My latest post over at the Nauvoo Times (Orson Scott Card's LDS project with a good variety of writers) is "Mystery of the Hidden Cosmos: Something Big is Missing from Our Everything," wherein I use a recent cover story from Scientific American to speculate a bit. I've discussed dark matter and dark energy a couple of times here at Mormanity, but recent analysis of dark matter is making things even more interesting as the possibility of complex forms of dark matter become more plausible. Your feedback is welcome here or there.

Mysterious, invisible dark matter and dark energy both appear needed to explain the strange attributes of the cosmos. We know so little about the universe, but thanks to the steady progress of science, each big discovery seems to help us know even less. Or rather, to better appreciate how much we don't yet know. The cosmos is such a marvelous mystery, and so filled with evidence of miraculous intervention to make all this possible--but that's another story.

I really love Joseph Smith's statement in Doctrine & Covenants 131:7-8 about the materiality of spirit, insisting that it is actually a form of matter that is "finer" than the ordinary matter we know and invisible to us, but still real and physical. That seems at least compatible with the surprising finds of scientists in recent years poiting to the existence of much more "dark matter" than the ordinary matter we know. In fact, the ordinary matter (and energy) that we thought was pretty much all there was turns out to only account for about 4 or 5% of the universe. To me, that's stunning and even humbling.

By the way, I hope you're a regular reader at NauvooTimes.com, where many interesting topics are raised each week in areas such as history, movies, literature, and many aspects of LDS life.
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