The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe

Professor Randall takes us on a journey from the outermost reaches of the universe to the unseen players of conventional and dark matter. It is a wonderfully layered work that peers into not only the elemental factors that make up our entire universe, but also the minds of the leading scientists covering a diversity of fields that helped to foster Professor Randall's work. Although we will continue to watch and see how the dark matter story plays out, this book certainly provides a very provocative theory for one of the most important events in Earth's history.

Covers the same topics as several other recent books. The information presented is not organized in a particularly interesting manner. Also does not contain any new interesting nugggets or insights. OK read, but there are better options

Its only because I recently read Brian Greenes book "The Fabric of the Cosmos", that I was able to follow Randall's arguments. She leaves too much unexplained and the rest is slightly condescending. I was looking forward to this book and am now somewhat disappointed.

This is great and so interesting. I read it while I was on vacation at the beach, I took the book jacket off because the wind was blowing- I had gotten slightly wet and the book hardcover itself is black and dyed my pink shirt black and blue, and my entire arm and the beach blanket, so that was a bummer.

Wonderfully entertaining and educational at the same time. Lisa Randall's way of talking about complex subjects in everyday terms is absolutely appreciated. Hardly have to look any of the words up.I love the way she attacks the assumption that there is only one type of dark matter. Why shouldn't dark matter be as varied as "light matter."

If you want to understand how the universe evolved and the concepts of what holds it (and us) together, a very good read. The last few chapters before the end, where she presents arguments for and against her concept of what dark matter, were a bit much for a non-physicist like myself.

In excellent condition. Just way too scientific, not an enjoyable read for this nurse. The idea was fascinating, but I had a difficult time relating to the actual dark matter. I ended up reading the conclusion for our book club after I barely got through 5 chapters, the rest of the members were just as befuddled! The woman who choose the book is a retired nuclear engineer.

This is wonderful! This is exciting! This is understandable! This is written with a sense of humor!! For me, this has made the wonder of Creation even more compelling. How could anything so complicated and inter-dependent happen by chance!

If you want to understand how the universe evolved and the concepts of what holds it (and us) together, a very good read. The last few chapters before the end, where she presents arguments for and against her concept of what dark matter, were a bit much for a non-physicist like myself.

In excellent condition. Just way too scientific, not an enjoyable read for this nurse. The idea was fascinating, but I had a difficult time relating to the actual dark matter. I ended up reading the conclusion for our book club after I barely got through 5 chapters, the rest of the members were just as befuddled! The woman who choose the book is a retired nuclear engineer.

This is wonderful! This is exciting! This is understandable! This is written with a sense of humor!! For me, this has made the wonder of Creation even more compelling. How could anything so complicated and inter-dependent happen by chance!

I believe I have reviewed this book before. I thought it would be much more about the demise of Dinosaurs and Dark Matter than it turned out to be. I have two doctorate degrees (none in physics nor related fields) yet I had a difficult time understanding much of the contents in this book.

Stunning review of particle physics and the potential effects of dark matter in the configurations
of our universe. Reasoned hypothesis re the K/T (K/Pg) catastrophe the put a final quietus
on Dinosauria ... excepting the avian forms. Lucidly written. Lisa Randall is something else!

While the title captured my interest, the book itself did not. Everything about dark matter is conjecture, and the book really doesn't establish any link between dark matter and the demise of the dinosaurs. Much of the second half of the book reviews current experiments and hypotheses about dark matter that unsurprisingly reveal little. I would not recommend this book.

Although the title of the book is interesting and seems to have a particular theme, the book was not. A broad discussion of topics ranging from particle physics to cosmology to evolution of life on earth...all relevant topics, but lacks the focused specificity to engage knowledgeable readers.

This is a quite-readable-and-instructive book for laymen (like me).
I wouldn't call it a literary gem, but it does have informative value for inquisitive people like me.
When considering "dark matter", physicists think within the box and consider some unknown elementary particles as candidates for it.
This is reasonable BUT, however, can dark matter be something totally different, un-imagined and impossible for today's scientists?
Where does it all take us? what does it all bring to us?
Still, let humankind play its cerebral games until the next mass extinction...

Rambling. i wasn't interested in all the other "mass extinctions" she describes endlessly, just the one implied in the title. Takes a long time to get to the discussion of dark matter. It seems you can take scant and flimsy data and postulate almost anything. The author couldn't pass up the opportunity to predict that the next mass extinguishing will result from human-caused global warming. GMAB

Spins the wheels a little giving the information. It seems the writer does not expect the reader to be able to keep to the next level with the thread of the information. At times the lengthy explanation or rehashing of information causes the reader to drift off the path.
The writer is engaging though. It is just a hard read because the writer is making it hard to follow.

Written like the stereotypical scientist. Dry, grotesquely repetitive, and boring. I've read a lot of science-based books, and I had to force myself to finish it. Luckily, the last three chapters were quite lovely! Skip the entire book, and read the last 63 pages before the conclusion.

I started reading this with a lot of enthusiasm. As I read through the text, I found that many concepts are not clearly explained. They need to be taken at face value. I kept asking the question "why?" as I was reading the book. There was no answer given. The concepts being explained are not simple. There could have been many more diagrams for explaining concepts. It seems like most concepts have been dumbed down. I'm going to keep at it to see if it makes sense. It's a shame. There was so much promise.

I chose the Audible version of this book but will leave reviews on Audible and Kindle.

This book has long introductions to geology, physics, paleontology, astronomy, etc—including subjects like comets, meteoroids, dark energy, cosmic microwave background, solar system periodicity, the Oort Cloud, some evolution, and a bit about dinosaurs and their extinction.
If you have a solid science background and want to read about dark matter, you may wish to choose another book. You may also want a newer book.

The author finally gets to dark matter in Part 3, but by then I had stopped listening several times. However, when I pushed myself to listen, I enjoyed listening to Part 3. I skipped the last section which is “Looking Up.”

I looked through the reviews after starting to read the book. We are sitting for grandkids and I noted Randall's text and read the first bit. Fun to marvel at what others stack for late night reading!

The first set of reviews were generous and then I read Professor Prothero's scathing one star review. Long, Detailed analysis of Randall's text. In the body of his critique he mentions a number of pages in which Randall mentions sort of in passing that the hypotheses are not proven.

More important is that In the introduction she notes that the text is partly a "what if" speculation, the kind of conjecture that scientists use to work through an idea not just for fun but to see how recent discoveries or 'proven' ideas, such as dark mater, might be involved and might some time be able to explain the presently unexplained. A voyage of scientific fantasy allows some explication of complex cosmological,ideas, difficult for most of us to fathom. It also helps explain how experts in one field can relate their discoveries to other fields. Philosophers descry physicists jumping into their field, so do climate scientists carp at particle physicists discussing their field, if only in imaginative conjecture.
Our worlds are filled with doubt and angst and more people rely on science as described in ancient texts than that pronounced by modern scientists. We are past the time, perhaps, when disagreement with accepted truths results in death. Those who disagree run a risk of denial of credentials, perhaps not life.

Prothero is a skeptic and a member of the skeptic society. I a, a card carrying skeptic but do not accept every opinion as a biblical truth. His article on April 22, 2014 is worth reading with fun dialogue of commentaries. He is well published and an expert in the green house of dinosaurs.
Professor Prothero is earnest and he really hopes nobody believes the speculative conjecture is felt to be real. That anyone would do so would be one who was not a reader of the introduction.

Randall repeatedly notes the concept is "speculative scenario" pvii. And " up front I don't know yet if idea is correct." On p.xiii she notes. It is " an unconventional proposal....I hope to convey how inspiring it can be to contemplate what we know---as well as what we might expect or hope to figure out in the future." Scientists metaphorically sit under the apple tree and speculate. That the. Leads to designing research to prove or disprove the thesis. Her adventure here is one professor's speculation.

Recent discussions concern the Deccan volcanic eruption may have been related to an asteroid in Chicxulub Mexico 60 million years ago. Mark Richards reported geological society of America bulletin in March 2015, that the asteroid and the volcanic eruption are " uncomfortably close" coincidence. This is open source, but the article in Science in December requires subscription. Life is filled with uncomfortable coincidences.
Prothero relies on a statement that at geological meetings in 2014 and 2015Randall's concepts were debunked in a consensus. The footnotes on his review list many articles from 1984 thru 1995. Would that the consensus statement was also available. So many consensus are like those we see when political candidates ask for a show of hands or pollsters poll a small number.

There are many reasons to read this well written book. Understanding modern cosmology and how scientists think are two important reasons.

Today I am reviewing “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs” by Lisa Randall, who is a professor of theoretical and particle physics at Harvard.

It takes some background to appreciate the arguments in this book. The stars, planets, and everything we can see are made of “baryonic matter” (or “ordinary matter” if you prefer). Astronomers and physicists have postulated for some decades now that there is another type of matter called “dark matter” that interacts with ordinary matter only through gravity. (As the author points out “dark matter,” is a misleading name. It should have been called “transparent matter” in that it does not absorb or emit light or any other kind of electromagnetic radiation, i.e. there is nothing particularly “dark” about it.) The postulate is based on observations that there seems to be much more gravity around individual galaxies than can be accounted for by all the visible stars. As a matter of fact, there would have to be over five times as much dark matter than ordinary matter in the Universe.

As strange as the above description sounds, dark matter almost certainly exists. Cosmological models seem to require some kind of dark matter to reproduce the observed large-scale structure of the universe. Alternative models that try to explain astronomical observations without invoking some type of dark matter, for instance the idea that the inverse-square law of gravity is not quite right, seem to be ruled out. At present, physicists do not know what dark matter is made of. It cannot be accounted for by the currently accepted Standard Model of particle physics. Various attempts have been made to directly test for dark matter assuming it has a very small but non-zero interaction with ordinary matter. So far no definitive results.

It is not really known whether dark matter interacts with itself by anything but gravity, and this is an important point in this book. Most galaxies, including our galaxy The Milky Way, are flat spirals of hundreds of billions of stars. Conventional thought is that there is a thick diffuse halo of dark matter surrounding each galaxy. However, one speculative theory from the author is that if we allow the possibility of dark matter interacting with itself, by say, allowing it to emit energy of some kind, the dark matter in a galaxy could settle into a very thin disk, even thinner than the disk formed by the stars. This hypothetical structure is called the “dark disk.” Remember it would not be detectable except by gravity.

More astronomical background is needed to follow the argument further. Our solar system is surrounded by a hollow shell of icy bodies called the Oort Cloud, which is 30-50 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is. (There is a closer shell of icy bodies called the Kuiper belt outside the orbit of Neptune. Pluto is now regarded as a Kuiper Belt object.) The Oort Cloud is thought to be the source of long-period comets. Any influence gravitationally perturbing the Oort Cloud can send some comets toward the sun, where they might once in a while collide with a planet.

The sun orbits the galactic center more or less in the galactic plane, taking ~250 million years to go around. However, there is motion perpendicular to the plane; the sun should periodically pass through the plane of the galaxy several times per orbit.

Finally, we know the Earth and Moon have been bombarded with asteroids and comets all through their history, the most frequent collisions happening near the beginning of the solar system. At least one asteroid/comiet collision has caused a mass extinction: the K-T. Some scientists claim, based on the age of known craters and the spacing of mass extinctions, that asteroid/comet strikes have a periodicity, i.e. they are more frequent at regular intervals. Estimates range from 20-60 Myr., but it is far from certain that the periodicity is real and not a statistical artifact. In the 1980’s it was proposed that the sun had a companion brown dwarf star (called Nemesis) with an extremely elongated orbit that could periodically approach the sun and perturb the Oort Cloud, thus explaining the supposed periodicity in comet strikes. Nemesis should have been visible in later surveys of nearby stars, but it was not seen. This is not surprising since it was invented only to explain one iffy observation.

This is the ladder of thought by which the author takes to link dark matter to the dinosaurs:
There is a periodicity of ~35 million years to crater impacts on Earth.
2. The sun crosses the galactic plane at about the same period.
3. Whereas the stars in the galaxy would not have enough density to perturb the Oort Cloud through gravitational tidal forces, a dark disk would have enough density to do so.
4. Therefore, the periodicity of crater impacts is explained by the dark disk model.
Randall and coauthor Matthew Reese published this line of reasoning in 2014 in Physical Review Letters as an article “Dark Matter as a Trigger for Periodic Comet Impacts.” This article can be considered the starting point of “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs”.  The additional point added in the book is:
5. The extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by a comet strike due to the periodic perturbation of the Oort Cloud, which was in turn caused by a dark matter disk.
This is a big stretch. First, we cannot necessarily assign the specific K-T strike to a particular wave of comet strikes, similarly to the way we cannot assign Hurricane Sandy to global warming. We do not know that the K-T impactor was a comet and not, say, a near Earth asteroid. It is not clear whether there is a real periodicity in crater impacts and we do know with precision how often the sun would cross the galactic plane. The dark disk idea depends on a particular set of assumptions about dark matter made by the author, and these assumptions are speculative at best. The author admits that this chain of reasoning is tenuous and discusses all these uncertainties in detail.
On the one hand, the book is an easy read and I learned a lot about dark matter, galaxy formation, and near-earth asteroids. So thumbs up for it as a semi-popular book about new areas of astronomy and physics. On the other hand, I feel sort of cheated because the link to dinosaurs was largely “smoke and mirrors.” If you are looking for a book on paleontology, or even mass extinction, look elsewhere.

Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs by Lisa Randall concerns some of the most intriguing questions facing scientists. As cutting-edge as the material is, the book reads almost like a mystery novel. It is as if the police have a suspect and only need to find enough evidence to convict.

It is a murder mystery, the dinosaurs are dead and one of the prime suspects, at least as an accomplice, is dark matter. The investigators are astrophysicists, particle physicists, mathematicians, biologists, astronomers, archaeologists, and many other scientists from varying fields of science.

Dr. Randall, in this book as in her earlier books, brings difficult concepts into the realm of the ordinary reader, a reader who does not hold a degree in math or physics. Her sense of humor smiles through, as does her impeccable sense of order, bringing a bit of understanding to chaos. Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs is readable; it is understandable, and it is a jewel in the genre of books making science accessible to the average reader.

Did dark matter initiate the 65 million year-old demise of the dinosaurs? Randall admits we don't know for sure, but she builds a convincing case for dark matter as the instigator. She looks at facts we know about the universe and the formation of the solar system; she explores craters found in various earthly locations; she integrates what we know about dark matter, as little as it is at the present.

Not enough evidence against dark matter is yet available for a jury trial, but Randall brings enough evidence, and comes to conclusions that make a strong argument for the Universal Grand Jury to take under advisement.

Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs is highly recommended reading for those who are interested in how we came to be as we are, how our planet Earth was and is under the influence of universal forces and the cascading events of matter, ordinary and dark. Read this book and you become a member of the cosmic grand jury.

Lisa Randall builds on her book Warped Passages with this intro to dark matter, but she attempts something different here. She posits dark matter as a possible cause to periodic comet bombardment - including the one that killed off the dinosaurs. She shows how disparate things are connected in the universe through her example of dark matter/impact events/dinosaurs. She briefly reviews the history of cosmology, so don't worry if you didn't read Warped Passages. If you did, or the books by Brian Greene, you may end up skimming some of this unless you need a review.

In delving into the "astounding disconnectedness of the universe" at large she only hints at items beyond her thesis, such as what allows life to exist. But she seems to struggle with this. She writes she "was overwhelmed by the many connections among the phenomena that ultimately allow us to exist," only to later write "our world or even our particular universe is [not special]." She finds "anthropic reasoning troublesome" because "no one yet knows what might be essential to any possible life form." This is a strange comment from a physicist given that the physical laws are the same throughout the universe and those laws dictate what elements can be the basis of complex life. The laws limit and define that life regardless of where it is.

She briefly discusses habitable zones and some of the things that define them. Even though previously writing she was "overwhelmed" by what allows us to live, her language is full of "seems" and "probably." It's almost like one side of her mind doesn't want to see the fine-tuning required for life and the other does. Or when she wants multiverses to be true and asks "Why shouldn't they [exist]?" To that we should ask, why should they? To this she even admits they are "inaccessible" and "unlikely" to be found.

Could this be methodological naturalism influencing her science? As much as she tries to paint science as independent of philosophy or religion, it is clear some personal philosophy of her own - whether she realizes it or not - will let her go only so far in her reasoning. Others have gone into greater detail of the rarity of life and the fine-tuning that allows (and limits) what does exist: Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe,Why the Universe Is the Way It Is or The God Hypothesis: Discovering Design in Our Just Right Goldilocks Universe.

While she does largely try to stick to science, you can see the markers of methodological naturalism influencing ideas. She wrote in a previous book something to the effect that "religious" scientists must be willing to keep two contrary things in their head. This "science and religion aren't compatible" or "they can speak about each other's realms" is a ridiculous fallacy. Many have written on this such as in God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? or The Genesis of Science. It's time to bury the myth. At least Randall doesn't take the blatant fundamentalist approach of Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson. And I'm not trying to criticize Randall, it is almost as if she's writing about the things she's debating in her head. She more than once states she tries to be "open-minded." That is something that a scientist - if not all of us - should be, but not something methodological naturalism is fond of.

I was surprised to see her write that "Darwinian evolution does not completely account for life" and doesn't "explain how life formed in the first place." Nor does it do well with "radical changes." I'm also surprised that the naturalist crusaders haven't boycotted her book and tried to get put on the religion shelf. After all, they claim only the religious would dare question Darwinism. Of course, that's not true as shown by science, documented by many such as in Darwin's Doubt,Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis or Origins of Life.

All have beliefs, worldviews, religions or philosophies - no one can claim they don't, even champions of science like Lisa Randall. She challenges us to think and not to see science as something obscure or hard. It is part of our existence and can teach us a great deal - perhaps far more than Randall even suggests.

Dark matter must exist in order to account for the motions of the galaxies. It exerts gravity, but otherwise seems to interact very little with our means of detection. It is very sparsely distributed : the equivalent of one hydrogen atom's mass per cubic centimeter of our space. It can be annihilated if two "particles" of it collide. There may be more than one kind of dark matter, just as there are many kinds of ordinary matter.
There may be as yet unknown types of forces acting on dark matter-perhaps analogous to the electromagnetic force acting on ordinary matter.
Much of what is known or asserted about dark matter comes from computer simulations.
There may be a disc of dark matter near the center of the milky way- this could cause gravitational perturbations when the solar system migrates
through the disk every 30 million years or so-resulting in the displacement of comets from the Oort cloud- one or more of which might hit the earth with devastating results.
The author makes this all seem real and believable, and also gives a fine summary of the development of the universe and the solar system
as currently understood, all lucidly rendered in non-technical language
I will seek out her other books.