Dark matter
Long time no blog. Far too busy is my excuse. Yesterday I attended a talk by Erik Ramberg, who is a scientist at Fermilab, on dark matter. The point that struck me is that we do not know what 94% of the universe is made of. This is quite amazing. Just think. We know only 6% of what our universe is made of, after all these centuries of science. Truly, what we know is just a speck.
Dark matter was first postulated by an eccentric Swiss-American scientist named Fritz Zwicky. I found this quote from him worth quoting:
To base the unexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature onto an other miracle God is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious thinker.
According to some webpages dedicated to Zwicky, he used to call his colleagues ‘spherical bastards’, since they were bastards, regardless of what angle he looked at them from 
. He’d accost any new student with the line “Who the hell are you?”. And he had the habit of getting up in any talk and saying that what was being proposed had already been discovered by someone, namely himself. Zwicky made some very substantial contributions to astrophysics, including supermovae, which fascinated me greatly when I was in high school.
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