Word: astrophysicist
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...dark halo that rings our galaxy, searching for large, dim objects like burned-out stars. Others are positioning electronic detectors in underground tunnels, hoping to entrap phantom particles that may be so prevalent that they drench the universe like invisible drops of rain. "Someday soon," predicts University of Chicago astrophysicist David Schramm, "one of these groups is going to strike gold -- Swedish gold," the kind that bears the likeness of Alfred Bernhard Nobel...
Dark matter was first postulated in the 1930s by the astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky, who observed that galaxies in the far-off Coma cluster were whirling around one another faster than the laws of physics would allow. They should by rights have been flung out into deep space, unless, as Zwicky contended, the gravity from some massive, invisible substance was holding them in. For decades the idea was rejected as too bizarre. "It smacked of angels dancing on the head of a pin," recalls theoretical physcist Joel Primack of the University of California at Santa Cruz...
...dark matter not only exists but exists in great quantity. Much of the evidence comes from the kinds of motions Zwicky noted and also from the mysteriously rapid rotation rates of individual star systems, particularly those known as spiral galaxies. Another clue, uncovered largely by AT&T Bell Laboratories astrophysicist J. Anthony Tyson, is the bending of light from distant galaxies. The light is presumably distorted by the gravitational pull of invisible matter...
...Jersey's Seton Hall University is both priest and physicist. He believes that science can describe the Big Bang beginning of the universe but is incapable of fathoming the ultimate origins of matter and energy, which will always come under the realm of religion. George Coyne, a Jesuit astrophysicist who directs the Vatican Observatory, warns against reducing science to religion, or vice versa. For instance, when the Big Bang theory was brand new, Pope Pius XII wrote that "scientists are beginning to find the finger of God in the creation of the universe." Coyne thinks the Pope was wrong...
...Harvard astrophysicist Owen Gingerich, an Evangelical Protestant, the real choice is not "creation or evolution" at all, but "purpose or accident." Like millions of ordinary folk, he says, "I passionately believe in a universe with purpose, though I cannot prove it." Purpose, like origin, is a point where the wisdom of empirical science ends and the quest for religious faith begins...