Kirkus Reviews QR Code   The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries
of Our Time  By Michael Brooks  Pub Date: Aug. 12th, 2008 ISBN:
978-0-385-52068-3 Publisher: Doubleday   He starts with one of
the biggest: that 96 percent of the universe that can’t be
detected. Dark matter and dark energy are attempts to explain
why galaxies don’t disintegrate under their momentum, and why
distant galaxies are moving away from each other faster than
expected. As mathematical models, the two posited phenomena work
fine. What nobody has yet explained is what sort of physical
reality they represent. Are they just fudge factors? Or could
the observations be wrong? Two space probes launched in the
1970s seem to defy Newton’s laws of gravity. Are the
measurements inaccurate, or is some unseen force affecting them?
Cold fusion set off a scientific furor when it was first
announced in 1989, but was branded as pseudoscience when nobody
could duplicate the experiments. Now a few people appear to have
done so. Which is flawed: the experim