US, xiv, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 73, 79, 81, 82, 143, 191, 192, 228, 314 see also House of Representatives, US; Senate, US Constellation program, 186 Contact (film), 28 Convention on Registration of Objects Launched into Outer Space, 310–11 Cook, James, 160 Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRDAs), 303–8 Copernican principle, 34, 36 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 34, 97, 115, 118 Corey, Cyrus, 212 cosmic microwave background, 92, 94–95, 176 cosmic perspective, 258, 259–61 cosmochemistry, 30 Cosmos (TV show), 256 Cosmos 1 spacecraft, 166, 170 Cosmos 954 satellite, 168 Cronkite, Walter, 145–46 culture, 72–74, 147–48, 210–11 Curie, Marie, 96 Curtis, Heber D., 98–101 Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien de, 217 Daniels, George H., 215–16 dark energy, 255 dark matter, 255 Darwin, Charles, 98 Deep Space 1 spacecraft, 164–65, 169–70 Deep Space Network, 246 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), 125 Defense, Department of, US, 271, 274, 309, 312 De Forest, Lee, 218 Democrats, 4–5, 13, 224 Denmark, 7 De Revolutionibus (Copernicus), 115 Descent of Man (Darwin), 98 dinosaurs, 49, 103 Dirac, Paul A.

The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow

airport security, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anthropic principle, Arthur Eddington, Buckminster Fuller, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, dark matter, fudge factor, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, luminiferous ether, Mercator projection, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Thales of Miletus, the scientific method, Turing machine

Electromagnetic force • the second strongest of the four forces of nature. It acts between particles with electric charges. Electron • an elementary particle of matter that has a negative charge and is responsible for the chemical properties of elements. Fermion • a matter-type elementary particle. Galaxy • a large system of stars, interstellar matter, and dark matter that is held together by gravity. Gravity • the weakest of the four forces of nature. It is the means by which objects that have mass attract each other. Heisenberg uncertainty principle • a law of quantum theory stating that certain pairs of physical properties cannot be known simultaneously to arbitrary precision.

The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity by Peter Schwartz, Peter Leyden, Joel Hyatt

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, American ideology, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, centre right, classic study, clean water, complexity theory, computer age, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, Danny Hillis, dark matter, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, double helix, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, George Gilder, glass ceiling, global village, Gregor Mendel, Herman Kahn, hydrogen economy, industrial cluster, informal economy, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, life extension, market bubble, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Productivity paradox, QR code, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Y2K, zero-sum game

This scientific method keeps driving the evolution of our understanding of the world. Today, in some ways, we have a scientific situation similar to the one a century ago. For example, we can't account for a big chunk of the mass that, according to current theories, should exist in the universe—we're talking 90 percent of the mass, which we call dark matter, partly because we can't find it. Something seems screwy here. Or according to our big bang theory of creation, the universe is expanding out from that initial explosion in one of two ways: Either it has been expanding at a steady rate after that first shove into the emptiness of space, or it is expanding but decelerating because of the gravitational pull of all the bodies in the universe.

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See microprocessors Connections, See Networks Christian Democratic coalition, 94, Control vs. complexity, 263-265 113 Copernicus, 212 Chrysler, 60, 175 Corporations, 2, 42-45, 121 Citibank, 262 Climate change Corruption, 114-115, 126 COX2, 190 developing vs. developed worlds, 157-159 Crime, 285-286 floods, 150 Culture preservation, 234 forest fires, 150-151 Cuyahoga River, 156 global warming, 10, 152-154 Cyberspace libraries, 89 Hurricane Andrew, 149,150 Cystic fibrosis, 198 Hurricane Mitch, 150 overview, 148-154 Daimler-Benz, 60,171, 174 pollution in China, 158-159 D'Alema, Massimo, 94 regional weather problems, 151 Dark matter, 213 tornadoes, 151 Databases, 215-216 United Nation's Conference on Decentralization Climate Change, 157 personal computers and, 19, 26 Clinton, President Bill, 41, 52, 76, ragtag computer techies fostering, 92, 121 28-30 Cloning, 195-199 of telecommunications, 22,178 Club of Rome, 162 of utilities industry, 178-181 Coal, 158-159 Defense Advanced Research Projects Coca Cola, 112 Agency (DARPA), 50 Code of honor, 28-30 Delphi Energy & Engine Cold fusion, 219-220 Management Systems, 176 Cold War, 48, 49, 134-135, 22 Deming, W, Edwards, 119 Colorado, 267 Democracy Communism, 40, 116, 262 free markets and, 111-112, 115 Compassionate conservatism, 274 growth of middle class and, 235 Complexity theory, 263-265 media freedom in, 114 Computers rule of twos in, 112-114 economic decentralization and, in Singapore, 269 19, 26, 28-30 transparency rule, 114-115 impact of, 189-190 women in, 250 326 Democratic Party, 76-77 Democrats of the Left, 92 Deng, Xiaoping, 48, 116 Depression, 51-52 Deregulation of European businesses, 93 of U.S. businesses, 41 of utilities industry, 178,180-181 in Washington consensus, 96 Detroit Edison, 178 Digital technologies, 25-26 Diversity, 248, 273 DNA, 188-189, 197-198 Dolly, 195 Dow Jones Industrial Average, 47, 92 Downsizing, 42, 93 Drake, Frank, 220 Drake's equation, 220 Drexler, Eric, 203-204, 208 Dust Bowl, 149 Earth Day, 160 Earth Summit, 157 East vs.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

An encounter with the deity who created our universe and (presumably) the heavenly cloud where our connectome souls are uploaded after death would very probably top all of these encounters, given its implications for our future existence, not to mention the opportunity to answer science’s deepest questions from the ontological source itself: What is dark energy and dark matter? What was there before the Big Bang? Did you create our universe out of a singularity, and if so how did you do that … and why? We only have our thoughts and the tools of communicating those thoughts through speech and writing. Thus, free thought and free speech are the epistemological primitive, the ground of all other rights.

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None of these arguments is relevant to the question because, I contend, whether there is a God or not, the universe per se cannot have a purpose in any anthropomorphic sense for which that term is usually employed. The universe is simply the collection of galaxies, stars, planets, comets, meteorites, and other solar system detritus, plus whatever dark matter and dark energy turn out to be. The universe is governed by laws of nature that themselves have no purpose other than dictating what matter and energy do. Stars, for example, convert hydrogen into helium, and they have no choice in the matter once they reach a certain size and temperature. Stars are not sitting around thinking “my purpose in life is to convert hydrogen into helium, so I better get on with it.”

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It by Matthew Williams

3D printing, 4chan, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic bias, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, gamification, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, Oklahoma City bombing, OpenAI, Overton Window, power law, selection bias, Snapchat, statistical model, The Turner Diaries, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, white flight

SQUIDs are so remarkably sensitive that they have been compared to hearing a pin drop at an AC-DC concert.2 They are used to detect gravitational waves, undulations in space-time emanating from cataclysmic events in the universe like a star going supernova or the collision of two black holes 1.8 billion light years away.¶ They have also been used in attempts to detect axions, the ghostlike particles with virtually no weight that were candidates for the dark matter that makes up 85 per cent of the universe. More locally, they have been used to study brain activity in sufferers of epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. It may come as no surprise to learn that the theory underpinning SQUIDs, the Josephson junction, won its namesake the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1973.

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., 1 Byrd, James, Jr, 1 California, 1, 2n, 3 Caliskan, Aylin, 1 Cambridge Analytica, 1, 2 cancer, 1, 2 Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC), 1, 2, 3, 4 caregiving motivational system, 1 care homes, 1, 2 Casablanca, 1 cascade effect, 1, 2 categorisation, 1, 2, 3, 4 Catholics, 1 Caucasian Crew, 1 causality, 1, 2 celebrities, 1, 2, 3, 4 censorship, 1, 2 Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta, 1 Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 1 change blindness, 1 charity, 1, 2, 3 Charlottesville rally, 1, 2, 3n, 4 chatbots, 1, 2, 3 Chauvin, Derek, 1 Chelmsford, 1 Chicago, 1 childhood: attachment issues, 1; child abuse, 1, 2, 3; child grooming, 1; child play, 1; failures of containment, 1, 2, 3, 4; group threat, 1, 2; intergroup contact, 1, 2; learned stereotypes, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2; predicting hate crime, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; trigger events, 1, 2; understanding the ‘average’ hate criminal, 1; understanding the ‘exceptional’ hate offender, 1, 2, 3 China, 1, 2, 3, 4 Chinese people, 1, 2, 3 ‘Chinese virus,’ 1, 2 Cho, John, 1 Christchurch mosque attack, 1 Christianity, 1, 2, 3 cinema, 1 citizen journalism, 1 civilising process, 1 civil rights, 1, 2, 3, 4 class, 1, 2 cleaning, 1 climate change, 1, 2 Clinton, Hillary, 1, 2 cognitive behavioural therapy, 1 cognitive dissonance, 1 Cohen, Florette, 1, 2 Cold War, 1 collective humiliation, 1 collective quests for significance, 1, 2 collective trauma, 1, 2 colonialism, 1n, 2 Combat 1, 2 comedies, 1, 2, 3 Communications Acts, 1, 2 compassion, 1, 2, 3 competition, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 confirmation bias, 1 conflict, 1, 2, 3, 4 conflict resolution, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Connectome, 1 Conroy, Jeffrey, 1 Conservative Party, 1, 2, 3 conspiracy theories, 1, 2, 3 contact with others, 1, 2 containment: failures of, 1; hate as container of unresolved trauma, 1; understanding the ‘exceptional’ hate offender, 1, 2, 3 content moderation, 1, 2, 3 context, 1, 2, 3 Convention of Cybercrime, 1 cooperation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Copeland, David, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 coping mechanisms, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Cordoba House (‘Ground Zero mosque’), 1 correction for multiple comparisons, 1, 2n ‘corrective rape’, 1, 2 cortisol, 1 Council of Conservative Citizens, 1n counter-hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4 courts, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 2, 3 Cox, Jo, 1, 2, 3 Criado Perez, Caroline, 1 crime, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Crime and Disorder Act 1998, 1n crime recording, 1, 2, 3, 4 crime reporting, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), 1 criminal justice, 1, 2, 3 Criminal Justice Act, 1, 2n criminal prosecution, 1, 2 criminology, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 cross-categorisation, 1 cross-race or same-race effect, 1 Crusius, Patrick, 1, 2 CUBRIC (Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre), 1, 2, 3, 4 cultural ‘feeding’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 cultural worldviews, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 culture: definitions, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; tipping point, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1 culture machine, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 culture wars, 1 Curry and Chips, 1 cybercrime, 1 dACC, see dorsal anterior cingulate cortex Daily Mail, 1, 2 Dailymotion, 1 Daily Stormer, 1, 2n Daley, Tom, 1, 2 Darfur, 1 dark matter, 1 death: events that remind us of our mortality, 1; newspapers, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; religion and hate, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trigger events, 1, 2 death penalty, 1, 2 death threats, 1 decategorisation, 1 De Dreu, Carsten, 1, 2, 3, 4 deep learning, 1, 2 defence mechanisms, 1 defensive haters, 1, 2 dehumanisation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 deindividuation, 1, 2 deindustrialisation, 1, 2, 3, 4 Democrats, 1, 2, 3 Denny, Reginald, 1 DeSalvo, Albert (the Boston Strangler), 1 desegregation, 1, 2, 3 Desmond, Matthew, 1 Dewsbury, 1, 2, 3 Diffusion Magnetic Resonance Imaging (Diffusion MRI), 1, 2 diminished responsibility, 1, 2 Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), 1 disability: brain and hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; intergroup contact, 1; Japan care home, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1; profiling the hater, 1; suppressing prejudice, 1; victim perception, 1n Discord, 1, 2, 3, 4 discrimination: brain and hate, 1, 2; comedy programmes, 1; Google searches, 1; Japan laws, 1; preference for ingroup, 1; pyramid of hate, 1, 2, 3; questioning prejudgements, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 disgust: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; group threat detection, 1, 2, 3; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2; Japan care home, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2 disinformation, 1, 2, 3 displacement, 1, 2 diversity, 1, 2, 3 dlPFC, see dorsolateral prefrontal cortex domestic violence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 Doran, John, 1, 2, 3 dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), 1, 2, 3n, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), 1n, 2, 3 Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger, 1 drag queens, 1 drugs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Duggan, Mark, 1 Duke, David, 1 Dumit, Joe, Picturing Personhood, 1 Durkheim, Emile, 1 Dykes, Andrea, 1 Earnest, John T., 1 Eastern Europeans, 1, 2, 3 Ebrahimi, Bijan, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 echo chambers, 1, 2n economy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 EDL, see English Defence League education, 1, 2, 3, 4 Edwards, G., 1 8chan, 1, 2 elections, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 electroencephalography, 1n elites, 1 ELIZA (computer program), 1 The Ellen Show, 1 El Paso shooting, 1 Elrod, Terry, 1 Emancipation Park, Charlottesville, 1 Emanuel African Methodist Church, Charleston, 1 emotions: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; group threat, 1; subcultures of hate, 1; trigger events and mortality, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4 empathy: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; feeling hate together, 1; group threat, 1, 2; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1 employment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 English Defence League (EDL), 1, 2n, 3 epilepsy, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Epstein, Robert, 1 equality, 1, 2 Essex, 1 ethnicity, 1, 2n, 3, 4 ethnic minorities, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ethnocentrism, 1 EU, see European Union European Commission, 1, 2 European Digital Services Act, 1 European Parliament, 1, 2 European Social Survey, 1 European Union (EU): Brexit referendum, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5; Facebook misinformation, 1; group threat, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1 Eurovision, 1 evidence-based hate crime, 1 evolution, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 executive control area: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1, 2; extremism, 1; recognising false alarms, 1; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1 exogenous shocks, 1 expert opinion, 1 extreme right, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 extremism: Charlottesville and redpilling, 1, 2; feeling hate together, 1; online hate speech, 1; perceiving versus proving hate, 1; quest for significance, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Facebook: algorithms, 1, 2; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2; Christchurch mosque attack, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; filter bubbles, 1, 2; how much online hate speech, 1, 2; Myanmar genocide, 1; online hate and offline harm, 1, 2, 3; redpilling, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4 facial expression, 1, 2, 3, 4 faith, 1, 2 fake accounts, 1, 2; see also bots fake news, 1, 2, 3, 4 false alarms, 1, 2, 3 Farage, Nigel, 1, 2 far left, 1n, 2, 3, 4 Farook, Syed Rizwan, 1 far right: algorithms, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain injury, 1; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2, 3n, 4; COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 2; Facebook, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; filter bubbles, 1, 2; gateway sites, 1; group threat, 1, 2; red-pilling, 1; rise of, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; terror attacks, 1, 2, 3; tipping point, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4n; trigger events, 1, 2; YouTube, 1 fathers, 1, 2, 3 FBI, see Federal Bureau of Investigation fear: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; feeling hate together, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; mortality, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Federation of American Immigration Reform, 1 Ferguson, Missouri, 1 Festinger, Leon, 1 fiction, 1 Fields, Ted, 1 50 Cent Army, 1 ‘fight or flight’ response, 1, 2, 3 films, 1, 2 filter bubbles, 1, 2, 3, 4 Finland, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Finsbury Park mosque attack, 1, 2, 3 first responders, 1 Fiske, Susan, 1 Five Star Movement, 1 flashbacks, 1 Florida, 1, 2 Floyd, George, 1, 2, 3 Flynt, Larry, 1 fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 football, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 football hooligans, 1, 2 Forever Welcome, 1 4chan, 1, 2 Fox News, 1, 2 Franklin, Benjamin, 1 Franklin, Joseph Paul, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Fransen, Jayda, 1 freedom fighters, 1, 2 freedom of speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 frustration, 1, 2, 3, 4 functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 fundamentalism, 1, 2 fusiform face area, 1 fusion, see identity fusion Gab, 1 Gadd, David, 1, 2n, 3, 4 Gaddafi, Muammar, 1, 2 Gage, Phineas, 1, 2 galvanic skin responses, 1 Gamergate, 1 gateway sites, 1 gay people: author’s experience, 1, 2, 3; brain and hate, 1, 2; Copeland attacks, 1, 2; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; filter bubbles, 1; gay laws, 1; gay marriage, 1, 2, 3; group associations, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; hate counts, 1, 2, 3, 4; physical attacks, 1, 2; profiling the hater, 1; Russia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Section 1, 2, 3, 4; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2; why online hate speech hurts, 1; see also LGBTQ+ people gay rights, 1, 2, 3, 4 gender, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Generation Identity, 1 Generation Z, 1, 2 genetics, 1n, 2, 3 genocide, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Georgia (country), 1 Georgia, US, 1, 2, 3, 4 Germany, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Gilead, Michael, 1 ginger people, 1 girls, and online hate speech, 1 Gladwell, Malcolm, 1 Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, 1 glucocorticoids, 1, 2 God, 1, 2 God’s Will, 1, 2 Goebbels, Joseph, 1 Google, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Google+, 1 Google Translate, 1 goth identity, 1, 2, 3, 4 governments, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Grant, Oscar, 1 gravitational waves, 1 Great Recession (2007–9), 1 Great Replacement conspiracy theory, 1 Greece, 1, 2 Greenberg, Jeff, 1, 2, 3 Greene, Robert, 1 grey matter, 1 Grillot, Ian, 1, 2 Grodzins, Morton, 1 grooming, 1, 2, 3 ‘Ground Zero mosque’ (Cordoba House), 1 GroupMe, 1 groups: ancient brains in modern world, 1; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; childhood, 1; feeling hate together, 1; foundations of prejudice, 1; group threat and hate, 1; identity fusion, 1, 2, 3; intergroup hate, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; reasons for hate offending, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; tipping point, 1, 2, 3, 4; warrior psychology, 1, 2, 3; what it means to hate, 1, 2 group threat, 1; beyond threat, 1; Bijan as the threatening racial other, 1; context and threat, 1; cultural machine, group threat and stereotypes, 1; evolution of group threat detection, 1; human biology and threat, 1; neutralising the perception of threat, 1; overview, 1; society, competition and threat, 1; threat in their own words, 1 guilt, 1, 2, 3, 4 guns, 1, 2 ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2, 3, 4 Haines, Matt, 1 Haka, 1 Halle Berry neuron, 1, 2 harassment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 harm of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Harris, Brendan, 1 Harris, Lasana, 1 Harris, Lovell, 1, 2, 3, 4 hate: author’s brain and hate, 1; the brain and hate, 1; definitions, 1, 2; feeling hate together, 1; foundations of prejudice and hate, 1, 2, 3; group threat and hate, 1; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2; hate counts, 1; hate in word and deed, 1; profiling the hater, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; rise of the bots and trolls, 1; seven steps to stop hate, 1; subcultures of hate, 1; tipping point from prejudice to hate, 1; trauma, containment and hate, 1; trigger events and ebb and flow of hate, 1; what it means to hate, 1 hate counts, 1; criminalising hate, 1; how they count, 1; overview, 1; perceiving versus proving hate, 1; police and hate, 1; rising hate count, 1; ‘signal’ hate acts and criminalisation, 1; Sophie Lancaster, 1; warped world of hate, 1 hate crime: author’s experience, 1, 2, 3; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; definitions, 1; events and hate online, 1; events and hate on the streets, 1, 2; the ‘exceptional’ hate criminal, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; foundations of prejudice and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; hate counts, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; laws, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5; number of crimes, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; predicting hate crime, 1; profiling the hater, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; understanding the ‘average’ hate criminal, 1; understanding the ‘exceptional’ hate offender, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3 hate groups, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 hate in word and deed, 1; algorithmic far right, 1; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2, 3n, 4; extreme filter bubbles, 1; game changer for the far right, 1; gateway sites, 1; overview, 1; ‘real life effort post’ and Christchurch, 1; red-pilling, 1 HateLab, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 hate speech: far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; filter bubbles and bias, 1; harm of, 1; how much online hate speech, 1; Japan laws, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1; Tay chatbot, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3; why online hate speech hurts, 1 hate studies, 1, 2 ‘hazing’ practices, 1 health, 1, 2, 3, 4 Henderson, Russell, 1 Herbert, Ryan, 1 Hewstone, Miles, 1 Heyer, Heather, 1 Hinduism, 1, 2 hippocampus, 1, 2, 3, 4 history of offender, 1 Hitler, Adolf, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 HIV/AIDS, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 hollow mask illusion, 1, 2 Hollywood, 1, 2 Holocaust, 1, 2, 3, 4 Homicide Act, 1n homophobia: author’s experience, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3; evidence-based hate crime, 1; federal law, 1; jokes, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2; Russia, 1, 2; Shepard murder, 1; South Africa, 1; trauma and containment, 1; victim perception of motivation, 1n Homo sapiens, 1 homosexuality: author’s experience, 1; online hate speech, 1; policing, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; Russia, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2; see also gay people hooligans, 1, 2 Horace, 1 hormones, 1, 2, 3 hot emotions, 1 hot-sauce study, 1, 2 housing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Huddersfield child grooming, 1 human rights, 1, 2, 3 humiliation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 humour, 1, 2 Hungary, 1 hunter-gatherers, 1n, 2 Hustler, 1 IAT, see Implicit Association Test identity: author’s experience of attack, 1; British identity, 1, 2; Charlottesville rally, 1, 2; children’s ingroups, 1; group threat, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; steps to stop hate, 1, 2 identity fusion: fusion and hateful murder, 1; fusion and hateful violence, 1; fusion and self-sacrifice in the name of hate, 1; generosity towards the group, 1; tipping point, 1, 2; warrior psychology, 1, 2, 3 ideology, 1, 2, 3, 4 illegal hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4 illocutionary speech, 1 imaging, see brain imaging immigration: Forever Welcome, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; hate counts, 1n, 2; HateLab Brexit study, 1; identity fusion, 1; intergroup contact, 1; negative stereotypes, 1; online hate speech, 1; Purinton, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2n, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; YouTube algorithms, 1 immortality, 1, 2 Implicit Association Test (IAT), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 implicit prejudice: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; online hate speech, 1, 2 India, 1 Indonesia, 1 Infowars, 1, 2 Ingersoll, Karma, 1 ingroup: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; child play, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; HateLab Brexit study, 1; identity fusion, 1, 2; pyramid of hate, 1; reasons for hate offending, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Instagram, 1, 2, 3 Institute for Strategic Dialogue, 1 institutional racism, 1 instrumental crimes, 1 insula: brain and signs of prejudice, 1, 2, 3; facial expressions, 1, 2; fusiform face area, 1; hacking the brain to hate, 1; hate and feeling pain, 1; neuroscience of hate, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5; parts that edge us towards hate, 1; parts that process prejudice, 1; processing of ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1, 2 Integrated Threat Theory (ITT), 1, 2, 3 integration, 1, 2, 3, 4 intergroup contact, 1, 2, 3 Intergroup Contact Theory, 1, 2, 3 intergroup hate, 1, 2, 3, 4 internet: algorithms, 1, 2; chatbots, 1; counterhate speech, 1; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; filter bubbles, 1, 2, 3; Google searches, 1; hate speech harm, 1; how much online hate speech, 1; online news, 1; reasons for hate offending, 1; rise of the bots and trolls, 1; stopping online hate speech, 1; tipping point, 1, 2, 3; training the machine to count hate, 1; why online hate speech hurts, 1 interracial relations, 1, 2, 3, 4 intolerance, 1, 2 Iranian bots, 1 Iraq, 1 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 1 ISIS, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Islam: group threat, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Islamism: group threat, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; profiling the hater, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Islamophobia, 1, 2, 3, 4 Israel, 1, 2, 3 Italy, 1, 2 ITT, see Integrated Threat Theory James, Lee, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Japan, 1, 2, 3 Jasko, Katarzyna, 1 Jefferson, Thomas, 1 Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin, 1 Jewish people: COVID-19 pandemic, 1, 2; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; filter bubbles, 1; Google searches, 1, 2; group threat, 1; Nazism, 1, 2; negative stereotypes, 1 2 online hate speech, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; ritual washing, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trauma and Franklin, 1, 2, 3 jihad, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 jokes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Jones, Alex, 1 Jones, Terry, 1 Josephson junction, 1 Judaism, 1; see also Jewish people Jude, Frank, Jr, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Kansas, 1 Kerry, John, 1 Kik, 1 King, Gary, 1 King, Martin Luther, Jr, 1, 2 King, Rodney, 1, 2, 3 King, Ryan, 1 Kirklees, 1, 2 KKK, see Ku Klux Klan Kuchibhotla, Srinivas, 1, 2, 3, 4 Kuchibhotla, Sunayana, 1, 2 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 1, 2, 3n, 4, 5, 6, 7 Labour Party, 1, 2, 3 Lancaster, Sophie, 1, 2 language, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), 1 Lapshyn, Pavlo, 1 Lashkar-e-Taiba, 1 Las Vegas shooting, 1, 2 Latinx people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 law: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3; criminalising hate, 1; hate counts, 1, 2, 3; Kansas shooting, 1; limited laws, 1; online hate speech, 1; pyramid of hate, 1 Law Commission, 1 Lawrence, Stephen, 1 learned fears, 1, 2, 3 Leave.EU campaign, 1, 2 Leave voters, 1, 2, 3n Lee, Robert E., 1, 2, 3 left orbitofrontal cortex, 1n, 2n Legewie, Joscha, 1, 2, 3, 4 lesbians, 1, 2 Levin, Jack, 1 LGBTQ+ people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17; see also gay people LIB, see Linguistic Intergroup Bias test Liberman, Nira, 1 Liberty Park, Salt Lake City, 1, 2 Libya, 1, 2, 3, 4 Light, John, 1 Linguistic Intergroup Bias (LIB) test, 1 Liverpool, 1, 2 Livingstone, Ken, 1, 2 Loja, Angel, 1 London: author’s experience of attack, 1; Copeland nail bombing, 1, 2; Duggan shooting, 1; far-right hate, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1, 2; Rigby attack, 1; terror attacks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 London Bridge attack, 1, 2, 3 London School of Economics, 1 ‘lone wolf’ terrorists, 1, 2, 3, 4 long-term memory, 1, 2, 3, 4 Loomer, Laura, 1 Los Angeles, 1 loss: group threat, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; tipping point, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 love, 1, 2 Love Thy Neighbour, 1 Lucero, Marcelo, 1, 2 Luqman, Shehzad, 1 ‘Macbeth effect’, 1 machine learning, 1 Madasani, Alok, 1, 2, 3 Madrid attack, 1, 2 Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI): Diffusion MRI, 1, 2; functional MRI, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 magnetoencephalography (MEG), 1, 2, 3 Maldon, 1 Malik, Tashfeen, 1 Maltby, Robert, 1, 2 Manchester, 1, 2 Manchester Arena attack, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 marginalisation, 1, 2 Martin, David, 1 Martin, Trayvon, 1, 2 MartinLutherKing.org, 1, 2 martyrdom, 1, 2, 3, 4n masculinity, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 The Matrix, 1 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act, 1n, 2n Matz, Sandra, 1 Mauritius, 1 McCain, John, 1 McDade, Tony, 1 McDevitt, Jack, Levin McKinney, Aaron, 1 McMichael, Gregory, 1 McMichael, Travis, 1 media: far-right hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; stereotypes in, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1; trigger events, 1 Meechan, Mark, 1 MEG (magnetoencephalography), 1, 2, 3 memory, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 men, and online hate speech, 1 men’s rights, 1 mental illness, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 mentalising, 1, 2, 3 meta-analysis, 1 Metropolitan Police, 1 Mexican people, 1, 2, 3, 4 micro-aggressions, 1, 2n, 3, 4, 5, 6 micro-events, 1 Microsemi, 1n Microsoft, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 micro-targeting, 1, 2 Middle East, 1, 2 migration, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; see also immigration Milgram, Stanley, 1 military, 1 millennials, 1 Milligan, Spike, 1 Milwaukee, 1, 2, 3 minimal groups, 1 Minneapolis, 1, 2, 3 minority groups: far-right hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; police reporting, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2 misinformation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 mission haters, 1, 2, 3 mobile phones, 1, 2, 3 moderation of content, 1, 2, 3 Moore, Nik, 1 Moore, Thomas, 1 Moores, Manizhah, 1 Moore’s Ford lynching, 1 Moradi, Dr Zargol, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Moral Choice Dilemma tasks, 1, 2, 3 moral cleansing, 1, 2, 3 moral dimension, 1, 2, 3, 4 moral outrage, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Moroccan people, 1, 2 mortality, 1, 2, 3 mortality salience, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Moscow, 1 mosques, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Moss Side Blood, 1 mothers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 motivation, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Mphiti, Thato, 1 MRI, see Magnetic Resonance Imaging Muamba, Fabrice, 1 multiculturalism, 1, 2, 3, 4 murder: brain injury, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3; hate counts, 1; identity fusion and hateful murder, 1; police and hate, 1, 2; profiling the hater, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Murdered for Being Different, 1 music, 1, 2, 3 Muslims: COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; Google searches, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; negative stereotypes, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2; profiling the hater, 1, 2; Salah effect, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; and Trump, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6n Mvubu, Themba, 1 Myanmar, 1, 2 Myatt, David, 1 Nandi, Dr Alita, 1 National Action, 1 National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, 1 national crime victimisation surveys, 1, 2 National Front, 1, 2, 3 nationalism, 1, 2 National Socialist Movement, 1, 2, 3, 4 natural experiments, 1, 2 Nature: Neuroscience, 1 nature vs nurture debate, 1 Nazism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 NCVS (National Crime Victimisation Survey), 1, 2 negative stereotypes: brain and hate, 1, 2; feeling hate together, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; tipping point, 1 Nehlen, Paul, 1 neo-Nazis, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Netherlands, 1, 2 Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz (NetzDG) law, 1 neuroimaging, see brain imaging neurons, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 neuroscience, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 Newark, 1, 2 news, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 newspapers, 1, 2, 3, 4 New York City, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 New York Police Department (NYPD), 1 New York Times, 1, 2 New Zealand, 1 n-grams, 1 Nimmo, John, 1 9/11 attacks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 911 emergency calls, 1 Nogwaza, Noxolo, 1 non-independence error, 1, 2n Al Noor Mosque, Christchurch, 1 Northern Ireland, 1 NWA, 1 NYPD (New York Police Department), 1 Obama, Barack, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Occupy Paedophilia, 1 ODIHR, see Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights Ofcom, 1 offence, 1, 2, 3, 4 Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), 1, 2 Office for Security and Counter Terrorism, 1 office workers, 1 offline harm, 1, 2 Oklahoma City, 1 O’Mahoney, Bernard, 1 online hate speech: author’s experience, 1; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; hate speech harm, 1; how much online hate speech, 1; individual’s role, 1; law’s role, 1; social media companies’ role, 1; steps to stop hate, 1; tipping point, 1, 2; training the machine to count hate, 1; trigger events, 1 Ono, Kazuya, 1 optical illusions, 1 Organization for Human Brain Mapping conference, 1 Orlando attack, 1 Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1 Osborne, Darren, 1 ‘other’, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Ottoman Empire, 1 outgroup: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; child interaction and play, 1, 2; evolution of group threat detection, 1; feeling hate together, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; HateLab Brexit study, 1; human biology and threat, 1; identity fusion, 1; prejudice formation, 1; profiling the hater, 1; push/pull factor, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; society, competition and threat, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; tipping point, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 outliers, 1 Overton window, 1, 2, 3, 4 oxytocin, 1, 2, 3, 4 Paddock, Stephen, 1 Paddy’s Pub, Bali, 1 paedophilia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 page rank, 1 pain, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Pakistani people, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Palestine, 1 pandemics, 1, 2, 3, 4 Papua New Guinea, 1, 2, 3 paranoid schizophrenia, 1, 2 parents: caregiving, 1; subcultures of hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1, 2, 3 Paris attack, 1 Parsons Green attack, 1, 2 past experience: the ‘average’ hate criminal, 1; the ‘exceptional’ hate criminal, 1; trauma and containment, 1 perception-based hate crime, 1, 2 perception of threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 perpetrators, 1, 2 personal contact, 1, 2 personality, 1, 2, 3 personality disorder, 1, 2 personal safety, 1, 2 personal significance, 1 perspective taking, 1, 2 PFC, see prefrontal cortex Philadelphia Police Department, 1 Philippines, 1 physical attacks, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 play, 1 Poland, 1, 2, 3 polarisation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 police: brain and hate, 1, 2; Duggan shooting, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; and hate, 1; NYPD racial bias, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; perceiving versus proving hate, 1; police brutality, 1, 2, 3, 4; predicting hate crime, 1; recording crime, 1, 2, 3, 4; reporting crime, 1, 2, 3; rising hate count, 1, 2, 3; ‘signal’ hate acts and criminalisation, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; use of force, 1 Polish migrants, 1 politics: early adulthood, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2; filter bubbles and bias, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1, 2; seven steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Trump election, 1, 2 populism, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 pornography, 1 Portugal, 1, 2 positive stereotypes, 1, 2 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 poverty, 1, 2, 3 Poway synagogue shooting, 1 power, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 power law, 1 predicting the next hate crime, 1 prefrontal cortex (PFC): brain and signs of prejudice, 1; brain injury, 1; disengaging the amygdala autopilot, 1; feeling pain, 1; ‘gut-deep’ hate, 1; prejudice network, 1; psychological brainwashing, 1; recognising false alarms, 1; salience network, 1; trauma and containment, 1; trigger events, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1, 2 prehistoric brain, 1, 2 prehistory, 1, 2 prejudgements, 1 prejudice: algorithms, 1; author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; brain and signs of prejudice, 1; cultural machine, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2; filter bubbles and bias, 1; foundations of, 1; Google, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9; human biology and threat, 1; neuroscience of hate, 1, 2; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; parts that process prejudice, 1; prejudice network, 1, 2, 3, 4; prepared versus learned amygdala responses, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; releasers, 1, 2; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; tipping point from prejudice to hate, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Trump, 1, 2; unconscious bias, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1; what it means to hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 prepared fears, 1, 2 Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1 profiling the hater, 1 Proposition 1, 2 ProPublica, 1n, 2 prosecution, 1, 2, 3 Protestants, 1 protons, 1 psychoanalysis, 1 psychological development, 1, 2, 3, 4 psychological profiles, 1 psychological training, 1 psychology, 1, 2, 3, 4 psychosocial criminology, 1, 2 psy-ops (psychological operations), 1 PTSD, see post-traumatic stress disorder Public Order Act, 1 pull factor, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Pullin, Rhys, 1n Purinton, Adam, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 push/pull factor, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 pyramid of hate, 1, 2 Q …, 1 al-Qaeda, 1, 2 quality of life, 1 queer people, 1, 2 quest for significance, 1, 2, 3 Quran burning, 1 race: author’s brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; brain and signs of prejudice, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; Google searches, 1; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; hate counts, 1, 2, 3; online hate speech, 1; predicting hate crime, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; race relations, 1, 2, 3; race riots, 1, 2; race war, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4n, 5, 6; trigger events, 1, 2; unconscious bias, 1; unlearning prejudiced threat detection, 1 racism: author’s experience, 1; brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; far-right hate, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; Kansas shooting, 1; NYPD racial bias, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4; steps to stop hate, 1n, 2, 3; Tay chatbot, 1; trauma and containment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; Trump election, 1; victim perception of motivation, 1n; white flight, 1 radicalisation: far-right hate, 1, 2, 3; group threat, 1; subcultures of hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; trigger events, 1 rallies, 1, 2, 3; see also Charlottesville rally Ramadan, 1, 2 rape, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 rap music, 1 realistic threats, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Rebel Media, 1 rebels, 1 recategorisation, 1 recession, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 recommendation algorithms, 1, 2 recording crime, 1, 2, 3, 4 red alert, 1 Reddit, 1, 2, 3, 4 red-pilling, 1, 2, 3, 4 refugees, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 rejection, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 releasers of prejudice, 1, 2 religion: group threat, 1, 2, 3; homosexuality, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3; predicting hate crime, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; religion versus hate, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2; subcultures of hate, 1, 2; trauma and containment, 1n, 2; trigger events, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; victim perception of motivation, 1n reporting crimes, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 repression, 1 Republicans, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 research studies, 1 responsibility, 1, 2, 3 restorative justice, 1 retaliatory haters, 1, 2, 3 Reuters, 1 Rieder, Bernhard, 1 Rigby, Lee, 1 rights: civil rights, 1, 2, 3, 4; gay rights, 1, 2, 3, 4; human rights, 1, 2, 3; men’s rights, 1; tipping point, 1; women’s rights, 1, 2 right wing, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; see also far right Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale, 1 riots, 1, 2, 3, 4 risk, 1, 2, 3 rites of passage, 1, 2 rituals, 1, 2, 3 Robb, Thomas, 1 Robbers Cave Experiment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Robinson, Tommy (Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), 1, 2, 3, 4 Rohingya Muslims, 1, 2 Roof, Dylann, 1, 2 Roussos, Saffi, 1 Rudolph, Eric, 1 Rushin, S,, 1n Russia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Russian Internet Research Agency, 1 RWA (Right-Wing Authoritarianism) scale, 1 Rwanda, 1 sacred value protection, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Saddam Hussein, 1 safety, 1, 2 Sagamihara care home, Japan, 1, 2 Salah, Mohamed, 1, 2, 3 salience network, 1, 2 salmon, brain imaging of, 1 Salt Lake City, 1 same-sex marriage, 1, 2 same-sex relations, 1, 2, 3 San Bernardino attack, 1n, 2, 3 Scanlon, Patsy, 1 scans, see brain imaging Scavino, Dan, 1n schizophrenia, 1, 2, 3, 4 school shootings, 1, 2 science, 1, 2, 3 scripture, 1, 2 SDO, see Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) scale Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME), 1 search queries, 1, 2, 3, 4 Second World War, 1, 2, 3 Section 1, Local Government Act, 1, 2, 3 seed thoughts, 1 segregation, 1, 2, 3 seizures, 1, 2, 3 selection bias problem, 1n self-defence, 1, 2 self-esteem, 1, 2, 3, 4 self-sacrifice, 1, 2, 3 Senior, Eve, 1 serial killers, 1, 2, 3 7/7 attack, London, 1 seven steps to stop hate, 1; becoming hate incident first responders, 1; bursting our filter bubbles, 1; contact with others, 1; not allowing divisive events to get the better of us, 1; overview, 1; putting ourselves in the shoes of ‘others’, 1; questioning prejudgements, 1; recognising false alarms, 1 sexism, 1, 2 sexual orientation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 sexual violence, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 sex workers, 1, 2, 3, 4 Shakespeare, William, Macbeth, 1 shame, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 shared trauma, 1, 2, 3 sharia, 1, 2 Shepard, Matthew, 1, 2 Sherif, Muzafer, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 shitposting, 1, 2, 3n shootings, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 ‘signal’ hate acts, 1 significance, 1, 2, 3 Simelane, Eudy, 1 skin colour, 1, 2, 3n, 4, 5, 6, 7 Skitka, Linda, 1, 2 slavery, 1 Slipknot, 1 slurs, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 Snapchat, 1 social class, 1, 2 social desirability bias, 1, 2 Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) scale, 1 social engineering, 1 socialisation, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 socialism, 1, 2 social media: chatbots, 1; COVID-19 pandemic, 1; far-right hate, 1, 2, 3, 4; filter bubbles and bias, 1; HateLab Brexit study, 1; online hate speech, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; online news, 1; pyramid of hate, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3; subcultures of hate, 1; trigger events, 1, 2; see also Facebook; Twitter; YouTube Social Perception and Evaluation Lab, 1 Soho, 1 soldiers, 1n, 2, 3 Sorley, Isabella, 1 South Africa, 1 South Carolina, 1 Southern Poverty Law Center, 1n, 2 South Ossetians, 1 Soviet Union, 1, 2 Spain, 1, 2, 3 Spencer, Richard B., 1 Spengler, Andrew, 1, 2, 3, 4 SQUIDs, see superconducting quantum interference devices Stacey, Liam, 1, 2 Stanford University, 1 Star Trek, 1, 2, 3 statistics, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 statues, 1 Stephan, Cookie, 1, 2 Stephan, Walter, 1, 2 Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth, Everybody Lies, 1 Stereotype Content Model, 1 stereotypes: brain and hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7; cultural machine, group threat and stereotypes, 1; definitions, 1; feeling hate together, 1, 2; group threat, 1, 2, 3, 4; homosexuality, 1; NYPD racial bias, 1; steps to stop hate, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; study of prejudice, 1; tipping point, 1; trigger events, 1 Stoke-on-Trent, 1, 2 Stormfront website, 1, 2, 3 storytelling, 1 stress, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 striatum, 1, 2, 3n, 4 subcultures, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 subcultures of hate, 1; collective quests for significance and extreme hate, 1; extremist ideology and compassion, 1; fusion and generosity towards the group, 1; fusion and hateful murder, 1; fusion and hateful violence, 1; fusion and self-sacrifice in the name of hate, 1; quest for significance and extreme hatred, 1; religion/belief, 1; warrior psychology, 1 subhuman, 1, 2 Sue, D.

The Science of Language by Noam Chomsky

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, backpropagation, British Empire, Brownian motion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, Drosophila, epigenetics, finite state, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, language acquisition, phenotype, public intellectual, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, trolley problem

[C] Further, [in] talking about the capacity to do science [in our very recently practiced form, you have to keep in mind that] it's not just very recent, it's very limited. Physicists, for example, don't go commit suicide over the fact that they can't find maybe 90 percent of what they think the universe is composed of [dark matter and dark energy]. In . . . [a recent] issue of Science, they report the failure of the most sophisticated technology yet developed, which they hoped would find [some of] the particles they think constitute dark matter. That's, say, 90 percent of the universe that they failed to find; so we're still in the dark about 90 percent of the matter in the universe. Well, that's regarded as a scientific problem in physics, not as the end of the field.

The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population

We get less output for any level of inputs, taking account, for instance, of the smaller capital stock.23 We can estimate the predicted effect of the smaller capital and other observable inputs on productivity. The difference between this and the actually observed decline in productivity is the result of missing “dark matter.” Something hard to observe is missing. Even if we can’t precisely parse out the components of this dark matter, it’s real and needs to be taken into account. There are many components of this missing capital. In their twenties, individuals accumulate skills that increase their productivity over a lifetime. But those skills are gained largely through on-the-job training.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

It might sound like something out of a Netflix series or a science fiction novel, but there is a real push towards reducing the population of this amazing planet by a bunch of psychopathic men that have the capacity to actually make it happen when they want to. The long-term plan for depopulation is shrouded in mystery and dressed up to look like a man-made disaster caused by the people, but like most of the attempts by the New World Order to control the world, it is lies upon lies forced upon the people by the corrupted corporate media. The Dark Matter of Power Being in control offers the types of rewards that true psychopaths seek: real power, almost endless amounts of money, fame, and everything that comes with it, a feeling of importance, the ability to make life and death decisions, and the influence to cover them up. It is this ability to cover up and intentionally keep the “People They Serve” blind and in the dark, that gives them the ability to change laws and influence morals, safe in the knowledge that people are generally uncomfortable with revealing the rot – as long as they can pretend it is not there.

…

In politics, the supreme powers are also being influenced by something that the people cannot see, but know is there. It remains in the darkness, but the control that it has over the politician is easily determined by his uncharacteristic actions that expose the hidden hand of influence. In the never-ending vastness of political dark matter, one only really begins to understand what they are up against when they make the decision to illuminate the places intentionally kept in the dark. To put it another way: Spreading mold covers more ground when the pantry door is shut, the light is turned off, and no one is watching. Sunlight is the best solution to illuminate the problem – and also to disinfect it.

Letters From an Astrophysicist by Neil Degrasse Tyson

dark matter, do what you love, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Large Hadron Collider, microaggression, Pluto: dwarf planet, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, unbiased observer

Tyson and any other kind brainiacs, My Aspergers son Jack* is scary smart and could very well be the next Einstein, which is his nickname. I’m trying to reach out to other super smart scientists who may be able to help Jack grow his gift. Jack’s vocabulary and obsessions consist of things like concept cars, nuclear fusion, biotech, particle accelerators, dark matter, anti-matter, worm holes, black holes, nanobots, creating cures for disease, and lots of hydrogen! I have no means of nourishing Jack’s brain. His spirit has been almost extinguished by his public school environment. I want so badly for Jack to have connections with other people. That can’t happen when the people surrounding him can’t relate or understand, or believe what he is talking about.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

Prize-backed challenges are an acknowledgment that governments work better when they tap the intelligence of the wider population. The power of these challenges does not merely arise from the sheer number of people involved but also from the intellectual diversity of the population. NASA cosponsored a challenge to elicit algorithms that would help computers map the dark matter in the universe. They created a “live leaderboard” of entries, so that participants could learn from their competitors and refine their submissions over time. Leading algorithms were submitted by a Ph.D. student researching satellite photos of glaciers, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, and a signature verification expert from Qatar University.

The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything by John Gribbin

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, complexity theory, dark matter, Dmitri Mendeleev, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, Stephen Hawking

A shadow planet could pass right through the Earth and never affect us, except through its gravitational pull. It sounds like science fiction, but one reason that the idea has been taken seriously is that there is astronomical and cosmological evidence that a lot of the Universe exists in the form of dark matter, detectable gravitationally but not seen. It is, though, at least as likely that in the shadow universe later symmetry breakings occurred differently from in our own world, so that there are no shadow stars, and so on, after all. All this is tangential to the story being told here (but see In Search of the Big Bang).

The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

Those teams spent more than $100 million, developed breakthroughs, and launched a new space race which we are seeing the benefits of today. Since that time, other crowdsourced competitions have been used to develop breakthroughs in everything from healthcare, to creating better algorithms to find dark matter, to cleaning our oceans. One of the key attributes of crowdsourcing is that it is open to participation; it allows ideas and contribution to come from anywhere and anyone. Those solutions are often far better than anything that could have been imagined by experts in a field. The internal debate to write this book was derived from the most important lesson in my life, which also came from my greatest tragedy—the sudden loss of my brother.

Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World by Paul Stamets

clean water, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, Exxon Valdez, invention of gunpowder, Louis Pasteur, phenotype, precautionary principle

FIGURE 5 A slime mold, Physarum polycephalum, chooses the shortest route between 2 food sources in a maze, disregarding dead ends. In a controversial article, Toshuyiki Nakagaki proposes that this represents a form of cellular intelligence. FIGURE 6 Computer model of the early universe. These primeval filaments in space resemble the mycelial archetype. FIGURE 7 Computer model of dark matter in universe. In a conjunct of string theory, more than 96 percent of the mass of the universe is theorized to be composed of these molecular threads. Note the galaxies interspersed throughout the myceliumlike matrix. The idea that a cellular organism can demonstrate intelligence might seem radical if not for work by researchers like Toshuyiki Nakagaki (2000).

…

FIGURE 10 Hurricane Isabella approaches North America in October 2003. FIGURE 11 Spiral galaxies conform to the same archetypal pattern as hurricanes and mycelium. The Mycelial Archetype Nature tends to build upon its successes. The mycelial archetype can be seen throughout the universe: in the patterns of hurricanes, dark matter, and the Internet. The similarity in form to mycelium may not be merely a coincidence. Biological systems are influenced by the laws of physics, and it may be that mycelium exploits the natural momentum of matter, just like salmon take advantage of the tides. The architecture of mycelium resembles patterns predicted in string theory, and astrophysicists theorize that the most energy-conserving forms in the universe will be organized as threads of matterenergy.

Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons by Peter Barnes

Albert Einstein, car-free, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, dark matter, digital divide, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, hypertext link, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, jitney, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, money market fund, new economy, patent troll, precautionary principle, profit maximization, Ronald Coase, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

But there’s another trove of wealth that’s not so well-known: our common wealth. Each of us is the joint recipient of a vast inheritance. This shared inheritance includes air and water, habitats and ecosystems, languages and cultures, science and technologies, social and political systems, and quite a bit more. Common wealth is like the dark matter of the economic universe—it’s everywhere, but we don’t see it. One reason we don’t see it is that much of it is, literally, invisible. Who can spot the air, an Reinventing the Commons | 67 aquifer, or the social trust that underlies financial markets? The more relevant reason is our own blindness: the only economic matter we notice is the kind that glistens with dollar signs.

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, a Philosophy, a Warning by Justin E. H. Smith

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Adrian Hon, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic management, artificial general intelligence, Big Tech, Charles Babbage, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark matter, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, global pandemic, GPT-3, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kuiper Belt, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meme stock, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, passive income, Potemkin village, printed gun, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, Skype, strong AI, technological determinism, theory of mind, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, Turing machine, Turing test, you are the product

Working in a vein largely uninformed by historical examples prior to the most recent era of technology, Schneider speculates, citing Caleb Scharf as inspiration, that a machine superintelligence invented by an alien species could by now have “blend[ed] in with natural features of the universe, perhaps it is in dark matter itself.”9 Of course, few ideas have a more ancient pedigree than the belief that the celestial bodies are intelligent, and indeed vastly superior to us: Schneider is refurbishing this old trope that we could just as easily have come across in Aristotle, while ornamenting it with the latest findings in physical cosmology.

Half Empty by David Rakoff

airport security, Buckminster Fuller, dark matter, double helix, gentrification, global pandemic, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, phenotype, RFID, subprime mortgage crisis, twin studies, urban planning, urban renewal, wage slave, Wall-E, Y2K

(A hint: it rhymes with schmucking sneaker factory.) That can be a cold and lonely reality with which to contend, and one to which every one of us, even the most vinegar-soaked pessimist, is naturally resistant. We all spend our lives rejecting this truth and, consciously or not, entreating the universe—with its vast stretches of deep space, dark matter, and uncharted, immeasurable distances—to somehow align itself in sheer admiration of our fervor and gumption, to rain down precisely that which it is we wish for. And the universe will say nothing. Even the most charmed life is a veritable travelogue of disappointment. There will always be an inevitable gulf between hope and reality.

How to Be Black by Baratunde Thurston

affirmative action, carbon footprint, Columbine, dark matter, desegregation, drone strike, gentrification, high-speed rail, housing crisis, phenotype, plutocrats, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, supply-chain management, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

That name was just a bit too soft for a black kid from the city. Speaking of soft, my initial interest in the school was based entirely on the crush I had on a girl from my church, never a good reason to make a six-year commitment. Strike Two: building design. The school had no hallways. I don’t mean that the inside of the building consisted of dark matter or “The Nothing” from The Neverending Story. I mean the classrooms all had doors to the outside, and kids walked outdoors to get from one class to the next. I later learned that this is a common design in warm places like Southern California and Hawaii, but Green Acres was in Bethesda, Maryland, whose climate offers three full months a year with average low temperatures at or below freezing.

Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Cepheid variable, cosmological constant, dark matter, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Georg Cantor, heat death of the universe, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, machine readable, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, retrograde motion, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking

They did, however, allow for several other fates, which depend on the amount of mass in the cosmos. In the case of a light universe, the balloon of space-time could expand forever, getting bigger and bigger. The stars and galaxies would wink out, one by one. The universe grows cold and dies a heat death. However, if there is enough mass—galaxies, galaxy clusters, and unseen dark matter—the initial push given by the big bang wouldn’t be enough to allow the balloon to inflate forever. The galaxies would tug on one another, eventually pulling the fabric of space-time together; the balloon would begin to deflate. The deflation would get faster and faster, the universe would get hotter and hotter, and it would eventually end in a backward big bang: the big crunch.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional