A Physicist Looks at the Universe’s Most Confounding Puzzles

Harry Cliff shares 5 key insights from Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe.

What in the world is going on in the universe? While scientists have made remarkable progress in ferreting out the secrets of the cosmos, there are some persistent puzzles that have even our smartest thinkers scratching their heads. And in some ways, the more we learn the less we seem to know about the fundamental nature of reality. Here to shed some light is Harry Cliff, author of the new book Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe. Harry is a particle physicist based at the University of Cambridge and does research at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Here he is with his big ideas.

1. Our theory of the universe may need rewriting.

We’ve learned a huge amount about the universe over the past century, from the realization that it began with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago to the fact that the cosmos appears to be dominated by utterly mysterious substances called dark matter and dark energy. All this knowledge is encapsulated by a theory known as the standard cosmological model, which is based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity. So far, this model seems to describe the history of the universe from the Big Bang to the present day pretty well, but in the past few years, evidence has been growing that we may be missing something big.