Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku Page A

plausible.)
    Unfortunately,
the question of priority left a bad taste in Gamow's mouth. Gamow, if one reads
between the lines, was not pleased that his work and the work of Alpher and
Hermann were rarely mentioned, if at all. Ever polite, he kept mum about his
feelings, but in private letters he wrote that it was unfair that physicists
and historians would completely ignore their work.
    Although the
work of Penzias and Wilson was a huge blow to the steady state theory and
helped put the big bang on firm experimental footing, there were huge gaps in
our understanding of the structure of the expanding universe. In a Friedmann
universe, for example, one must know the value of Omega, the average distribution
of matter in the universe, to understand its evolution. However, the
determination of Omega became quite problematic when it was realized that most
of the universe was not made of familiar atoms and molecules but a strange new
substance called "dark matter," which outweighed ordinary matter by a
factor of 10. Once again, the leaders in this field were not taken seriously by
the rest of the astronomical community.
    OMEGA AND DARK MATTER
    The story of
dark matter is perhaps one of the strangest chapters in cosmology. Back in the
1930s, maverick Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky of Cal Tech noticed that the
galaxies in the Coma cluster of galaxies were not moving correctly under
Newtonian gravity. These galaxies, he found, moved so fast that they should fly
apart and the cluster should dissolve, according to Newton's laws of motion.
The only way, he thought, that the Coma cluster can be kept together, rather
than flying apart, was if the cluster had hundreds of times more matter than
could be seen by telescope. Either Newton's laws were somehow incorrect at
galactic distances or else there was a huge amount of missing, invisible matter
in the Coma cluster that was holding it together.
    This was the
first indication in history that there was something terribly amiss with regard
to the distribution of matter in the universe. Astronomers universally
rejected or ignored the pioneering work of Zwicky, unfortunately, for several
reasons.
    First,
astronomers were reluctant to believe that Newtonian gravity, which had
dominated physics for several centuries, could be incorrect. There was a
precedent for handling crises like this in astronomy. When the orbit of Uranus
was analyzed in the ninteenth century, it was found that it wobbled—it deviated
by a tiny amount from the equations of Isaac Newton. So either Newton was
wrong, or there must be a new planet whose gravity was tugging on Uranus. The
latter was correct, and Neptune was found on the first attempt in 1846 by
analyzing the location predicted by Newton's laws.
    Second, there
was the question of Zwicky's personality and how astronomers treated
"outsiders." Zwicky was a visionary who was often ridiculed or
ignored in his lifetime. In 1933, with Walter Baade, he coined the word
"supernova" and correctly predicted that a tiny neutron star, about
14 miles across, would be the ultimate remnant of an exploding star. The idea
was so utterly outlandish that it was lampooned in a Los Angeles Times cartoon on January 19, 1934.
Zwicky was furious at a small, elite group of astronomers whom, he thought,
tried to exclude him from recognition, stole his ideas, and denied him time on
the 100- and 200-inch telescopes. (Shortly before he died in 1974, Zwicky
self-published a catalog of the galaxies. The catalog opened with the heading,
"A Reminder to the High Priests of American Astronomy and to their
Sycophants." The essay gave a blistering criticism of the clubby, ingrown
nature of the astronomy elite, which tended to shut out mavericks like him.
"Today's sycophants and plain thieves seem to be free, in American
Astronomy in particular, to appropriate discoveries and inventions made by lone
wolves and non-conformists," he wrote. He called these individuals
"spherical bastards," because "they are