The Edge of Physics: A Journey to Earth's Extremes to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe

Abstract

It was the day after Christmas in 2004, a bright winter's day in Berkeley, California. I was outside a cafe at the corner of Shattuck and Cedar, waiting for Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the Uni-versity of California. The campus is nestled at the base of wooded hills that rise steeply from the city's edge. About 1,000 feet up in the hills is the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). In the 1990s, the UC campus and LBNL housed several members of two teams of astronomers that simultaneously but independently discov-ered something that caused ripples of astonishment, even alarm. Our universe, it seems, is being blown apart.