Includes Index

1. Our dark universe
2. Dead stars, black holes, planets, and baseballs
3. Darkness from the quantum world
4. A dark animal in the quantum zoo
5. A grand symmetry
6. The hunt
7. Gravity, strings, and other dimensions of space
8. In the beginning
9. The weight of emptiness
10. An unlikely universe?
11. Cosmic offspring
12. The skeptics
13. Visions of the future

Everyone knows that there are things no one can see, for example, the air you're breathing or a black hole, to be more exotic. But not everyone knows that what we can see makes up only 5 percent of the Universe. The rest is totally invisible to us.

The invisible stuff comes in two varieties—dark matter and dark energy. One holds the Universe together while the other tears it apart. What these forces really are has been a mystery for as long as anyone has suspected they were there, but the latest discoveries of experimental physics have brought us closer to that knowledge. Particle physicist Dan Hooper takes his readers, with wit, grace, and a keen knack for explaining the toughest ideas science has to offer, on a quest few would ever have expected: to discover what makes up our dark cosmos.