The History of Science Changed Again

"Dark matter?"

Hearing Chen Ning Yang say those words, Huang Kun froze.

Nearly half a minute passed before he asked with a furrowed brow,

"Old Yang, by dark matter, do you mean the concept Fritz Zwicky proposed years ago?"

Chen Ning Yang nodded.

"That's right."

The hesitation on Huang Kun's face deepened.

Dark matter.

These days, it was a fairly obscure concept.

The history of dark matter observation went back to 1933. Using measurements of spectral redshift and the virial theorem, Fritz Zwicky calculated the dynamical mass of the Coma Cluster.

He found that the calculated mass was far greater than the luminous mass estimated from the cluster's starlight. He concluded that the cluster contained a great deal of unseen matter that emitted no light.

Zwicky later studied the Virgo Supercluster and found the same result.

That led him to propose an idea:

Only a small fraction of the universe's total mass-energy was visible matter.

That included the galaxies, nebular dust, stars, planets, and everything else we could see. The rest was invisible. It was what he called...

Dark matter.

This kind of matter carried no electric charge and took part in no interactions with matter. It was affected only by gravity.

For a long time, though, scientists knew little about matter at the microscopic level and had doubts about estimates of luminous mass. They paid Zwicky's conclusion little attention.

Dark matter was like a ginger-and-garlic stall tucked into the far corner of a market. It had customers, but next to the big vegetable, fish, and meat stalls, business was slow. It could barely get by.

Who would have thought, then, that the sixty-second elementary particle Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee had derived would turn out to be dark matter?

"Wait. That doesn't sound right."

Something occurred to Huang