Dark matters

It's one thing to lose the car keys, or to forget where you left that true crime paperback with the lurid cover; they'll turn up eventually. But astrophysicists appear to have mislaid approximately 80% of the universe. Actually, it's probably always been missing, but it took them this long to notice. The problem it appears, is that things move too fast--things in orbit, that is--stars orbiting within galaxies, galaxies orbiting about one another. Given the puny amount of mass we can observe, they should be flying off in all directions. We would need five times as much "stuff" to explain what we see in the telescope. Quite the three-pipe problem.

Left: a map of the missing "stuff"

With Jesuitical aplomb as regards matters of uncertainty, physicists declare the missing rest of the universe to be "dark matter," invisible, and thus far undetectable. As an explanation, it reminds me of the cartoon where a blackboard is covered by an endless and intricate equation, totally indecipherable except for the phrase in parentheses in the middle: "then something magic happens."

No doubt we will someday discover that the loss can be accounted for by totaling up mateless socks, lost airline luggage, daylight savings time, balls in the rough, inventory shrinkage, evaporation, lost homework assignments, bets laid down on inside straights, and the countless other little dark matters that remain beyond our ken. Until then, we take the invisible on faith.