Production of the audio version of Prelude to Ascension is complete. We're now into final review. Getting close!
The paradox of Dark Matter leads unavoidably to a few questions. The first and most obvious has to do with galaxy structure. How can galaxies behave as though they contain 70% more mass than they appear to have? What keeps them from simply flying apart? But these questions quickly lead to the even more intriguing question of how they ever formed at all. Understanding the riddle of Dark Matter requires rewinding the clock all the way back to the Big Bang. Like so many other questions in physics, it can seem odd that two seemingly disconnected topics can end up having such direct bearing on one another. But in the end, unexpected connections like this often end up being a good thing; they are signals, hints that we may have tapped into a fundamental aspect of the Universe that once understood, could help resolve other mysteries as well. First, what of galaxy structure and rotation? Here the problem is that we cannot detect enough matter to account for the gravity that we know mu...