Quintessence : The Mystery of the Missing Mass in the Universe [Hardcover]

Lawrence Krauss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2000

Will the universe continue to expand forever, reverse its expansion and begin to contract, or reach a delicately poised state where it simply persists forever? The answer depends on the amount and properties of matter in the universe, and that has given rise to one of the great paradoxes of modern cosmology: there is too little visible matter to account for the behavior we can see. Over ninety percent of the universe consists of ”missing mass” or ”dark matter” - what Lawrence Krauss, in his classic book, termed ”the fifth essence.”In this new edition of The Fifth Essence, retitled Quintessence after the now widely accepted term for dark matter, Krauss shows how the dark matter problem is now connected with two of the hottest areas in recent cosmology: the fate of the universe and the ”cosmological constant.” With a new introduction, epilogue, and chapter updates, Krauss updates his classic for 1999 and shares one of the most stunning discoveries of recent years: an anti-gravity force that explains recent observations of a permanently expanding universe.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Lawrence M. Krauss is the Chairman of Physics at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio. His popular books include the bestselling Physics of Star Trek, Beyond Star Trek, and Fear of Physics. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 2nd edition (February 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465037402
• ISBN-13: 978-0465037407
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,143,013 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in New York City and shortly afterward moved to Toronto, spending my childhood in Canada. I received undergraduate degrees in mathematics and physics from Carleton University, and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982.

After a stint in the Harvard Society of Fellows, I became an assistant professor at Yale University in 1985 and Associate Professor in 1988. I moved in 1993 to become Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics, professor of astronomy, and Chairman of the Physics Department at Case Western Reserve University In August 2008 I joined the faculty at Arizona State University as Foundation Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Department of Physics in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Director of the University's Origins Initiative. In 2009 we inaugurated this this initiative with the Origins Symposium [www.origins.asu.edu] in which 80 of the world's leading scientists participated, and 3000 people attended.

I write regularly for national media, including The New York Times, the Wall St. Journal, Scientific American (for which I wrote a regular column last year), and other magazines, as well as doing extensive work on radio and television. I am strongly committed to public understanding of science, and have helped lead the national effort to preserve sound science teaching, including the teaching of evolution. I also served on Barack Obama's 2008 Presidential campaign science policy committee. In 2008 I became co-chair of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and in 2010 was elected to the Board of Directors of the Federation of American Scientists.

I became a scientist in part because I read books by other scientists, such as Albert Einstein, George Gamow, Sir James Jeans, etc, when I was a child, and my popular writing returns the favor. One of my greatest joys is when a young person comes up to me and tells me that one of my books motivated them to become a scientist.

I believe science is not only a vital part of our culture, but is fun, and I try and convey that in my books and lectures. I am honored that Scientific American referred to me as a rare scientific public intellectual, and that all three three major US Physics Societies: the American Physical Society, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the American Institute of Physics, have seen fit to honor me with their highest awards for research and writing.

My research focuses on the beginning and end of the Universe. Among my contributions to the field of cosmology, I helped lead the search for dark matter, and first proposed the existence of dark energy in 1995.

When I have the chance, I love to mountain bike, fly fish, and scuba dive. I spend a tremendous amount of time on planes now, alas, and enjoy flying, but hate airports..

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth the effort., September 9, 2000

By 

John Robinson "john" (Yokohama, Kanagawa Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Quintessence : The Mystery of the Missing Mass in the Universe (Hardcover)

I understand the negative reviews. This book is dense with information and is most appropriate for the lay reader who really wants to get some idea of where professional cosmology is today, and how it got there. Reading it just once, quickly, like a cheap novel, is not going to be good enough. You need to read it at least twice before it will start to really click (unless you have more background than I do!). I remember reading a book about Feyman (the Nobel prize-winning physicist) in which he related that, when he was a kid, he would read a heavy-duty science book until he couldn't understand it anymore. Then he would put it aside. The next day, he would pick it up again, start reading and, lo and behold! the foggy became clear and he could get a little further. He would repeat this process until he had finished the book. Sometimes, if you want to know, you just have to make that kind of effort. This book rewards the effort. It is excellent, but it's not a cheap date and you aren't going to get very far in a single encounter. Unless, again, you have a good background in this area already.

Buy it. Live with it for a week. It will pay off. You will be fascinated. Do it now.

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not Sure I understood what I read., February 13, 2000

By 

Michael J Woznicki "Michael J Woznicki" (Holland, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Quintessence : The Mystery of the Missing Mass in the Universe (Hardcover)

I look out in the vast heavens and often wonder what is the size of the universe. I have pondered the questions of, where did it all begin? Where does it end? Can anything change the course of the universe? Lawrence Krauss may have the key to unlock these mysteries with this book.

Krauss, who is the Chairman of Physics at Case Western Reserve University, explains in great detail that the old idea the missing mass of space is nothing more than the space itself. Krauss has written a highly convincing book.

Krauss shows that is given enough black space, a gravitational pull will occur and therefore cause the universe to alter its position. While I am a little more than a novice in this area I found the reading fascinating and hard to put down.

What captured my attention was Krauss's quantum fluctuations of empty space and how it can create a, as he calls it, a nonzero energy. Grab a copy of this book and you can read his explanation of this phenomenon. Overall this book was very good, although tailored to specific reader genre.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's about the missing mass in the universe, October 26, 2001

By 

Duwayne Anderson (Saint Helens, Oregon) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Quintessence : The Mystery of the Missing Mass in the Universe (Hardcover)

Krauss takes his title, "Quintessence" from ancient concepts about space, and makes the point that some of our concepts have come full circle (though not in ways envisioned by their first proponents). The subject is the "missing mass" of the universe. The universe, of course, is exactly what it is - so there isn't really any "missing mass." What's meant by that phrase is that we know there is more mass in the universe than what we see, and the question is, what is this hidden material? That might seem like a narrow subject for such a long book, but missing mass, it turns out, has implications for just about everything, from quantum mechanics to the broadest theories of formation of the universe.

For me, the book started off slow. The first chapter is mostly about ancient notions of the universe, with discussions about Aristotle's aether, and things like that. This chapter is basically a very short history of science, from earliest concepts through Einstein's development of the theory of relativity, and the demise of the aether. With the theory of relativity, physics viewed empty space as just that - empty. The idea of a uniform background of invisible stuff (particles, aether, etc.) lay pretty much discarded.

Then we had the beginnings of the modern science of cosmology and the discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which has been confirmed as the closest-to-theoretical blackbody radiation source ever discovered. The CMB is one of the pillars of evidence for the expanding universe and the Big Bang theory of cosmology, and Krauss does a nice job of following the historical and logical sequence of discoveries in its development. Within the Big Bang theory, the amount of matter in the universe has broad implications for how the universe will continue to evolve, so any "missing mass" is very important. Krauss covers these topics in a relatively brief but nicely done chapter on the Big Bang and large-scale structure in the universe. One of the things I like best about this book is the extra bit of detail Krauss offers that is often over looked in other books. The sort of details that help the reader better understand the specifics and particulars that real science is made of.

The subjects in this book range from the very large (theories of the evolution of the cosmos) to the very small (concepts and ideas in quantum physics). For example, there is an early introduction to the concept of virtual particles and the resolution they bring to many different and important calculations in physics. One of the most important of these is the philosophical problem of action at a distance, which virtual particles solve nicely by providing a mechanism for transferring force from one particle to another.

Chapter three was one of the most interesting for me, and marks the beginning of the real meat of the book. It describes how astronomers weigh the universe. At first, this can seem either trivial or impossible, depending on your expectations. On one hand, it seems that all you need do is count stars (not literally, of course, but by measuring an average density and multiplying by total volume) multiply by some sort of average stellar weight, and there you have it. On the other hand, closer examination begins to show cracks in that method. What about dim stars? Gas? Dust? Planets? How much mass do they contribute? Krauss does an excellent job of pointing out these difficulties, and showing how, one by one, scientists refined their estimates by including more and more candidates for matter in the universe. It was a monumental task, and Krauss does a nice job of illustrating for the informed layman the incredible intricacies that had to be included in the methods and calculations that went into calculating the amount of barionic matter in the universe.

Next, Krauss shows how you can use Newtonian mechanics to predict the amount of mass within a given radius by measuring how fast objects outside the radius orbit the center. He begins with an example showing the average orbital velocity of the planets as a function of the distance from the sun. He uses this example to predict the solar mass, and to also illustrate how much (how little, actually) other material besides the planets there is in the solar system. I find this aspect of science fascinating; how, with some careful observations of lights in the sky, we can infer the amount of mass resulting from countless unseen specs of dust orbiting the sun in an unimaginably large volume of space.

The orbital velocities for planets in the solar system fall off rapidly with increasing distance from the sun. But when we apply these techniques to galaxies, we see something different: the orbital velocities fall off as if there was an invisible halo of mass around them. Taking the best estimates for matter in a typical galaxy, and measuring the velocities of stars orbiting various galaxies, scientists found that the amount of matter they thought was there is a small percentage of the amount that is inferred by the measured orbital velocities. This is the origin of the central problem of Krauss' book: the missing mass of the universe. We know it's there, but what is it? What is it made of? If current estimates are correct, it is the dominant source of mass in the universe.

Most of the rest of the book looks at the central question of what the missing matter - called dark matter - is made of. Along the way Krauss examines possible candidates from neutrinos and WIMPS to vacuum energy. As I said, this is a nicely written book, and one that wraps a whole lot of information on the universe together. If you enjoy amateur cosmology (like I do) I think you'll want to read it.