210 Complete Evolution

. Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books, 1998.
. What Is Life? Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Sapp, Jan. Evolution by Association: A History of Symbiosis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Dark Matter
Year of Discovery: 1970
What Is It? Matter in the universe that gives off no light or other detectible
radiation.
Who Discovered It? Vera Rubin

Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?

Calculations of the expansion of the universe didnt work. Calculations of the speed of
stars in distant galaxies didnt match what astronomers observed. Calculations of the age of
the universe (based on the speed of its expansion) didnt make sense. Something had to be
wrong with the methods used for these calculations. With these major question marks hanging over the calculations, no one could dependably calculate the history of, present mass of,
or future of, the universe. Much of physics research ground to a halt.
Vera Rubin only meant to test a new piece of equipment. What she discovered was that
the actual motion of stars and galaxies appeared to prove that Newtons lawsthe most
fundamental principles of all of astronomywere wrong. In trying to explain the difference
between observations and Newtonian physics, Rubin discovered dark mattermatter that
exists but gives off no light or other radiation that scientists could detect. Astronomers and
physicists now believe that 90 percent of the mass of the universe is dark matter.

How Was It Discovered?

In 1970 Vera Rubin worked at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) at the Carnegie Institute of Washington. DTMs director, astronomer Kent Ford, had just created a new
high-speed, wide-band spectrograph that could complete eight to ten spectrographs (graphic images on chart paper of some spectrumin this case of the energy emitted from distant stars at different frequencies along the frequency spectrum) in a single night while existing models were
lucky to complete one in a day. Vera was itching to see what Fords invention could do.
During the night of March 27, 1970, Rubin focused the DTM telescope on
Andromeda, the nearest galaxy to our own. She planned to see whether Andromedas millions of stars really moved as existing theory said they should.
When attached to powerful telescopes, spectrographs detect the presence of different
elements in a distant star and display what they detect on chart paper. Rubin rigged a
high-power microscope to read the charts created by Fords spectrograph.
Rubin knew that the marks astronomers measured on a spectrograph shift a tiny bit
higher or lower on the frequency chart paper depending on whether the star is moving to-

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