Dude, where’s my universe?

You’d think a remote place like Saipan would offer clear skies for stargazing. I’ve never found that to be the case, however. Maybe high humidity is the culprit. I don’t know. And after I poked my snoot into some recent news on astronomy, “I don’t know” is my new astronomical anthem.

Here’s something to consider: Scientists don’t know what the universe is made of. You’d think that’s a pretty basic fact, but it’s a total mystery.

If you’d like an attention-getter to hook you into the subject, then here’s a grab from the back of a book, The 4% Universe, by Richard Panek: “In recent years, a handful of scientists have been in a race to explain a disturbing aspect of our universe: only 4 percent of it consists of matter that makes up you, me, and every star and planet. The rest is completely unknown.”

Unknown, the man says. Unknown!

That unknown stuff is called dark matter and dark energy. Sounds mysterious, indeed. And these mysteries are no mere footnote in the cosmic cookbook, but are thought to be the main ingredients for existence itself.

Looking back to school days, nobody sprang this dark matter gig on us, we normal civilians outside the gate of scientific expertise who were just dabbling in a few astronomy courses. Back then, I figured that stuff was, well, stuff. Nobody told me that stuff wasn’t stuff, or, maybe more to the point, that the stuff that wasn’t stuff was really most of the stuff.

Dark matter had been theorized in the 1930s actually. But that memo never filtered down to my plebeian level; maybe I was too busy looking for discount coupons on spark plugs and doughnuts.

But some of what we were taught in school seems to be holding. The ultimate cosmic hand grenade, the Big Bang, pulled its pin 13.7 billion years ago. The galactic shrapnel is still flying away in all directions. In other words, the universe is expanding.

One question is whether gravity will eventually pull everything from the flying-apart mode and into the pulling-together mode. For the latter case to happen, there would need to be enough mass in the universe to generate enough gravity to pull everything back together, so at some point the universe would stop expanding and start contracting, thus creating a cosmic U-turn that will end in a Big Squish.

On the other hand, if there isn’t sufficient mass in the universe, then there won’t be sufficient gravity either for a cosmic U-turn. In that case, the universe will keep on expanding. It will get thinner than dime store soup.

So while they have a good idea how the universe started (the Big Bang), they don’t know how it will end, because they don’t yet know how much mass it has.

So, yeah, I’m serious here: They’ve got to weigh the entire universe. That’s a bigger task than I could tackle. I tried weighing my dog once, and though I had “x” points of leverage, he always had “x + 1” points of resistance. Perhaps the cosmos has the same tricks.

Meanwhile, various observations made for various reasons, such as, in one case, studying the rotational behavior of galaxies, seemed to indicate that there was more mass in play than the scientists could actually see. In other words, the cosmic couch showed deep impressions like a fat guy was sitting on it, but there was only a skinny guy visible in the room.

Since this invisible cosmic fat guy is likely made up of teeny-tiny particles smaller than atoms, scientists in laboratories are trying to figure out how to find these particles. So the biggest issue, the universe, has become the smallest one, sub-atomic particles. So I guess little is the new big. Or is big the new little?

As freaky as dark matter is, dark energy is apparently so freaky that few will even attempt an explanation to slobs like me. But here’s a suitably weird tidbit I’ve read, which brings us back to the Big Bang gig: Instead of slowing down, the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up. How can that happen? Hey, don’t ask me. But dark energy is offered as a theoretical explanation.

I used to think of stars and space as pretty much settled stuff. The celestial scene was a solid anchor that counteracted the quirky vicissitudes of earthly life. But now? Now all I see is question marks. I mean, 96 percent unknown? I don’t like those odds. Heck, the house odds in blackjack are around 51 percent or so.

Well, I don’t have the solution, but I darned sure have the answer: I’m trading in my Newtonian telescope for a cardboard kaleidoscope. And with the money left over from the swap I’m heading to Tinian to hit the casino, where I can enjoy better odds.

After all, back in the day it all seemed so simple. But since then, Dude, somebody stole my universe.

Visit Ed Stephens Jr. at EdStephensJr.com. His column runs every Friday.