For decades, astronomers have grappled with their inability to decipher the universe’s darkest secret: the identity of most of its matter. It’s not the same stuff as the ordinary atomic variety of matter common on Earth. Atoms or their parts — such as protons and neutrons — make up less than 17 percent of the mass in the cosmos. All the rest is “dark” — invisible to eyes and telescopes, its presence deduced by its gravitational tug on stars and galaxies (SN: 8/28/10, p. 22). This mystery matter apparently consists of tiny particles of some exotic species, but efforts to trap the... (p. 18)

A fundamental problem for almost all science is how to tell a fluke from a fact. It’s usually very hard to know whether an experiment’s result reflects a truth of nature or a random accident. So scientists use elaborate math to gauge the odds that a finding is bogus. But those odds rarely offer definitive evidence — or even much evidence at all. In fact, evidence in science is a slippery concept. It’s kind of like the U.S. Supreme Court’s idea of pornography: Scientists supposedly know evidence when they see it. But they don’t know precisely how much evidence they’ve got; stand... (p. 26)

For decades, physicists have been promising the world that it is worth the money to build enormous machines, costing billions of dollars, to shock empty space into revealing an exotic particle called the Higgs boson. After years of false starts and frustration, hints and hopes, the Higgs has finally been found at the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva. It’s a cause for celebration — and for explanation, of what the Higgs is and why it matters. The Higgs’ cosmic purpose Ever since scientists figured out that the universe began with an explosive bang, some of them have wondered h... (p. 26)

By now, all aficionados of physics news — and quite a few people who don’t know physics from phonics — have heard about the discovery of the Higgs boson. It’s the biggest news in physics ever tweeted. And it came after a long wait. For more than three decades, the Higgs has been physicists’ version of King Arthur’s Holy Grail, Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth, Captain Ahab’s Moby Dick. It’s been an obsession, a fixation, an addiction to an idea that almost every expert believed just had to be true. But despite years of searching, using the most complex machines ever built ... (p. 28)

Alan Turing, often considered the father of computer science, was born a century ago, in June of 1912. He foresaw machines’ potential to mimic brains. (p. 26)

Ask any physicist to name the top two theories of the 20th century, and you’ll almost always get the same automatic answer: Einstein’s relativity and quantum mechanics. But lately a few 21st century thinkers have hinted that maybe the third-place theory should move up a notch. In the wake of the computer revolution, information theory might deserve to displace relativity in the rankings. That revisionist perspective reflects a late 20th century twist in the story of that century’s theories: the surreptitious merger of quantum theory with information science. Their origins had been entir... (p. 26)