Word: astrophysicist
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That's a big "if." Observes David Schramm, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Chicago: "Whenever you're at the forefront of science, one-third of the observational results always turn out to be wrong." But this hasn't stopped the theorists from doing crazy things anyway; they've proposed one mind-stretching idea after another to explain what's going...
Nobody can say what the turmoil means-whether the intellectual edifice of modern cosmology is tottering on the edge of collapse or merely feeling growing pains as it works out a few kinks. "If you ask me," says astrophysicist Michael Turner of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago, "either we're close to a breakthrough, or we're at our wits...
...universe off in the direction of the constellations Hydra and Centaurus; Great Voids, where few galaxies can be found; and galaxies caught in the throes of formation a mere billion years after the Big Bang, when they should not yet exist. "If we really trust the data," exclaims Stanford astrophysicist Andrei Linde, "then we are in disaster, and we must do something absolutely crazy...
...digital artists who are building their own galleries in cyberspace -- all in addition to the digitally savvy filmmakers who have already transformed cinema. Lanier embodies a whole new genre of music that uses computers to create and disseminate its own distinctive sounds. Another practitioner on the rise is Italian astrophysicist Fiorella Terenzi, 30, who has been described as a cross between Madonna and Carl Sagan. Terenzi has used audio telescopes to intercept radio waves from a galaxy 180 million light-years away, then fed them into a computer, applied a sound-synthesis program to convert her data into music...
Another possible solution to the puzzle is that the cosmos contains much less matter than theorists like to think. But it's hard to understand how the galaxies and clusters of galaxies we now see could have evolved in a low-mass universe. There could also be, as some astrophysicists believe, a "cosmological constant," a sort of universal antigravity force that would make the universe look younger than it really is. Albert Einstein invented that concept as part of general relativity, then renounced it as "the greatest blunder of my life." It's still considered a long shot, but, says...